Two Daily Questions to Change Your Life
One of my goals for myself in 2024 continuing into 2025 is to create and accept more ease in my life and work. One of the most impactful ways I’ve been making progress on this goal is by asking myself two simple questions each day.
In this article I’ll talk about:
Why creating and accepting more ease in my life and work is a goal for me
How asking myself two simple questions each day helps me create and accept more ease
How you can use two simple daily questions to add more of what you want into your life and/or work
1. Why creating and accepting ease is a goal for me
Sometimes situations are acutely difficult in life or work due to factors outside my control (for example: a serious medical diagnosis, death of a loved one, having to lay employees off). However, I’ve noticed that I have a tendency to approach situations in a way that creates more stress and intensity than is necessary for the situation. In other words, if it’s not hard I make it feel hard because I’ve associated the feeling of difficulty with being successful. I found that I often “white knuckle” situations where I could do just as well (or better!) without making the situation feel difficult or stressful.
This approach to life and work stems from a core belief of: If it’s not difficult, it’s not impressive, it’s not an accomplishment, and it’s not interesting. Beliefs like this are fairly common among people who’ve achieved a lot in their lives. That’s because if you have a belief like this, you tend to seek out things that are actually difficult and you work hard to achieve those difficult things. And doing this results in success.
Having beliefs like this when you’re in your teens, 20s, and early 30s can be rather productive because you have so much knowledge to gain, have high energy levels, and are willing to basically run through brick walls doing a ton of hard things as an executor. You’ve been doing hard things and you can manage to get by even when you make something harder than it needs to be.
When highly successful people start to hit their late 30s and early 40s, the darkside of craving the feeling of difficulty can start to cause very negative effects. To succeed at higher levels, your job often becomes less about being the super executor and more about being the wise steady-handed leader who is thinking 1+ years ahead and not getting caught in the minutiae of daily or weekly up-and-downs. Additionally, you’re already so good at so many things that used to be actually difficult for you, your energy levels start dropping, and you may have more responsibilities (such as raising children). You can’t afford to add stress and difficulty where it’s unnecessary anymore. Plus all those years of running through brick walls starts to catch up to you resulting in burnout (in some cases so extreme that it causes serious health issues).
Decoupling the notion that “difficulty = success” when it’s not warranted and proactively adding more ease frees you up to have more energy and headspace around handling the most important parts of your life and work including the unexpected events that get thrown at you.
2. My daily questions
I brought up this goal of ease to my coach, Rich Litvin. He proposed asking myself two simple questions each day about ease. He also gave a rough format on what the questions could look like. After a bit of discussion about what the exact questions should be, we landed on asking myself these two questions at the end of each day:
How did I create and accept more ease in my life or work today?
How would I like to create and accept more ease in my life or work tomorrow?
Asking these simple questions has been adding a lot of ease in my life and work. There are several reasons for this:
It keeps ease on my mind
It holds me accountable to create and accept ease
It gives the conscious and unconscious parts of my brain positive reinforcement
It reminds me that I sometimes create or accept ease without even consciously trying
Over time, it shows me that as I create and accept ease I become even more successful
Sometimes the ease I create is related to taking action (for example, declining to work with a potential coaching client who I know would drain my energy), sometimes it’s me doing the same task but approaching it with a more easeful mindset, and sometimes it’s me noticing and accepting the ease that is already available and then comfortably sitting in that ease.
3. Creating your own daily questions
To create your own questions, think about what you most want to add, remove, do more of, or do less of in your life and/or work.
If you’re having trouble, here are some examples to get your mind going on what you may like your daily questions to be about:
Trusting your gut
Asking for or accepting help
Implementing a decision you’ve already made your mind up on
Doing an action that makes you feel better
Taking 15 minutes during the day to eat, take a brief walk, stretch, or breathe deeply
Delegating a task or area
Actively listening to someone instead of just thinking about how you want to respond
Courageously facing a small fear
Making a small step each day towards your big goal
Noticing black-and-white thinking converting it to a spectrum
Drive a unmade decision to resolution
You can tweak the format of the questions to make them uniquely suited to you. For example, you can ask these questions before bed (asking about today, then tomorrow), on your commute home, at the start of the day (asking about yesterday, then today), before a meeting, etc. What’s important is to keep it simple by having just two questions, do it consistently, and have one question that looks backward and one question that looks forward.
It works better if you have your questions stated in the affirmative (in other words: what you’d like to have more of instead of less of; what you’d like to do instead of what you would not like to do). This is because the unconscious/subconscious parts of our brains don’t understand the concept of “not” very well. So instead of asking yourself, “what decision would I not like to delay tomorrow?” it’s better to ask yourself, “what decision would I like to finalize tomorrow?”
You can answer these questions in your head, but it will work even better if you write them down each day (on paper, in your notes app, etc.).
What you do each day doesn't always have to be big. Enough small things over time compound to make a big difference.
After you’ve answered your questions for a week or more, I’d be curious to hear how it’s gone for you. Please feel free to comment on this article or email me at kevin@kevinricecoaching.com with how it’s been affecting your life or work.