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The Art of Asking Better Questions: Pursuing Stronger Relationships, Healthier Leadership, and Deeper Faith
224 pages, Paperback
Published October 7, 2025
115 people are currently reading
595 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 39 reviews
September 26, 2025
This is easily one of the top five books I’ve read this year—and arguably the best. It should be required reading for anyone who interacts with others. Parents should read this book. Employers should read this book. Pastors should read this book. Friends should read this book. And if you’re none of those—but hope to become one—you should do the world a favor and read it.
The quality of the questions you ask will determine the quality of your life.
If you’d like a more detailed review, text me!
The quality of the questions you ask will determine the quality of your life.
If you’d like a more detailed review, text me!
February 12, 2026
Everyone should read this book! Practical and thought provoking! God created questions for a reason! Stay curious!
November 7, 2025
What is more formative, a question or an answer? Which is more relational? More human? More childlike? Which does Jesus do more of? I wonder what would change if we were all a little more curious about others...
November 5, 2025
What a fantastic resource for deep questions and considering how to ask good questions! Everyone should read this!
April 1, 2026
This isn’t bad but the first 2/3 just convince us that asking questions is important. I know that. That is why I picked up the book. I wanted to know the how more than the why. When he finally got to that it was much better!
January 1, 2026
“Life is better because of questions. They are some of the most valuable and easily accessible tools available to every one of us. When we make a commitment to learn to ask better questions, we experience better marriages and families, cultivate closer friendships, and deepen our faith. We have the opportunity to humanize our places of work, build stronger schools, and create more connected neighborhoods.
Learn to see the world as a question mark, and the journey never ends.
If the quality of your life is determined by the quality of the questions you ask God, yourself, and others, how then will you live into those questions?”
Shout out to my brotha Rainer for recommending this book! I think everyone should read this book especially those in ministry! I realized I suck at asking great questions and now that’s all I want to learn to do! Praying for God to use the things I learned in this book to help me be a more encouraging brother in Christ!
Learn to see the world as a question mark, and the journey never ends.
If the quality of your life is determined by the quality of the questions you ask God, yourself, and others, how then will you live into those questions?”
Shout out to my brotha Rainer for recommending this book! I think everyone should read this book especially those in ministry! I realized I suck at asking great questions and now that’s all I want to learn to do! Praying for God to use the things I learned in this book to help me be a more encouraging brother in Christ!
January 14, 2026
Very approachable and asked some interesting questions. It quotes from The Six Conversations (Heather Holleman) and How to Know a Person (David Brooks). My conclusion after reading is that in the context of those two books, The Art of Asking Better Questions doesn’t add a lot of new content on the topic of caring for others through effective conversation. I could see someone who struggled to get something out of one of those finding this approach slightly more helpful, but for someone who consumed the other two and learned from them, this is less valuable. This does spend more time on asking questions of oneself, which is unique. I enjoyed and felt illuminated by that to some extent.
Taken alone, it’s a good book on an important subject. 3.5
A friend (who had also read Holleman and Brooks) made a comment that this one is probably better as a reference book for good questions than as a primary source for conversational skill, which I think is accurate.
Taken alone, it’s a good book on an important subject. 3.5
A friend (who had also read Holleman and Brooks) made a comment that this one is probably better as a reference book for good questions than as a primary source for conversational skill, which I think is accurate.
April 11, 2026
This was an excellent read as I love creating connections with others. It challenged my thinking and motivated me to become a more intentional and thoughtful question asker. The book dissects the “science behind questions” is how I’d describe it and I found the “levels of questions” fascinating. It dives into questions within the religious world and the questions/answers Jesus gave. I will say I didn’t fully agree with some of the theological details but use discretion where needed. It also provides lists of more thoughtful questions in various categories as a resource in the back. I’ll be thinking about this book for a while!
January 5, 2026
I love that Briggs covered everything from building relationships to Bible study. He shows how asking better questions in one area of life helps us ask better questions in every area.
This was a great New Years Day read - now I can look forward to practicing the art of asking better questions throughout the year.
This was a great New Years Day read - now I can look forward to practicing the art of asking better questions throughout the year.
January 21, 2026
This book and the concept of thoughtful question asking has truly changed the way I move about the world and I Tracy with people. I believe the curiosity and openness to ask questions is as valuable a skill as Briggs says.
A solid read for pastors and leaders who socialize to ANY degree.
A solid read for pastors and leaders who socialize to ANY degree.
December 31, 2025
Amazing instructive book! So practical about asking great questions. I will revisit multiple times.
February 21, 2026
There are few books that have been as inspiring and actionable as this one in my own personal life. I immediately found myself asking better questions, having deeper conversations, and building stronger relationships. The appendix section is worth the cost of the book all by itself.
If you are a leader, learner, person of faith, or just a good friend I highly recommend this book to you!
