Coaches Practice many models, techniques and strategies with their clients. Creating clarity is the most valuable in my opinion. I coach my clients to define their focus and concentrate their power to create ultimate clarity. Your client will come to each session with beliefs and experiences of the world that determine their perception of what is possible for them.
Coaches Practice Clarity by Asking Powerful Questions
Creating a secure list of powerful questions to add to your daily coaches practice will benefit the client and build rapport in your sessions. There are a few ways to check in on the questions you are asking your client to discover if they are empowering.
Ask yourself if your questions
- Create movement toward what your client wants
- Unveil clarity, new ideas or intellectual understanding for your client
- Challenge your client’s beliefs
- Show that you are listening and are in clear understanding of your client’s perspective
Types of Questions You Can Use
There are a few types of questions that are useful and powerful in helping your clients to access more clarity around their unique challenges.
- Brainstorming/Ideas
- As if
- Action
- Beliefs/Identity
- Fun
- Outcomes
- Summarizing
As you spend more time coaching each client, you can practice identifying what types of questions help your client to discover a break through in their patterns. It could be valuable to keep notes on how your clients respond to the questions you ask. As part of evaluating growth in your coaches practice see if you are aware what specific style of questions uniquely motivate active response from your client.
Listen Beyond Words to Access Clarity
Often time the clarity your client is seeking will lie buried beyond words. Coaches practice active listening to determine why life is fuzzy and out of focus for their clients. Active listening means you are able to turn off your self-expression and focus completely on your client. You must be able to determine when to jump in with a powerful question and when to allow the client to be silent.
A great way to add layers to your listening skills is to check in on if you are positioned in
- Your own viewpoint
- From someone else’s shoes
- Taking an independent position
Master coaches practice listening from the view point of a witness, navigating through all points of view. Listen with a sense of love and connection to all areas of your client’s perception. At this level of listening you are able to allow true creativity into your sessions.
Powerful questions and active listening will create clarity. With clarity your client can take unprecedented action toward conquering any challenge and finding total success within their goals.
Hope you took some great value out of this post today! I’d love to hear your feedback, so make sure you leave a comment with your thoughts or questions. And also, you can click on the Twitter button below to retweet this article… Thank you!
Jeannine Yoder
Life Coach
Writing team, Coaches Training Blog Community
Jeannine,
great article! I am a certified life coach and it’s always great to listen to advice on how to become a better coach. Active listening and asking the Right Questions at the Right time are the key to success. Sometimes you want to challenge your clients directly, sometimes you want to be a little easy on them so that they can figure it out for themselves. Sometimes people don’t want to embrace the truth right away!
— Jupiter Jim
Hi Jeannine,
what a great article on coaching. You have covered a lot of ‘bases’ in it.
Clarifying questions, which help the client to feel that we listened to him/her are so important. Sometimes this can be done through a ‘paraphrasing’ question.
Doing the coaching course with Barbara Silva has taught a lot which I can also use in my ‘normal’ relationship interactions.
Thank you for your valuable information.
Thank you for saying, “You must be able to determine when to jump in with a powerful question and when to allow the client to be silent.” I tend to want something to move somewhere, and even though I realize that “it” is moving in the silence, I want to jump in and help “it.” Good reminder. Also appreciated the types of questions listed here, as well.
You’re welcome! This article was fun and informative to create and share!
Coach Jey