Question Yourself!

Some people might think that becoming more effective requires never questioning themselves.
I've encountered this proposition a few times, and I must say that I feel compelled to question it.

I'm reminded of the popular bumper sticker, t-shirt, or button that says "Question Authority!" Well, by what authority are they exhorting me to question authority? What authority specifically, and how specifically should I question it/them? 

Well, in this case specifically, I suggest questioning yourself by your own authority.  Confused yet? Let me elaborate.

When we notice our own internal dialogue, a common tactic is to try to go silent inside. A silent internal dialogue is frequently an indicator of flow state, so NLP, meditation, and hypnosis abound with techniques for silencing your mind.  But in some cases, it might be a useful tactic to "embrace and extend" your internal dialogue by questioning it with the NLP meta model. Can you see how that might be useful?

So when I say that I question myself sometimes, I am not committing the great "sin" against the American way known as "self-doubt", but I am literally asking questions of my internal dialogue.  Since it's part of me, of course it sometimes has interesting things to say.  So why not examine what it's saying by getting it to elaborate upon it's usually vague unspecified statements, and if consciously I think my dialogue is somehow disconnected from reality, I can reconnect it by using the meta model internally.

For those of you who don't know the meta model of NLP, I highly recommend Bandler and Grinder's The Structure of Magic, and any number of other good NLP books or web sites that can get you started.