If you are a leader, learner, person of faith, or just a good friend I highly recommend this book to you!
February 21, 2026
An extremly short and easy read that blends a mix of bite size pieces of wisdom relating to the idea of the question, how and why we askk them, and the art of learning to ask better ones. A sizeable portion of this is dedicated to the practicals of this discussion, which should cater to readers who connect to such a learning style (pragmatic, concrete, sequential). For someone like me who navigates instead towards theory and the abstract, I apreciated that he takes the time to set the stage of the what and the why. That's what I found most valuable.
Such as the notion of questions being intimately rooted in time and place, a dynamic that is intuitive and automatic but not something we tend to reflect on.
Questions also reveal our values. Even more importantly, they determine the shape of our lives. As the author writes, "A good question is an invitation for participation and engagement- with others and inside your own body." (page 14) To this end he speaks of question asking as a "mindset" and a "posture" as opposed to "a checklist of do's and don'ts."
Or the portion where the author distinguishes between questioning and question-asking. The first is largely a practice of cyncism. We are questioning the validity and truthfulness and relevance of a particular something. Can it be a necessary posture? Sure, given the time and space evoking our response. But this is expressly differentiated by the art of asking questions. This is a posture that seeks not to name the cyncism but to explore the truth. The word that comes up a few times over the course of this book is a posture of "curiousity." It's seeking the possibility in the face of potential cynicism. Any time we aren't asking quesitons, it is highly likely that we are questioning, often to defend the thing we are protecting. In contrast, the art of asking better questions, as the author imagines it, can be seen as "a gift we extend to others." (page 17)
Questions, as the author surmises, are risky things. Asking questions is risky business. At the heart of it is often fear. This is part of the reason why we so often content ourselves with asking the wrong questions. "Wrong" might not be the ideal world. Rather safe questions. Ones that keep us in the narrow confines of our protected frameworks. Thus part of the art of asking better questions is actually learning how to allow the questions we ask to be reframed. This goes against so much of our modern sensiblities. We like our certainty, our pragmatism, our control. We are part of the great scientific revolution after all. There's a certain irony to the fact that while we uphold an indebtedness to the scientific process as the thing that challenges our old frameworks (usually defined, symbolically, as the Dark Ages), we have also become experts in the modern practice of using science to protect our own tightly guarded frameworks. In some way, shape or form the modern enterprise can tend to fear posing better questions to its own paradigm precisely because it stands to challenge its exclusive hold on "enlightenment" and progress.
Which I think is why, the more the author delves into the nature of a question and why we ask them, the more we become immersed in a more holisitic understanding of questions as having a relational quality. Understanding and knowledge is not reducible to data. In fact, such thing often act contrary to our need to reduce things to data points. Questions to this end are "tools for engagement." It doesn't lead to some progressive knowledge of "information," but rather works to delve us deeper into the nature of a given thing, whatever that point of engagement is. It is seeking that invisible quality within the visible.
Question asking is also intimately connected to how we think. And thinking is intimately tied to how we engage the world around us, including our own selves. The truth is, we can only find (the truthfulness of a thing) what our questions allow us to find. Meaning, the kind of questions we ask and the ways in which we ask them determine the potential asnwers that can come. And the most meaningful answers are not the ones that narrow our world but open it up according to what the author calls four essential principles: curiousity, wisdom, humility and courage- (in case this needs to be stated, the author does parlay this as well on to a life of faith and belief, as this is an element of the world the author is observing.
And, as the practicalities of this which follow in the later section of the book will underscore, once again reiterating that these principles always apply to this notion of time and place- everything in context, everything in season, everything in participation and relationship. As someone who adheres to participationalist theology/philosophy this made proper sense to me.
Such as the notion of questions being intimately rooted in time and place, a dynamic that is intuitive and automatic but not something we tend to reflect on.
Questions also reveal our values. Even more importantly, they determine the shape of our lives. As the author writes, "A good question is an invitation for participation and engagement- with others and inside your own body." (page 14) To this end he speaks of question asking as a "mindset" and a "posture" as opposed to "a checklist of do's and don'ts."
