Can Questions Be Seductive?
You clicked on this article. There must be something to the question headline, right?
We like more those who are curious about us. I won’t be the first to observe being interested makes someone interesting. When someone “goes inside us to tell us who we are,” it can become an intensely seductive experience.
Questions let us do precisely that. We go inside someone through questions. They bring out someone’s uniqueness. They lead us to a deeper level to know what’s going on in this world. The formula could then read:
Better questions, better chats, better life.
So few of us think about questions, right?
Most of us throw out the same hackneyed questions a supermarket cashier would use, though. How are ya? How’s it going?
At risk of being a curmudgeon, I went into the perils of asking such lame questions in this post.
Having been a diplomat for 17 years, we had 3–15 conversations a day with strangers. Diplomacy is cross-cultural political speed dating. So we had to think ahead of which questions to ask. We wrote down questions on briefing papers before many meetings. Since unlike some other professions, we didn’t have cash to get others to provide info. We had to use a fun conversation. We thus thought of ways to get others to open up through…
