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I can never get proper answers to my questions. Why?

My mentor in Argentina, Dr. Armando Vivante, had an interesting habit: he never gave a direct answer to any of my questions. Every time I asked something to him, he would reply with a new question. I would try to answer his question, he would then ask me something else, and the cycle would start again.

After several years of that kind of conversations, one day I asked Dr. Vivante why he never gave me a direct answer to my questions. This time, he gave a direct answer. “I can’t answer a question you don’t even understand. If you could understand the question, you wouldn’t ask it,” he said.

In other words, it was any incapacity on his part to give answers, but my own incapacity to understand the question (much less the answer) that prevented him from answering my questions. At the end of the dialogue, I usually have more questions and no answers.

Many years later I realized that interesting dynamic of not offering answers allowed me to increase my understanding of the questions and allowed Dr. Vivante to monitor the progress of my understanding (an “understanding,” by the way, that will never reach the level of understanding my mentor had.)

That ebb and flow of questions and answers returned to my mind a few days ago when I was reading the “dialogues” I had, via email, with some colleagues and coworkers.

In one case, for example, I sent a message to a colleague sharing information about a conference about education in Denver. Knowing she likes those events, I asked her if she would attend. Her answer was a surprise. She told me she would not attend the event because she did not like an audience of business people.

It should be noted the conference I referred to is a conference for college students, not for business people. I truly believe my colleague did not even read my message and she just replied to what she thought the message said.

Another example: I recently asked a professional acquaintance to stop using my personal email for business purposes and to start using my professional email to contact me. In his answer, sent to my personal email, he said he was sorry I was having email problems and he asked me to inform him once those “problems” had been solved.

It goes without saying I never mentioned any problems in my message to him and he never acknowledged my request of sending his messages to a different email address.

Is it really that difficult to read a message, understanding it, and send a proper answer? It seems it is. Perhaps the reason why there are so many different platforms to communicate with others is precisely because we do not know how to communicate.

Perhaps we need to go back to the exercise of reading the message or the question, be sure we understood it, and only then write an answer. Am I asking too much? (Yes, that was a question.)

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