Over the next week, ask a friend, family member or colleague to allow you to practice your skills during a half hour coaching session on a topic of their choice.

Don’t forget to reference the questions from the slides to fuel your creative questioning technique. More importantly don’t forget to let them do the heavy lifting, don’t offer solutions and stay curious!

Coaching Questions for your Leadership toolkit

Here are some creative questions to help fuel your coaching conversations:

TO HELP THEM CREATE AWARENESS (What do you want?)

1. What is it that you want?
2. Why would you want it?
3. What are the ways you could?
4. What makes this a challenge for you?
5. Do you remember a time when you were completely lost in the moment?
6. Can you describe the conditions that created this state of flow?
7. What can you do to re-create/replicate/create these conditions/principles in the future?
8. How can you add these principles to your life?
9. What will adding these principles to your life bring you?

TO HELP THEM DETERMINE THEIR MOTIVATION

(Why do you want it? What is the meaning of?) how do we motivate and move the client forward?

1. What would you like to achieve obtain?
2. What do you find meaningful about this goal?
3. Why is it important for you?
4. What will it bring you?
5. What is meaningful about this goal?

TO ASSIST THEM WITH THEIR PLANNING (How will you do it? How will you do it?)

1. How will you realize it?
2. What resources do you have/need?
3. What do you have control over?
4. What would the risks be?
5. Is that realistic for you?

TO HELP THEM SET SUCCESS INDICATORS (How will you know you have it?)

1. How will you know that you have succeeded?
2. How will you maintain focus?
3. What will you have?

TO HOLD THEM ACCOUNTABLE AND KEEP THEM FORWARD FOCUSED

(How will you remain focused and progressing? What could creep up as a roadblock and how will you manage?)

1. How will you sustain this?
2. How will you maintain your focus?
3. How will you hold yourself accountable?

End of session questions

1. What has changed for you during this session?
2. What is one of your takeaways?
3. What are you walking away with today?

Roadblock/Session prompting questions

1. When clients say…I don’t know that is why I hired you! Response: Yes, I realize that in today’s society of instant responses (social media, etc.) we have become to asking, getting an answer and responding. Somewhere along the way, we have lost the value of reflection…so how about we allow the silence to do the heavy lifting and provide you this time and space to reflect.
2. What’s coming up with you in the silence?
3. Because time is limited, is this something that you believe we can discuss within this timeframe?
4. What are you hoping to walk away from today’s session?
5. I see you are doing XYZ, what does that mean to you?
6. I am hearing you apologize a lot, why do you think you are doing that?
7. What if you were not sorry, what would that mean?
8. Sounds like the voice of your saboteur vs. your sage, inner critic vs. self.
9. If your Sage or self was speaking, what would he/she be saying?
10. What do you need to do right now to take care of yourself?
11. What was your big takeaway today?
12. What were your wins since our last chat
13. What do you need to happen to get past that?
14. What if nothing changes? Followed up with “Are you OK with that?”

Additional Tips:

• Use summaries only when there is an opportunity to create a new awareness…to connect several pieces together to create insight.
• Use summary to return to focus and linking/connecting several elements of the conversation.
• Ask the how, the how but not the why as it can often lead to forgiveness.
• The importance of honouring a moment/a space….Silence is not awkward and does not translate to the coach’s inability to guide/provide clarity but rather, it is a way of providing and honouring space for the mentee.
• What words is my client using and what do they mean.
• Paraphrasing with purpose
• Meet the coachee where they are
• This client is not broken, I am not here to fix the client. I am here to be curious and guide the student.
• Taking deep breaths
• How might we questions…help people explore the possibilities
• Bring in the word YET…I can’t do it…YET.
• What would you advise a friend to do if faced with this?
• NOW = Name it, Own it, What do you want to do about it to move forward?
• If we spend the next 30-40 mins talking about that, where would you want to be at the end, what would you like to walk away with.
• How important is this to you?
• On a scale of 1-10 how are you feeling now, at the end of the session, where would you like to be?
• At the end of session, what would need to happen to kick you up from a seven to an eight?
• What advice would you give yourself in this situation?
• Comparing changes to the seasons

Working with a fixed mindset

• Can you explain, can you elaborate?
• Why do you feel this way?
• Others have different opinions, why do you think that is?
• Shift the focus from you as the coach to others.
• Only they can disarm themselves. Let them prove themselves wrong.
• Frame the conversation
• Stay curious
• Make them valued and safe
• Ask powerful and creative questions
• What is the tiniest BIG step you could take next.

Wheel of Life

• How do you think the low score on this quadrant may be impacting other areas of your life?
• Which quadrant do they want to focus on?
• What would you need to happen to move you up to an 8-10?
• What is currently hindering that from happening?
• Use to gauge progress
• Use to further hone-in

Goal Setting Questions

Holding it lightly and giving the client space to articulate the goal for themselves.

Help determine their topic of focus for the conversation

• If your goal was a headline in a newspaper how would it read? 
• What do you believe you want to explore?
• What do you want to talk about?
• What do you want to achieve?
• What goal are you working towards right now?
• What’s top of mind for you today?
• What’s up?
• What’s on your mind today?

Help Them Identify an Ideal Outcome

• What would be the ideal outcome?
• What’s top of mind for you today?
• What are you hoping to achieve?
• What would the endgame be?
• If no barriers what would success look like?
• What do you want to walk away with today?
• What would like to have at the end of the session?
• What do you need to walk away with?
• What do you need to achieve?

Help them identify and understand why they find this particular goal important

• Why does that matter to you?
• Why is this important to achieve?
• What does this mean to me?
• What would this mean to you?

Help Them determine how they will know they have achieved it

• How will you know that you have it?
• What will it look like?

Miracle questions

• How do you move the client from problem focused to solutions focused?
• Imagine that we FFWD…and you have achieved this already? What does that feel like? What does that look like?
• What will have changed for you?
• What if you gave yourself permission to learn?
• What if you were good enough? If you were good enough, what would that look like?