The big idea: Coaching is more than asking one question at a time. Coaching is taking your client on a journey by asking a SERIES of questions strategically designed to move them forward towards their desired results.
We define your Coaching Superpower very simply as what you choose to focus on with your client with your next coaching question; using your coaching skills to empower your client by shining the light on something with the questions that you ask.
When you think about it, your client has all the control and power. You have no control over what your client does in their life and whether they’re successful or not. Your best information, advice, opinion, or suggestion will not make a difference at all, which is why they are not considered “coaching skills.”
Your client is 100% in control. But your superpower, the best and most powerful thing that you’re able to do is to choose what you shine the light on, what you focus on with your client.
Connecting the Dots is Everything
Any training program combines focusing on learning individual skills and how to combine those skills successfully. While focusing on individual skills you lack the larger context of how each skill works together with other skills. But without focusing upon and practicing individual skills you are unable to put them together successfully to serve your client because you get stuck on the ones you haven’t yet mastered. This often results in trainees falling back upon giving suggestions and advice when they get stuck and run out of ideas for their coaching questions.
Being able to see the bigger picture and using your coaching questions to help your client connect the dots between where they are and where they want to be is a nuance of professional coaching that becomes important when coaching real clients.
Real clients have real long term goals that can be challenging to address in a limited training environment (such as practice Labs) as well as with “practice” clients when you only have one or two sessions. In these settings, it’s more difficult to “connect the dots” when you and your practice client are not addressing the long term big picture over multiple coaching sessions.
Using your Coaching Superpower to Connect the Dots and Move Forward
Coaching questions are our main tool for supporting, empowering, visioning, moving our client forward, setting the agenda for a coaching session, expanding awareness of their options/choices, decision making, accountability, and action planning, literally all the important coaching skills and activities.
Your Coaching Superpower combines what’s happening with your client and your own judgment and intuition to ask the best question that occurs to you in the moment to move your client forward. There are times when this is easy and times when it is hard, times that you fall flat and also those magical times when your client experiences life-changing transformation.
Effectively focusing your client with your next coaching question depends upon tapping into your intuition and judgment to decide what you need to focus upon to craft your next coaching question, which leads to the reason for this article.
The most important thing you need to do with your next coaching question is to connect the dots from where the client IS to their immediate next step forward. This essentially is the entirety of what composes a coaching session- connecting each moment with the next moment, connecting each step with the next step, connecting each question with the next question.
So there is really no such thing as “a coaching question” as coaching is really a SERIES of questions moving your client forward to where they want to go.
There’s also no such thing as a “powerful question” because any question has the potential to be powerful or fall flat, depending upon how it resonates with the client. So your goal can’t be to ask a “powerful” question, only to ask the best question that occurs to you in the moment, which is all you can and need to do. You’ll get better and more masterful with practice and experience- there are no magic solutions or shortcuts, ever. Practice and experience is the key to being a successful, masterful coach.
Connecting the Dots using a Strategic Series of Coaching Questions
If we view coaching as a SERIES of coaching questions we can expand our effectiveness if we realize that, like tools in a toolbox, our questions have different purposes. For example-
1. To START a new line of questioning/direction/focus of the coaching session
2. To move our client FORWARD in a particular direction/focus of the coaching session
3. To EXPAND AWARENESS of options, choices, resources, solutions, steps, actions, strategies
4. To DEEPEN clarity, detail (e.g. Vision), specificity (e.g. behavioral operationalizing), meaning, purpose
I’m sure there’s more, but these are the primary kinds of coaching questions and in any line of questioning to connect the dots and move our client forward we will typically use all of them.
Your Coaching Superpower (intuition) will tell you that your client is holding back, censoring themselves, and staying “safe” when they give one word/one sentence answers to something that is clearly huge and meaningful to them.
You know there is more that needs to come out to be able to make decisions and move forward, but how? Your client may be aware that something is holding them back but have no clue what it is.
How to respond when your client is stuck and can’t answer your coaching question is a common panic moment and stuck point for new and trainee coaches.
There are so many times this can happen in relationship coaching, such as a single person giving themselves permission to identify something important to them as a Requirement, a partner of a couple struggling to tell their truth and request what they really want/need, when your client is paralyzed by trying to decide between the risky, scary but desired option and the safe but less desired option, etc, etc.
