Five questions you can use while the moment is still happening, not an hour later.
Five questions, asked in order. Once you know them, they take a few minutes, and they work while the moment is still happening.
The first settles the body, because you cannot examine anything clearly while you are flooded. The middle questions find what you are demanding, and what you have quietly made it mean about you. The last one returns the choice to you.
Underneath the questions is a simple map. Everything in your life falls into one of three Circles, and only one of them is yours to author. Most of the suffering I see in coaching comes from placing your okayness in the other two. The method brings it back.
CRI stands for Compassionate Rational Inquiry. Compassionate, because the feeling is met before the story around it is questioned. Rational, because what feels true is not automatically true. Inquiry, because it works through questions you answer yourself, not a script you are handed.
What it is not: positive thinking, letting go, calming down, or a reason to put up with what should change. Some situations call for a boundary, a hard conversation, or leaving. The method makes you better at seeing which. Not more willing to tolerate.
The pattern has a name. I call it the IDBR loop, and it runs the same way under a breakup, a craving, and a stalled decision. In coaching you learn to catch it while it is running.
The method has a seated side as well. Three short meditations rehearse the return before anything has gone wrong, and each one slows down one part of the pattern so you can recognize it later when life is moving faster. Meditation here is not emptying the mind or producing calm. It is noticing a thought before you believe it.
Most tools are for afterward, in the journal or the session. The five questions take a few minutes and are built for the car, the meeting, the open fridge.
Self-help rarely names its sources. CRI5 draws a clear line between what came from Ellis, Kahneman, Maimonides and the Stoics, and what I am adding. You can check it.
Compassion first, then inquiry. Not positive thinking, and not an argument with yourself.
Two extra questions cover what most methods leave out: what to do when the answer is no, and how to wait when the answer is not in yet.
Wanting something badly and needing it to be okay feel identical. So do confidence and ego, caring for someone and losing yourself in them, accepting what happened and putting up with it. From the outside each pair looks the same. The difference is inside, in whether your okayness is riding on it. Each distinction comes with one question you can ask on the spot.
Built on
Albert Ellis · Aaron Beck · Daniel Kahneman · Kristin Neff · the Stoics · Aristotle · Maimonides · Viktor Frankl · Hillel · Ramana Maharshi and more →
CRI5 is built on a lineage, and the book says at every step which idea came from where.
What CRI adds is the map, the order, and the questions: where your okayness has gone, which question to ask first, and how to get from the feeling to the choice in a few minutes.
You are good at this when it is somebody else's life. You can see what a friend is doing long before you see it in yourself.
A client of mine had just finished a book about letting people be who they are. She could quote it. She agreed with every word. It changed nothing, because the conversation running inside her was not about him. It was about her: what his silence meant about her, and whether she could be okay without an answer.
Most of us have been given advice for this. Let go. Set boundaries. Accept what you cannot control. Much of it is wise. But tell yourself I need to let go and watch what happens. Now you are demanding that you stop demanding.
The gap between what you understand and what you can do while the moment is happening is the whole job. Advice does not close it. Practice on your own situation does. That is what the coaching is for.
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