This is a guest article Khyati Gulani. Khyati is an ex-cricketer now coaching state and academy cricket in Delhi.

One of the most important parts of communication is the culture to question.

We all come from different cultures and have different ways of expressing ourselves. Indians are not often encouraged to question their elders. We’re taught from the beginning, not to question the status quo. One of the key tenets of respect to elders is to not question them.

That make us less confident, less open and less communicative: Bad listeners. Yes, listening abilities are proportional to our ability to confidently ask questions. Questions increase our understanding.

Since we’re not encouraged to ask questions, we don’t appreciate being questioned either. In fact, some of us take grave offence to being asked questions! As coaches, we have a collective responsibility to ideate, incubate, encourage and grow pupils under us. Different folks need different strokes and incentives to open up. Every soul needs appreciation, support, acceptance and approval. This is especially true at people's peak or at the lowest. We often criticise or punish the player in the public and applaud silently, which has to be other way round.

Coaching must encourage and nurture active discussions and exchange of ideas.

A great question has the ability to change tracks, get us all thinking.

The ability to ask powerful questions is related more to a coach’s ability to listen actively and stay in the moment: Let us encourage the power to question anyone any anything. Give people a patient hearing. Let them introspect by asking questions out loud to themselves and to us. We can become better facilitator that way.

Questions break cycles, kill the mundane. As humans, we get into conditioning too often. It is easy to fall into the routine and become predictable. Powerful questions can stop the inner conversation from thinking in its usual way and suddenly you are thinking ‘outside’ the realm that you are used to.

Often times, management colleges teach something called "So What" analysis: You ask yourself "So What?" until you find the most logical answer.

Some coaching methodologies follow the “Socratic method” and derives its name from the ancient Greek philosopher, Socrates.He would continuously pose questions to his listeners to trigger thinking. Questioning continued until the listeners provided the most logical answer to a particular problem and discovery followed. The Socratic method of questioning led to people finding their underlying beliefs. One of the ways Socrates did this was to answer a question by turning the question into a statement and adding another question.

Could Sachin Tendulkar, an introvert, learn so much to be the master of the game, without asking questions?

Would all his questions be so profound every time or would he also have some irrevant, meaninless queries? Was he ever discouraged to ask those meaningless questions? Was his biggest strength ever to ask questions until he was satisfied? Did that lead to the enormous hunger he showed for cricket?

Food for thought.