2.4 Assignment. Using Empowering Questions
Getting Started
As you know by now, your overarching goal as a life coach is to help your coaching clients identify their goals and aspirations and utilize their strengths to help them get to where they want to be in their lives. What you don’t want to do is dispense advice. You ideally want to help your coaching clients to come to solutions that they discover themselves.
An effective approach to helping them do that is by posing well-placed, empowering questions. These questions can be used to:
· Help clarify an issue
· Consider a new perspective or angle
· Get to the root of a problem or pattern
· Invite a deeper reflection on an issue
· Elicit feedback
Empowering questions typically begin with “What” or “How.” For example: “What is important about that to you?” Or “How does that plan line up with your core values?” These open-ended questions invite your coaching subject to think and elaborate.
In contrast, close-ended questions can be answered in one or two words. For example, “When did you decide to start your own business?” There’s no discovery process in close-ended questions.
Also try to stay away from “Why” questions, which tend to put the person in a defensive posture. For example, “Why don’t you want to work with that business owner?” “Why” questions can be perceived as challenges. So when it comes to empowering your coaching client, it’s best to stick with “What” and “How” questions.
In this assignment, you are going to create empowering questions that you can potentially use in your two coaching sessions in this course.
Upon successful completion of this assignment, you will be able to:
· Develop empowering questions from concepts found in positive psychology that will assist in actual life coaching sessions.
Background Information
Well-placed questions are one of your greatest tools to help facilitate change. The key is to know which type of question is best used in a given situation. After reading the chapter in your textbook and the accompanying article, you should be prepared to brainstorm at least 24 questions using the eight categories listed. Feel free to develop more than three questions per category. The more you experiment with good questions, the better equipped you will be to use them effectively in your coaching sessions.
Instructions
1. In your textbook, Becoming a Professional Life Coach: Lessons from the Institute for Life Coach Training, read Chapter 4.
2. Read the article, 34 Questions to Ask Your Clients to Begin With(new tab).
3. Create questions to ask a client for each of the eight categories listed below. Below each category name is an example of a related question.
a. Provide at least three additional questions for each category. By the time you are finished, you will have brainstormed 24 questions that will equip you to take your coaching sessions into a meaningful discussion.
b. Use the Empowering Questions Worksheet (Word)(Word document) to record your questions.
Here are the categories and examples:
- Probing question:
- Example: What do you want to see happen?
- Clarifying question:
- Example: How would getting that help move you toward your core values?
- Goal-related question:
- Example: What’s the big picture you are trying to address?
- Expanding question:
- Example: If you had a magic wand, what would you do with it?
- Support question:
- Example: What do you need help with?
- Action question:
- Example: How could you break that down into small steps?
- Possibility question:
- Example: What would motivate you to change?
- Emotion-related question:
- Example: What is your dominant emotion and how is it affecting your choices?