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Stop asking ‘what’s wrong’ and get a New Year

Jenni Ho-Huan
4 min readDec 29, 2024
a large lighted question mark tilted on its right
image by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

A few years ago when my kids were teens, I helped us prepare for the New Year by asking them to think what they can Stop doing, Start doing, Keep doing.

This is meant to help them identify behaviours and attitudes that are helpful for them and exercise some willpower to persist or put them in place. It is also about recognising what doesn’t serve us in terms of our thought patterns, reactionary tendencies and speech.

If you are hoping for a new year, with positive change, I want to suggest that we stop asking the wrong question, start asking better ones, and keep at it.

Stop asking this: what’s wrong?

Yup, we ask ourselves this a lot when things aren’t going smoothly. We ask it when we feel frustrated with our spouse or kid or coworker. We do this when we want to discuss and improve things as a team. In our solutions-oriented societies, we love to probe for answers by digging around what went wrong. So this becomes an easy thing to blurt out, whether we say it out loud or not. It’s also a really immediate reaction as our brain is trying to get data so it can better predict and protect us from harm. Often “what’s wrong?!” is also a cluttered heart summarising all its pent-up frustrations seeking relief.

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Jenni Ho-Huan
Jenni Ho-Huan

Written by Jenni Ho-Huan

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