Performance Coaching = Make Your Clients Think

Performance coaching is all about helping the client find solutions and to help them move beyond their mental horizons. But can we unravel our internal capacities so we can get past life and career roadblocks? By doing precisely what we just did; asking more and better questions.

Questions are the backbone of coaching. Unlike answers, questions help us push past cognitive biases and into the unchartered territories of our minds and our potential.

The progress of the world has mostly depended on quality questions rather than finding answers. All remarkable achievements spring from the right kind of questions rather than finding the answers. Remaining in a questioning mode doesn’t quite come naturally for many of us. We are still primed from an early age to (madly) pursue answers.

However, the ability or even the desire to question is considered one of the chief aims of education. In fact, many people often imagine that the main reason for engaging a performance coach is to find all the answers to their long-standing or perennial problems. But in reality, a performance coach’s job is to steer you towards your own solutions. He or she will do this by helping you look at your situation from a different lens and to hold you accountable for taking the right actions.

Performance coaches must always plan their sessions by not just getting themselves in the right mindset, but also planning the right questions. While many of the questions might seem fairly standard, the right questions will enrich the sessions and allow the coachee to step back and examine themselves.

Great questions can make the difference between a powerful, dynamic and productive session and a one-way interrogation or lecture.

Not All Questions Are Created Equal

What kind of questions should a performance coach ask or how can they know a particular question is good or bad? The magic in performance coaching is in how you time and frame the questions. The same questions in the hand of a novice might not produce the same results. Sounds confusing? Here are a few guiding principles to keep in mind:

– Open questions are more productive than closed ones

– Descriptive questions (What’s working? What’s not?) pack a lot more punch than speculating ones (What if? What might be? Why not?).

– Questions can be quite annoying if they don’t spring from a deeply held conviction of what the coachee want’s to accomplish.

– Aggressive questions that put people on the spot, or cast unwarranted doubts on their ideas should be avoided at all costs.

– Avoid questions that reinforce the emotional charge your client is already feeling. Instead, ask questions that open up possibilities and other avenues that they may not have considered.

As a performance coach, you must have a genuine interest and curiosity towards your coachee’s answers. They can detect real interest and also whether you are just trying to do what you are supposed to do. Therefore, you are unlikely to get to that ‘nerve center’ of your client’s situation if you are just going through the motions of coaching.

Why questions can seem confrontational and even judgmental. ‘Why would you …” kind of questioning can make your client feel like they are on the spot, or being judged. This, of course, is not useful when it comes to trying to open them up and to come up with creative solutions.

Remember, the gates of meaningful change and action can only be opened from the inside. Your questions should try to create a bridge between what your client is sharing and what else you want to know.

Here are three powerful questions that often lead to important breakthroughs (and other questions), and that should be part of your coaching toolkit: