What pre-suppositions are hiding in your questions?

Dr. Adam S. Froerer, Katalin Hankovszky and Annie Bordeleau

Introduction

Looking closely at the title of this piece, what assumptions are embedded in there?

The author seems to assume that there are “pre-suppositions” in your questions and that you are not always aware of them, that they are not visible. What else? (A very SF question, assuming there is more).

“Don’t make assumptions” is a well-known sentence these days and if you stop to look at it, it is full of assumptions! It assumes that you make assumptions in the first place and that you can stop making them.

Some think that the beauty of SF is that we don’t make assumptions when in fact our utterances are loaded with them. To only name a few; we assume that our conversation partners are the experts of their lives and ask a question like: “Wow, how did you do that?” or we trust that they have examples of what has worked for them and ask, “When were you highest on the scale?” One huge assumption that underlines all of the work we do is that our partners want and hope for a better future.

As we cannot not make them, this podcast raises our consciousness of how we can actively lead with them.

In this short conversation, Katalin Hankovsky, SF Trainer, Coach, Speaker and Researcher and Adam Froerer, Associate Professor and Director at Mercer University’s School of Medicine, are meeting live, for the first time, to explore the many pre-suppositions that are embedded in our questions and how they accompany us in our SF conversations.

Enjoy!

Annie Bordeleau

About the Speakers

Adam Froerer

Adam Froerer is an Associate Professor and Associate Program Director for the Master of Family Therapy program at Mercer University’s School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. Adam also teaches and trains for Brief International. Adam has clinical experience working with individual, couples, and families in a variety of settings, including a juvenile justice centre, EAP, community agencies, outpatient treatment settings, and hospitals. In addition, Adam’s teaching experience has centred on couples and family therapy and chemical and behavioural addiction. Adam’s research interests include language and communication and solution-focused brief therapy.

Kati Hankovszky

Katalin Hankovszky, MA, PCC, is a coach, coach trainer, and solution focused practitioner. With a background in philology and educational sciences she has worked independently since 1995. Based in Switzerland, she is a part of an international network, Solutionsurfers, and has offered coach training in Hungary since 2010, with activities in consultancy and book publishing. After many years of work in the business environment Katalin started her PhD studies to bridge her experiences with the academic world. Her main interest is how we learn from our work and how we can make useful what we have learned, for the next client.