Successful professionals love to share their highlight reel - anecdotes about how they made bold career moves and achieved significant wins for themselves, their teams, and their organizations.

What gets less airtime is exactly how they found courage during the lowest points of their career: those emotional moments when their boldest ideas were deemed ‘too risky,' their biggest projects failed to deliver, their collaborators threatened to bail, and they silently asked themselves:

WTF are you doing?
WTF made you think this was a good idea?
WTF are you supposed to do now?
WTF did you do to deserve this?

I call those moments at work “WTF moments” and if you've attempted some bold career moves or made some audacious commitments over the course of your career, you know as well as I do: They are inevitable!

But when WTF moments threaten to freeze your ambition and derail your career, it is worth remembering that WTF moments have the potential to be career accelerators too!

The Power of WTF Moments

In my work with senior executives, small business CEOs, and leadership teams, I’ve seen WTF moments last minutes, hours, and sometimes days. They can feel raw, overwhelming, and even shame-inducing…

But they are almost always an opportunity to remember what emboldened you in the first place, and that mental exercise doesn't need to take long!

Giving yourself just 10 minutes to answer three powerful WTF questions repeatedly and honestly can generate simple yet significant ideas and motivation needed to get you back on track faster.

Three Powerful WTF Questions

Of the 10,000 or so WTF questions that flood your brain in emotional moments, there are the only three worth answering:

**1) WTF is true right now?**
**2) WTF do I have or have access to?**
**3) WTF did I come here for?**

They are irreverent enough to get your attention, simple enough to keep your thoughts moving, and powerful enough to shift you from ridicule to resourcefulness and from panic to purpose.Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Of course, your first few attempts to answer these questions won’t be completely easy, and your first few answers won’t be completely honest, but the longer you commit to answering these questions - and only these questions - the more you and/or your team will be able to focus on what’s true, use the strengths you have (or the strengths within your reach), and forge ahead on what matters most!