The fear of asking a question in case you look stupid? A few thoughts and words on that right here.
Hello, and a warm welcome to the spot on the Film Stories site where we stop for a bit to chat about things that may be affecting you, or people around you. It’s a weekly feature we run here, that inevitably won’t be too much use most of the time. But hopefully over the archive of articles, we hit on something that can help you, or someone you know.
On we go.
I do worry sometimes that these articles become a bit of me getting annoyed at stuff and then writing about it. But if my defence, there’s not too much that annoys me, and there are usually good reasons why things tend to do so.
Which brings me to stupid questions.
Those of us who don’t have the need to service planet-sized egos can generally happily accept that there are lots of things we don’t know. Still, there’s still an inherent nervousness sometimes, thinking that everybody else in the room knows something, and you don’t. The feeling that you should know what it is, and everybody else will laugh at you, or think less of you, for not having this piece of knowledge.
I think it’s something that comes out of school, a cauldron of course for all sorts of little bullying techniques. But still, I’ve sat in meetings and had the same feeling I had back when I was in a classroom. That little fear at the bottom of my stomach, that I was going to look stupid.
One of the benefits of getting a little bit older of course is it puts stuff like that in some degree of perspective. That you don’t necessarily lose it, but its ranking in the scheme of life is diminished. My deep breath moment was to start saying to people, when I was feeling a little out of depth, ‘what’s the stupid question I’m not asking?’. A small trick, but I’ve found it breaks a little bit of ice. I hope that it gets across that there’s nothing wrong with asking a so-called stupid question, and a few times, it’s told me things I didn’t know.
These last few weeks, I’ve been with a relative in hospital, talking to lots of brilliant doctors, nurses, healthcare assistants, physios and such like. After every conversation at first, I was asking just that: what’s the stupid question I’ve not asked? One time, I got a really, really useful answer to that, that I can’t share, but it reinforced to me the bullshit that surrounds the idea of asking a seemingly daft question.
The worst case scenario, increasingly, is that we might get laughed at, or someone thinks a bit less of us for asking. Yet against that, doesn’t that say more about the person who thinks worse of us for asking?
