So I recently started volunteering at my church with the Youth Ministry there. This is my first time working with this particular youth ministry. There is something special that I want to tell you about these kids. I'm not going to tell you any nitty-gritty details but it is in fact this: every week we play foursquare.
I'm not just talking about your momma's old fashioned foursquare where you are standing out on the street with four squares and you are bouncing a ball. This is competitive and intense foursquare. These guys have rules I've never even heard of! But I intuitively know that they have to be foursquare rules just by the caliber and quality of rule that they have.
The king serves the ball by bouncing it first in his or her square and then pushing the ball in the air into another person's square. It bounces there, and the person whose square it bounced in is now responsible for bouncing the ball back into somebody else's square without it bouncing in their own first.
I'm telling you about foursquare because I believe that foursquare and conversations have a lot in common. Friendships and relationships develop around conversation. It is the building blocks, the DNA, of our relationships. Yes, we have shared experiences, but most of the time we grow through having conversations with one another.
And, just like a great volley in tennis happens when one person and the other are hitting the ball back and forth without ever missing a beat, a conversation is important to have that sort of flow too.
The reason I bring this up is because, more often than not, I find in conversations that I will ask a question and then it will not come back. That is why I developed this technique that is the most simple kind of thing, the kind of thing that will make you scream, "that makes sense!" It is called How About You.
If somebody asks you a question, you answer it and then you say, "how about you?" It is something super simple that we completely forget to do. We get so caught up in answering the question that we forget to ask the person back.
Once we are done answering the questions that we have been given, we do not know what to do with ourselves and we often miss the opportunity to ask for the other person's input.
So, I want to talk about why it is so important that not only do we utilize How About You but that we make it routine, something that is a part of our DNA as an intentional friend.
Asking the question, "How about you?" invites other people into the conversation. I was talking about how communities are these circles that we have to make our way into so that we can engage in the circle, making it new and larger and more shaped like the people in it but to be honest I suffer from social anxiety when I am outside of the circle.
When someone asks, "how about you," it is an invitation into the circle to share your own thoughts, feelings, and knowledge about what you are talking about.
When you ask somebody the question, 'how about you," you are implying that it is important, what they have to say. And you are implying that you want to hear what it is that they have to say.
If you are like me, you do not jump in until somebody has asked you a question. It just doesn't feel right. It feels like you are imposing yourself on other people. I get that there are a lot of people in this world that do not feel that way. But just like in foursquare where hitting the ball before it bounces in your square gets you out, some people just feel that way. They feel like they should not jump in until they have been asked.
That is one of the main reasons that it is so important that we ask the question, "How about you?" It lets people know that they should feel free to talk. Simply telling them to feel free does not work, but we can communicate that they should be free by asking these questions.
I do not try and manipulate people using this technique, but I definitely do ask questions that I want to answer. I often use my questions as a hint to the things that I want to talk about.
Obviously I am going to ask you about something that is important to me. By using the phrase, "how about you," it gives the person asking the question a chance to answer it.
I used to play this game with people where we would ask each other questions and then we would have to answer our own question. The way we knew that it was our turn to answer the question was because we were asked, "how about you?"
Those three words allow other people to know when it is their turn to share. The words prevent one person from dominating the conversation.
Asking questions and having a conversation is not an interrogation. An interrogation is one sided where one person has all of the questions and they want to get all of the answers from the other person.
There is definitely places for interrogations and interviews, but in your every day relationships that is just not the case.
Asking how about you gets the asker involved in the conversation.
This does not mean that I believe that we should all be extroverts. I am an introvert and I definitely think that we have a place in the world. That place is beautiful. It does not mean that place should be exclusive. Let's look at an example.
Imagine that you are seven years old on the playground at your elementary school. Everyone is playing tag. How awful would you feel if it was you and five friends playing tag and your five friends kept tagging one another and never tagged you. You would almost start to feel like you are not even playing tag in the first place but more like you are watching tag.
This is what happens when we do not ask the question, "how about you?" We start developing these smaller circles that exclude people. But when we start asking that question it breaks back open the circle, inviting other people in.
That is what relationships are. They are invitations into a relationship. That is what our questions are meant to be used for. They are meant in our communities to be invitations into the community.
We should say, "how about you" because it is an invitation for other people to get involved. Just like foursquare and how you have to have the ball bounced into your square in order for your to participate, asking that question gets other people into the game.
It also is a response for when it is your turn in the game. You then pass it on to someone else and say, "how about you?" You don't skip over your answer but you answer whole heartedly as an example for others, looking for what you want in an answer. Then you allow somebody to provide that too.
Not only that, but that asker wants to be able to answer the question. There is a place for asking for hard facts, and in that case the asker does not need to answer. For most of your relationship conversations, the person asking the questions may even just be hinting at the very questions that they want to answer.
The last part is this. All communities, all relationships are full of invitations. We should become a people of radical inclusivity. Not for the sake of being extroverted but for the sake of allowing others in. For the sake of inviting other people into our lives.
The phrase, "how about you" is short and simple. There is nothing flashy or fancy about it but that phrase, like a hammer in the craftsman's hand, is the very tool necessary to create beautiful, strong, and long lasting relationships.
