Does it pain you to see friends or family members who smoke? Consider this…
The scene is a street in Thailand. As a hidden camera picks up the unfolding events one clearly-underage child after another, cigarette in hand goes up to a young adult who is smoking and asks for a light. All the adults that are approached refuse. They explain to the child that he or she should not smoke, adding that smoking is very dangerous and will cause them to get emphysema and lung cancer and that they will die at a young age.
The child walks away and then comes back a minute later and hands the adult a note that says, “You care about me. Why don’t you care about yourself?”
Every single adult without fail looks at the note, and showing obvious discomfort and embarrassment, throws down their cigarette and puts the note in their pocket. I don’t recall the percentage who stopped smoking completely as a result of this but it was a considerable number.
Unfortunately I cannot post the link where I saw it on youtube two days ago. If you click it now you will get the message: “This video has been removed by the user.” – Shame.
Anyway I trust my readers will have the intelligence and imagination to be impacted by the film even without having seen it.
The best questions are the ones that make people stop and think about what they’re doing. The mistake people usually make when they’re trying to dissuade people of something harmful is to tell them what they already know.
The adults being filmed already knew that smoking was dangerous to their health. That didn’t stop them from doing it. The surprise question in the note caught them off-guard and forced them to eat their own words.
This is Socratic questioning in action.
Socratic questions are used in Logotherapy as a way of challenging a person to question his or herself.
It begins within the person’s present frame of reference and stretches them to look at things from a new perspective or to clarify what they really think. Most of all it gets them to question whether their actions match their beliefs and values.
A master Socratic questioner is Dr. Paul Welter. He explains that the best questions are those that involve truth and action. The question is rhetorical; there’s no expectation of a verbal response, only an action response.
The questioner refers to the person’s past experiences, common sense or reasoning to cause them to admit what they already know and then uses a metaphor, tells a story or asks another question that gets them to move into action.