Five Examples of Stuck Clients Excerpted from Real Coaching Sessions
As you review the examples below, pause a moment after the client’s first response to the coach’s question and ask yourself how you would respond before reviewing the rest of the example conversation.
The first responses below are real examples of stuck clients that have stumped and stymied our trainees who didn’t have any idea how to respond without falling back upon providing “un-coach-like” suggestions or advice:
Example 1: Strategic SERIES of questions with a client who experiences fear about making a choice/taking an action.
Coach: If it doesn’t work out the way you hope, then what?
Client: I’ll be devastated and depressed.
***Pause here- How would you respond?
Coach: OK, if you’re devastated and depressed, then what?
Client: It will take a long time for me to want to try again.
Coach: OK, it will take you a long time to want to try again, then what?
Client: I will probably try a different way since what I tried didn’t work.
Coach: OK, what’s an example of what you could do differently?
Example 2: Strategic SERIES of questions with a couple reluctant to tell their truth/ask for what they really want.
Coach: What do you want to request from your partner?
Client: I can’t think of anything that wouldn’t hurt their feelings, make them mad, or reject me.
***Pause here- How would you respond?
Coach: Are you thinking of something specific you want to tell your partner or ask of them?
Client: Yes, but I don’t think it’ll go over well.
Coach: What would make it safe for you to ask?
Client: I don’t know. I don’t think it’s possible.
Coach: (asks partner) What can you do or say to help your partner feel safe enough to ask for what s/he really wants from you?
Client 2: You can ask me anything and I promise not to get mad or reject you.
Example 3: Strategic SERIES of questions with a client who has trouble operationalizing a Requirement/Need.
Coach: What does “deep connection” look like for you?
Client: Honestly I don’t really know as I’ve never experienced it.
***Pause here- How would you respond?
Coach: How would you know if you are experiencing “deep connection?”
Client: I would feel emotionally safe, loved, and happy with my partner.
Coach: What would help you feel emotionally safe with your partner?
Client: When they really accept all of how I am and what I say and do without judgment or criticism.
Coach: What would help you feel truly loved by your partner?
Client: When my partner is giving to me in ways that make me feel good without being asked.
Coach: What are some things your partner could do for you without being asked that would make you feel happy and loved?
Example 4: Strategic SERIES of questions with a client who has trouble Visioning.
Coach: What is your Vision of what that would look like?
Client: I don’t know. I want it, but I’ve never had it/done it/experienced it and don’t know what it would look like.
***Pause here- How would you respond?
Coach: What is important to you about it?
Client: That it makes me happy.
Coach: What is one thing about it that would make you happy?
Client: That I experience it as fun and easy.
Coach: What is one thing that would make it fun for you?
Example 5: Strategic SERIES of questions with a client who has trouble identifying their agenda for their coaching session.
Coach: What would you like to accomplish today?
Client: I don’t know, I’m feeling stuck because nothing I try seems to be working.
***Pause here- How would you respond?
Coach: What is one thing you tried this week that didn’t work?
Client: I tried to write my online dating profile and got totally stuck trying to describe myself. Everything I come up with seems off.
Coach: Would it help you to come up with a plan for writing your online dating profile today?
Client: Yes, it would!
Coach: OK, when it comes to describing yourself, what is one strategy you haven’t tried yet?
Client: Well, I can ask my friends and family members how they would describe me.
Coach: Who would you ask?
Client: Well, not my parents and grandparents as they think I walk on water. I think my sister, my uncle, my best friend and my cousin would be most objective and honest.
The Bottom Line
I hope these examples give you an idea of what a strategic SERIES of questions looks like. PLEASE don’t take them literally by copying these coaching questions for future use. Your effectiveness as a coach depends upon using your Coaching Superpower strategically in the moment and allowing your judgment and intuition to craft each coaching question in response to your client keeping the big picture in mind.
You can always ask better coaching questions and will be able to do so with practice and experience. In the meantime, just ask the best coaching question that occurs to you in the moment with your client, mindful to use your coaching questions to strategically connect the dots and create forward movement as illustrated in the examples above.
