2 Subtle Questions Sharp People Use That Make Others Lean In Immediately

As a full-time relationship coach, my time is spent as someone on the front lines of helping people face their pain. In my time, I have noticed a few patterns that keep us from leaning into our emotions and connecting with others. If trying to move forward in life isn’t working, a person usually needs help to recognize some of their old emotional and behavioral issues.

Sometimes we have to feel the old emotional residue, and other times, we simply need to start doing something different. Often it is both. Emotionally, we dull ourselves by not feeling the truth. Researchers called this part of "an emotional avoidance culture". But sharp people know how almost everyone's issues can be boiled down to asking two subtle questions that make other people lean in and listen up.

Here are two subtle questions sharp people use that make others lean in immediately:

1. 'What emotion are you not allowing yourself to feel?'

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In a high percentage of cases, many coaching clients come to me with leftover pain. The pain is often because they didn’t have the sense of deserving or permission to feel when they were going through the original difficulty. Maybe they never grieved a breakup or divorce when it happened. Or they had a significant amount of abuse in their childhood and repressed all of their sadness and anger about the event. Or they were angry at one of their parents for not showing up in a way that they needed them to.

Whatever the event, research has suggested the individual still has leftover pain in their body that they haven’t allowed themselves to feel. The lengths that people go to avoid feeling this pain are staggering. People can form addictive behaviors to avoid feeling what they’re afraid of feeling. And while allowing the pain, sadness, anger, frustration, hurt, and resentment to move isn’t easy when it’s happening, it is a lot easier than spending the majority of your life feeling uncomfortable in your own skin and running from yourself.

As Swiss psychotherapist Carl Jung wrote, “People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” To go from numbness to joy, you must go through pain. It is inevitable. Before you get to a place of genuine forgiveness with the people who you perceive as having hurt you, you must walk through the internal struggle you have been avoiding. There is no other way.

RELATED: 9 Types Of Pain That Are Directly Linked To How A Person Handles Their Emotions

2. 'What truth are you not allowing yourself to face, speak, or live out?'

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If it isn’t repressed emotional pain that people are running away from, it’s the truth. I would say that at least 90% of the people who come to me for coaching support have some relationship to the truth they’re trying to avoid, but they want a second opinion. They want their truth to be validated, but they’re also afraid of their truth being validated.

One common example is people coming to me with a “Should I stay or should I go?” situation regarding their intimate relationship. If I were to estimate, I would say that 70% of the time, they should go (because their reasonable needs are not being met with who they are in a relationship with), and about 30% of the time, they should stay (and they simply need to verbalize what they’re saying to me to their partner).

Another example is someone who knows they are overdue for an overhaul in their life trajectory. Maybe they want to stop dating around and commit to one person, quit their day job and start their own online business, or make more time for rest, relaxation, and play.

A study of anxiety and resistance to change helped explain how this relates to not letting go of old ego-based beliefs that you are somehow uniquely unlovable. So when someone is getting closer to them in a relationship, it frightens them. The easier said than done action to take here is to simply trust and allow the burgeoning romance to continue on its merry little way.

Make no mistake about it, just because someone knows what they should do doesn’t mean they’re doing it. Knowing the path is not the same thing as walking the path. Insights don’t automatically equal action.

It takes courage to lean into your fears. Whether those fears are on the emotional level or the behavioral level. And, at a relatively early stage in the journey, nothing will give you more of a sense of momentum, power, and aliveness than simply living out what you know to be true for yourself.

Tell them you love them. Start that business. Honor your body. End the misaligned relationships. Heal your relationship with your parents. Own your part in past pain. Say you’re sorry.

Do the hard thing. Especially because it’s hard. Repeat. Watch your life expand. I wish you the courage to lean into your growth edges, over and over, throughout the entirety of your life.

RELATED: You Can Almost Always Tell Someone Has High Emotional IQ By These 5 Behaviors That Are Obvious Once You See Them

Jordan Gray is a five-time Amazon best-selling author, public speaker, and relationship coach with more than a decade of practice. His work has been featured in The New York Times, BBC, Forbes, The Huffington Post, Women's Health, and The Good Men Project, among countless others.