Based on its title, you might expect this article to cover questions like “What is the meaning of life?” or “What is my purpose?” It doesn’t. Those are better left for a college philosophy class or a deep discussion with friends.

These five questions are different. They will challenge your beliefs and motives. By honestly answering them, you will hopefully make better choices about what you do and how you think.

Article ShortcutsQuestion 1: What if I’m wrong?Question 2: Is it impossible?Question 3: What’s the worst that could happen?Question 4: Why not now?Question 5: What if I’m the problem?Meditate On These Questions For A Month

The average person thinks 12,000 to 70,000 thoughts per day. Most of those them are part of an ongoing, one-way lecture in their head: They judge, complain, excuse, blame, and "should" all over themselves.

I’ve found that asking myself one or more of the following questions gets me out of the one-way lecture, and into a two-way conversation (still in my head) and solution for whatever situation I’m in.

Just a word of warning: You can't answer these questions without a moderate level of discomfort. Reconsidering the beliefs behind the tales we tell ourselves doesn't feel good.

Facing the answers might force you to think and behave differently. Change isn't easy, but it's almost always worth it.

It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.Eugene Ionesco

Question 1: What if I’m wrong?

The perfect question for checking your ego and controlling your emotions.

This question isn’t an easy one to answer. Before you ask this question of someone else, I suggest wrestling with it yourself first. The reality is, more of your beliefs are likely to be wrong than they are to be right. That's the case for me, too.

My Biased Beliefs

I am biased. My beliefs are often biased based on my life experiences, education, media consumption, and the people I listen to. Often, these biases are unconscious.

Those biases create a specific lens through which I view situations. Someone else with different experiences, education, and unconscious beliefs could have a completely different set of biases. Those biases become even more engrained when feeling fear or anger.

You'd think that our experience would be the best source of information to form our beliefs, but experience creates memories — and memories are often wrong.

Positive circumstances are often remembered as better than they were, while negative circumstances are often remembered as worse than they were, especially over time.

Misinformed Memories

Here’s an example of how misinformed our memories may be, as told by Marcia K. Johnson of Yale University.

"When I was a college freshman, during dinner with friends and my parents, I was reminded of an incident from when I was about 5 years old and recounted it:

My family was driving through the central valley in California when we had a flat tire. My father took the tire off the car and hitchhiked up the road to get the tire patched. My mother, brother, sister, and I waited in the hot car. We got very thirsty and finally my sister took a couple of empty pop bottles and walked up the road to a farmhouse. The woman explained there was a drought and she had only a little bottled water left. She set aside a glass of water for her little boy and filled my sister’s pop bottles with the rest. My sister returned to the car, we drank the water, and I remembered feeling guilty that we didn’t save any for my father...