The Coaching Habit
Great coaching starts with great questions. The right question can unlock insight, encourage motivation, and guide someone towards their own best solution. Whether you’re coaching others or reflecting on your own challenges, powerful questions are a valuable tool.
What makes a question great?
- It’s open-ended: encouraging exploration, not just yes/no answers
- It’s curious: coming from a place of genuine interest, not judgment
- It’s purposeful: helping the person move forward, not stay stuck
Examples of powerful questions:
- What’s stopping you?
- What have you tried so far?
- What’s stopping you?
- What are the possibilities?
- What would success look like?
Avoid questions that reinforce negativity and instead ask questions that invite solutions and actions. For example, the question “why does this always happen to me?” does several things:
- It sets the context for the brain that an undesirable situation is ‘always’ happening, so the brain will track off to find evidence to support that, screening out all the times it has not happened
- Asking “why?” will cause it to try to work out an answer, and if there is no positive reason, it will generate a negative one
- Then, ‘to me’ implies that it is you more than others, further corroborating any evidence that the brain has gathered