Or the portion where the author distinguishes between questioning and question-asking. The first is largely a practice of cyncism. We are questioning the validity and truthfulness and relevance of a particular something. Can it be a necessary posture? Sure, given the time and space evoking our response. But this is expressly differentiated by the art of asking questions. This is a posture that seeks not to name the cyncism but to explore the truth. The word that comes up a few times over the course of this book is a posture of "curiousity." It's seeking the possibility in the face of potential cynicism. Any time we aren't asking quesitons, it is highly likely that we are questioning, often to defend the thing we are protecting. In contrast, the art of asking better questions, as the author imagines it, can be seen as "a gift we extend to others." (page 17)
Questions, as the author surmises, are risky things. Asking questions is risky business. At the heart of it is often fear. This is part of the reason why we so often content ourselves with asking the wrong questions. "Wrong" might not be the ideal world. Rather safe questions. Ones that keep us in the narrow confines of our protected frameworks. Thus part of the art of asking better questions is actually learning how to allow the questions we ask to be reframed. This goes against so much of our modern sensiblities. We like our certainty, our pragmatism, our control. We are part of the great scientific revolution after all. There's a certain irony to the fact that while we uphold an indebtedness to the scientific process as the thing that challenges our old frameworks (usually defined, symbolically, as the Dark Ages), we have also become experts in the modern practice of using science to protect our own tightly guarded frameworks. In some way, shape or form the modern enterprise can tend to fear posing better questions to its own paradigm precisely because it stands to challenge its exclusive hold on "enlightenment" and progress.
Which I think is why, the more the author delves into the nature of a question and why we ask them, the more we become immersed in a more holisitic understanding of questions as having a relational quality. Understanding and knowledge is not reducible to data. In fact, such thing often act contrary to our need to reduce things to data points. Questions to this end are "tools for engagement." It doesn't lead to some progressive knowledge of "information," but rather works to delve us deeper into the nature of a given thing, whatever that point of engagement is. It is seeking that invisible quality within the visible.
Question asking is also intimately connected to how we think. And thinking is intimately tied to how we engage the world around us, including our own selves. The truth is, we can only find (the truthfulness of a thing) what our questions allow us to find. Meaning, the kind of questions we ask and the ways in which we ask them determine the potential asnwers that can come. And the most meaningful answers are not the ones that narrow our world but open it up according to what the author calls four essential principles: curiousity, wisdom, humility and courage- (in case this needs to be stated, the author does parlay this as well on to a life of faith and belief, as this is an element of the world the author is observing.
And, as the practicalities of this which follow in the later section of the book will underscore, once again reiterating that these principles always apply to this notion of time and place- everything in context, everything in season, everything in participation and relationship. As someone who adheres to participationalist theology/philosophy this made proper sense to me.
September 11, 2025
"The Art Of Asking Better Questions" by JR Briggs is a great title for anyone wanting to improve their interaction with other people by asking better questions. In a day and age where many people seem to be self-absorbed and eager to talk about themselves instead of letting others speak, this is a very timely read.
Some of the great topics and points covered include:
- The world has excessive information but a shortage of wisdom.
- 8 obstacles that keep us from asking questions (hint: one of them is self-absorption).
- 4 things needed for asking great questions.
- 4 levels of good questions that can lead to better and deeper relationships.
- The quality of our life is determined by the questions we ask.
- 6 reasons Jesus asked questions and the types of questions He asked.
- Questions to ask yourself when studying the Bible.
- 9 practices for preparing to ask great questions.
- How to improve your capacity for asking questions through asking yourself questions and asking other people questions.
Great book: written from a Christian perspective, full of good spiritual and practical insights, has excellent questions to ask ourselves, includes a very helpful footnotes section for further study, easy to read, and may be finished in a few sittings.
Great read and recommended. I was given a review copy by IVP in exchange for a fair review and appreciate the opportunity.
Some of the great topics and points covered include:
- The world has excessive information but a shortage of wisdom.
- 8 obstacles that keep us from asking questions (hint: one of them is self-absorption).
- 4 things needed for asking great questions.
- 4 levels of good questions that can lead to better and deeper relationships.
- The quality of our life is determined by the questions we ask.
- 6 reasons Jesus asked questions and the types of questions He asked.
- Questions to ask yourself when studying the Bible.
- 9 practices for preparing to ask great questions.
- How to improve your capacity for asking questions through asking yourself questions and asking other people questions.
Great book: written from a Christian perspective, full of good spiritual and practical insights, has excellent questions to ask ourselves, includes a very helpful footnotes section for further study, easy to read, and may be finished in a few sittings.
Great read and recommended. I was given a review copy by IVP in exchange for a fair review and appreciate the opportunity.
January 17, 2026
Audiobook
This was an excellent book. It was very thought provoking and straight to the point. What I loved about this book is that the author showed us how to use questions and talk about the importance of in the context of Christianity.
The first half of the book is full of good insights and examples. The end of the book was very practical, so we could put this in practice.
I have already become more thoughtful with your reply to my questions and approaches to conversations. I think this book will impact my pastoring, preaching, and even my teaching at my public school.
I highly recommend this one!!
This was an excellent book. It was very thought provoking and straight to the point. What I loved about this book is that the author showed us how to use questions and talk about the importance of in the context of Christianity.
The first half of the book is full of good insights and examples. The end of the book was very practical, so we could put this in practice.
I have already become more thoughtful with your reply to my questions and approaches to conversations. I think this book will impact my pastoring, preaching, and even my teaching at my public school.
I highly recommend this one!!
