Your childhood can teach you everything you need to know to develop your life in career and social situations. It is a shame that we forget to go back!

What is that?

You may ask surely we need as the good book says in 1 Corinthians chpt 13 vv11 "When I was a child, I spoke like a child, thought like a child, and reasoned like a child. I gave up childish things when I became a man.That is true, but your childhood holds the key to your future development - The trait to ask questions that are conflict managing type questions in our quest for knowledge to achieve our life goals.

You may think that you still ask questions every day, but what sort of questions are they the conflict managing type. Have you ever talked to yourself. What about when there is an unexpected knock at the door, do you catch yourself saying in your head or outloud - "Now who can that be?"?"

Now go on admit it you talk to yourself. You could probably at this moment be saying inside your head, "No I don't, do I?"

When the phone rings have you ever caught yourself saying out loud, "I wonder who is ringing at this time of night?"

There are of course those natural external questions such as when you meet someone and ask, "How are you?" most of the time you do not wait for a reply as you do not really ask questions to get a reply but out of common courtesy.

Now compare those questions to when a children ask questions, they almost demands answers by using questions that start with, who, what, where, when, how and why. They cry out for answers to increase their knowledge by asking open questions and demanding the answers.

In adulthood we feel the fear that in asking conflict managing questions, we appear ignorant, how many times when you have been listening at a seminar or other training course and you have nodded intelligently when you haven't got the foggiest notion what the speaker was talking about.

In listening to a speaker you place your own interpretation on the words you think you hear, the problem is the speaker also places his interpretation on the words which may be different from yours leading to misunderstanding and conflict.

Your misinterpretation is often caused by the workings of your inner mind, when you hear a word or collection of words, your inner mind needs to explore the recesses of your memory to find those words in your knowledge base and then set them against the experience you were subjected to that placed a meaning on those words into your memory.

The speaker also in searching for the correct words to use lets his inner mind search the recesses of his memory to uncover an experience he had related to or exactly the same as what he was trying to convey through his words. If you have a similar experience in your past lives there is harmony and understanding but if you have a totally different experience there is misunderstanding a need for conflict resolution.

Let me give you an example. What image springs into your mind when you hear the word 'pen'? We think in pictures not words. Let us say that you are using or have just used a biro pen, you would probably see the image of that pen in your mind, however, if my experience was to always use a fountain pen that is the image I was trying to portray through my words.

Now the resolving conflict that may occur between the interpretation of the word pen may not be catastrophic, but unless we ask conflict managing questions; when we do not understand what is being said we will live in conflict, leading to stress and breakdown or relationships both socially and career wise.

Going back to our child analogy, the other trait in a child's questions that we must return to is persistence. How many times does a child ask a question - until it understands the answer? Now how many times do you ask a question and stop asking in case you look a fool before you understand the answer.

As Luke chpt 11 vv9 says "Ask and you shall receive."

Do notfeel the fear, ask, ask, ask and even ask again until you understand he who thinks you are a fool for doing so is the bigger fool who wishes not to be understood.