I’ve been railing periodically about the abundance of advice flooding my inbox. This seems to have stimulated my contrarian curmudgeon persona to allow only questions and question askers to enter.

One of these question askers enters by way of The Choice: Embrace the Possible, a memoir of and by Dr. Edith Eva Eger. She tells her story and details her choices as a WWII concentration camp survivor. Her post war experience, intersecting path with Viktor Frankl, her practice as a professional counselor and her own life choices led her to asking the questions below. Her thinking building on Frankl’s Man’s Search For Meaning focus on the responsibility of each of us for our choices asks:

What do you want?

Who wants it?

Why do you want this?

What are you going to do about it?

When?

Dale Goldstein augments the “What do you want?” question in his beautiful book Heartwork: How to Get What You Really, Really Want, artistic work by Richard Wehrman. He suggests adding “What do you really want?” This question repeated as often as necessary provokes going deeply into your essence to answer.

To spice this inquiry up for me personally… on the whiteboard across from my desk are several additional questions. The one that provokes is “what if I got everything I want?” Or “Haven’t you always gotten what you wanted?” And “What choices will I make if I truly loved myself and all humanity?”

Your questions?

Your answers?