Adina Tovell

The Courage to Ask In 1959, my mother went to live in a foreign country, and in 1960, she returned with a husband. Like many immigrants of that era, my father arrived in this country with no money, no profession, no English, and a tremendous motivation to build a good life for his family and send money abroad to care for his parents. Our lives were, in many ways, stereotypical of immigrant families of that era. We owned a family business, and we all worked in it. While we never spoke about it, we also navigated the landmines of a loved one carrying the trauma of war, loss, and displacement. As a child, I didn’t fully understand the ways in which this distinguished us from my friends’ families. But as a sensitive child, I felt the ramifications, and they left their scars. I had a desperate need to be seen and understood. I longed for someone who could help me make sense of a world that seemed socially complicated. But my parents did not possess the skills, temperament, or even the consciousness to provide this. I became nervous all the time that I was “getting things wrong” when it came to social norms. Without close friends and without close relatives who engaged with me in this way, I held it all inside, carrying the burden of my ignorance and my anxiety about my own inadequacy. After decades of navigating life by trying to “make the right choices”—measured largely by other people’s approval of my decisions—I entered a coach training program for life and executive coaches. The core skills of coaching are asking powerful questions and deep listening. The key disposition of coaching is courageous curiosity. On the second day of our training, there was an exercise where we were asked to list three things that make us happy. As soon as I read the question, I was triggered. I began to heat up from the inside, and I had the instinct to run out of the room. Happiness, hobbies, interests—these were all foreign to me. Growing up in our immigrant household, I was familiar with responsibility and reputation. Those were the currencies I understood. But I didn’t run out of the room. Instead, I embraced the principles of coaching and decided to adopt a single powerful question: If I wanted to be guided by the pursuit of happiness, how would I spend my time? With no real understanding of what happiness might be or how it might guide me, I simply committed to asking myself this question over and over again, for six months, in as many situations as I could. It was an experiment to see what would happen. In the beginning, I asked, but rarely had an answer. But as I remained persistent, I discovered that this question acted like a key, opening doors into the recesses of my soul—places I had previously had no access to. Over the course of the year, I befriended the concept of happiness. I began to understand what happiness felt like. And I started to distinguish between making choices out of a sense of duty or a desire to please others, and making choices because they aligned with my soul. That experience changed the way I understood the power of a question. As a coach, I now feel privileged every day to ask the questions that help bring people closer to hearing their own soul speak—and to teach people how to pose those questions for themselves. Because sometimes, the courage to ask a question is the beginning of finding an answer we didn’t even know we were looking for.