February 17, 2026
Fun fact, I’m in the shoutouts/credits in the back of this book!
JR is an incredible coach, speaker, and writer. This book is very philosophical, while also being really practical. It highlights how question asking was really core to Jesus‘s ministry, and is also important to our humanity. Question asking something I’ve become passionate about ever since JR spoke at my college over a decade ago, and I truly believe asking questions is crucial when it comes to learning, caring, and loving others well. This book is a great tool to get readers to think more about asking questions, and I would highly recommend it for student leaders or for professional development.
JR is an incredible coach, speaker, and writer. This book is very philosophical, while also being really practical. It highlights how question asking was really core to Jesus‘s ministry, and is also important to our humanity. Question asking something I’ve become passionate about ever since JR spoke at my college over a decade ago, and I truly believe asking questions is crucial when it comes to learning, caring, and loving others well. This book is a great tool to get readers to think more about asking questions, and I would highly recommend it for student leaders or for professional development.
December 31, 2025
Fantastic—this should be a must-read for anyone going into a leadership role, anyone navigating family/friend relationships, and anyone with a desire to truly be a more thoughtful person. Are you a shifter or supporter? The author gets to the heart of why asking better questions is essential for us today, and if you want to connect at all with others, you should probably ask yourself: how will I choose to schedule time to learn from the wealth of relational treasure in this book? Will I put into practice at least three great questions this week?
February 22, 2026
I’ve been a fan of good questions since I was the receiving them from a mentor in my early 20s. Questions have given me a profound longing for heart-level conversations that have strengthened my relationships and my leadership. I’ve received quite a bit of coaching training and read a pile of books on coaching as well.
I say all of this to say this book is one of the best books on the value and use of questions I’ve ever read. I highly recommend it. I would give it more than 5 stars if I could. I’ll be returning to it regularly in the future for my own benefit and for training others.
I say all of this to say this book is one of the best books on the value and use of questions I’ve ever read. I highly recommend it. I would give it more than 5 stars if I could. I’ll be returning to it regularly in the future for my own benefit and for training others.
April 1, 2026
Reads a little bit like the Christian companion book to Warren Berger’s “A More Beautiful Question,” though that could just be that I read the two books back to back. Picked this up as my own supplemental reading for a ministry coaching program, and I really enjoyed it! Nice and concise, incredibly practical, and is a great resource I can see myself returning to for inspiration on questions for others and myself for my own spiritual growth
April 28, 2026
This is a helpful, encouraging reminder to cultivate our curiosity, stuff our ego, and ask more questions. I enjoyed the section on midwifery. Twenty-five years ago, a classmate--herself a midwife--shared a similar/memorable illustration. "Mothers and midwifes both deliver babies. As a counselor/teacher/pastor, we do better work when we remain in midwife mode. I.e., you can tell YOUR God story, but it's far better to help others deliver (identify and put language to) their testimonies.
January 10, 2026
I truly thought that as a therapist, I’d have cornered the market on question-asking. After all, I do it all day, every day. But this book has helped me level up my question-asking, learning different ways to ask to illuminate, rather than to segue way to instruction. Will keep this as a handy reference for sure.
January 21, 2026
This book has truly changed how I view interactions and how I want to operate in them. Asking better questions opens the door to depth and richness in relationships and in the inner heart. Briggs gives so many great examples, lists, and ways to practice this. So much wisdom in this short book. It’s one I’d give a copy to everyone I know.
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March 2, 2026“We don’t have a shortage of information; we have a shortage of wisdom, curiosity, and wonder. Asking good questions is a lost art. What if our obsession with the right answers is blinding us to the power of better questions? What if we learned to ask the right question at the right time for the right reason?”, p. 3
March 19, 2026
This book was discussed by a friend and I am glad I picked it up. It is one of those books that I will continue to think about over time and go back and reference. Thinking about the questions I ask and the questions asked by others will help me be a better conversationalist and communicator in general. I have already been able to put some of the tips into practice and practicing will continue.
January 9, 2026
Valuable resource! Despite questions throughout it's not a cheat sheet, it doesn't do the work for us, but it's filled with suggestions and questions to spur deepening our own questions and conversations.
April 8, 2026
Incredibly practical book for anyone who wants to get better at asking questions! Whether you’re already good at it or not but want to dive deeper in convos with those around you, definitely worth a read!!
April 12, 2026
I found this book well written, full of very helpful advice about asking questions and helping oneself along with others think about many aspects of life.
It was so full of great information that I took notes and have now decided to buy the book so I can use it for reference.
It was so full of great information that I took notes and have now decided to buy the book so I can use it for reference.
January 4, 2026
Good book for the basics of why to ask questions and the mental attitude you need to get good results.
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January 18, 2026I enjoyed this book very much, for myself personally and in my coaching career, it will be helpful.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 39 reviews