11 Empowering Questions as You Navigate the Contexts of Your Life

💭 11 Empowering Questions as You Navigate the Contexts of Your Life

Our lives are multi-layered and interconnected. And we continually bump up against countless circumstances, interrupting and influencing us even when we’re unaware of their impact. These contexts of our experience are often complex, affecting our ideas, behaviors, and interactions.

We navigate our daily lives trying to find balance across events, relationships, and time. What’s the impact? As humans, we’re shaped by our own internal individual factors (what goes on inside us) and by the external and contextual factors that surround us.

Thus, our inner experiences and our actions are often influenced by our inter-actions with the multiple levels of the interconnected human environmental systems in which we live. According to psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner, PhD, a founder of the federal Head Start program, human development is impacted by the layers of systems that surround us (1994). Not only our personal and communal relationships, but much more, including cultural beliefs, interpersonal interactions, social norms, politics, customs, traditions, laws, and ideologies.

These interconnections can be visualized as concentric rings with the individual (you, for example) at the center and then additional rings expanding outward toward the progressively broader world. The rings include our immediate contexts, such as intimate relationships, family, neighborhood, workplace, and also wider structures of society, such as cultures, religions/spiritual traditions, communities, and countries. More than most of us realize, our internal (personal) ideas, values, and development can be greatly influenced by these layers of externals.

In today’s turbulent times, our world is shifting in many ways. The numerous changes and conflicts in the various layers of our environment can have all kinds of impacts. Recognizing these contexts can help us understand how events around us may influence our own feelings, reactions, and internal dialogues.

Will you be nourished or stifled among life’s interconnected systems? While you typically have little or no control over many of the external contexts in which you live, you do have some measure of control about your responses to the circumstances and events that ripple through your life.

The poet Mary Oliver (2017), famously calls on readers in her poem, The Summer Day, to consider “what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” Ah, what a noteworthy question this is! And whatever you “plan to do,” your responses and actions are unique to you, framed within your internal self and cultivated among the diverse layers of environmental circumstances and events in which you find yourself.

The questions we ask ourselves, and how we respond to them, can influence who we are and who we might become. What questions do you ask yourself?

🤔 Here are 11 empowering questions you might want to consider as you navigate life’s contexts:

1. What are some of the layers and components of my environment? For example: family, friends, organizations, schools, local government, work, income sources?

2. What do I notice about the ways I’m affected by the layers of my environment?

3. What thoughts and emotions are awakened as I ponder my responses to numbers 1 and 2?

4. What do I hope for?

5. What do I value and how true am I to what I value?

6. What am I afraid of?

7. What would I want to learn more about?

8. What do I think I should learn more about?

9. What haven’t I done yet that I really want to engage in?

10. How would this engagement fit with what I value and my sense of purpose?

11. What am I waiting for?

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only. No content is a substitute for consulting with a qualified mental health or healthcare professional.

© 2025 Ilene Berns-Zare, LLC, All Rights Reserved

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References:

• Bronfenbrenner, U. (1994). Ecological models of human development. International encyclopedia of education, 3(2), 37-43.
• Oliver, M. (2017). Devotions: The selected poems of Mary Oliver. New York, NY: Penguin Books.

Ilene is a Featured Author on PsychologyToday!
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