Three Coaching Questions I've Stopped Asking
What do the questions we retire tell us about where we are heading?
One truth of the coaching journey, and one similarity a human coach will share with an AI coach, is that we are always developing.
Minute by minute, session by session, we grow our confidence, deepen our presence, and expand our skillset.
While it can seem tempting to hungrily collect questions or enquiries, we cannot hoard them all.
Reflecting on what enquiries no longer serve us can be a helpful tonic to the glut of questions we feel we should be asking.
Today I’ll share a few questions that I no longer ask, and the story behind the shedding.
#1 Who can help you with this?
Deep within my coaching heart there is a strong, but caring belief. A belief that somewhere living in the client’s mind, body and consciousness there is resourcefulness, capacity and know-how. It may not seem accessible. It may just be a few glowing embers shrouded in dust and ash and darkness.
But I wholly believe that my role as a coach is not to simply impart know-how, an extrinsic source of direction. Or indeed that I should imply to the client that someone else might.
I’ve often asked, and witnessed fellow coaches ask a variant, ‘who might be able to help you with this?’
We are steering and implying when we ask this. We are implicitly suggesting to them that we think they can’t manage this on their own. That they need external help or support.
I do not wish to imply with my questions that the person opposite me is lacking the capacity to find progress or resolution by their own merit.
I have retired this question, in favour of an enquiry which more often explores internal resources. Keeping my questions broad enough so that the client may well arrive at another person to help them. But untainted by an assumption that they need to.
#2 If you knew you couldn’t get it wrong, what would you do?
I’ve been asking this question for over five years. And in my reflections, I realise it rarely surfaces the intended insight or resourcefulness.
There are two elements I’d like to share with you.
First, linguistically, I realise now the negative focus of the language is working against the spirit of the question here. ‘Couldn’t’ and ‘wrong’, at some level, are emphasising unhelpful and negative language.
And second, environmentally thinking. Here’s one of my hot takes about effective coaching: it is less about the coach nailing the specific question. Is more about the environment, the mindset your client has. There needs to be some mode of receptivity to change, to exploration, to enquiry. Dr Richard Boyatzis and his colleagues have done some brilliant research on this.
Without this receptivity, the best and most wonderful questions in the coaching lexicon may not land.
An evolution that I’ve been through myself, and one that I help other coaches with in supervision and mentor coaching, is to focus less on finding the next perfect question. But to instead focusing on facilitating and environment of expansive, creative and deep thinking.
An environment where people can access greatness in themselves.
Presence, I believe, beats process every time.
I had been asking this question without putting in the work around that mindset, that loose, creative, expanded thinking. And it wasn’t working, and seemed to be embedding my client in a place of stuckness, and ‘yes, but-ness’.
#3 What do you think?
On the surface, this is a lovely, generous, open coaching question.
And yet, I've noticed how my interest in what my client is thinking has waned in recent years. Instead, I am more interested in much of the other data. Data that might not be so easily accessible. But may be even more valuable.
We are swimming in the waters of a prioritisation of thinking, logic, rationality and reductionism. What might be termed ‘left-hemisphere’ dominance. Rene Descartes offered that, ‘I think, therefore I am’, and our Western culture is still dominated by this mindset. A fragmentation of brain and body, a doing-away-with what we don’t understand or can’t measure.
Within and without coaching, it seems clear to me that much suffering stems from an over-dominance of our capacity to think, and the repression of our capacity to feel.
My approach to coaching honours that the client may well need some time and space to thinking something through. And yet, that the benefits of the work will be compounded by exploring how they feel too. What their body might be signalling. What their dreams and memories may be asking them to consider.
Coaching has the capacity to help evolve a deeper human consciousness. One that feels sorely and urgently needed in today’s unfolding meta-crises.
Sticking purely to thoughts and logical thinking, while repressing such other profound aspects of the human experience, strikes me as an unfulfilling and ultimately unhelpful approach to coaching.
Whether below in the comments, or via email, I’d love to hear the questions you’ve let go of - any why.
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