No matter where you are in your career or life, coaching is a useful tool to help others understand how they are feeling and what direction they want to go.

What is coaching and why would you want to do it?

Fundamentally, coaching is about asking rather than telling. Open questions allow someone to build their own perspective rather than inheriting yours. Everyone comes with their own motivations, and as you continue to improve at coaching you’ll find that people can often get satisfying solutions which aren’t what you were initially expecting. It’s going to be hard at first if you are someone who likes to solve problems, but people are more motivated when they are able to find answers for themselves rather than being handed options on a platter. I’ve found it can be frustrating for people when it feels like you are holding back your own perspective for too long, which is why I don’t recommend trying to “purely” coach people, but there is a real benefit to taking the time to get as much information as you can before jumping into suggestions.

Fundamentals

Listening is the most important skill. Where you are fully present with the intention to understand. You may find the rest of the skills coming naturally as a result.

Be fully present. Remove distractions, close your laptop, put away your phone, focus on them.

Active listening and paraphrasing. Pay attention to what they are saying, and ask for clarification when you don’t understand. Paraphrasing helps to confirm if your understanding is correct, and it also makes the person feel more heard.

Suspend judgement. You are listening to understand, not to make a value judgement on what they’ve done or what they are planning to do.

Raise awareness in the other person. As you listen you may pick up perspectives or patterns in what they are saying. Bringing this up during the conversation may help them understand what is really important to them.

Silence. People need time to think, and giving them time to respond is a way of showing that this conversation is about them.

Open questions to understand and explore. This part I found the most tricky. Finding the right open questions that allow someone to better understand what they are trying to do, without directing them too far in one direction or another. I’ll be going into this in more detail in a later section.

Feedback, advice, and information. After taking the time to understand what they are trying to achieve, use your perspective and experience to help them get where they want to go.

Coaching questions

There are dozens of lists of coaching questions out there, so if these don’t cover what you are looking for then feel free to dig around a bit more. However, having a small list on your mind when starting out helps to avoid getting overwhelmed with too many options. Find the ones that work for you and make a shortlist for yourself somewhere that’s easy to reference.

How are you? Open the conversation without making it too specific to what you have in mind.

Can you tell me more about that? / Can you tell me more about ‘x’? Can be more helpful if there are specific details you’d like to dig into. Pair with this paraphrasing for best results.

What do you think is stopping ‘x’ from happening? Understand their version of the things getting in their way.

What have you tried so far? Understand what they’ve tried before making suggestions. They may have already tried what you were going to suggest.

How can I support you? Offer your support without giving too much direction.

Explicit coaching

Coaching can be weaved quite naturally into most conversations, but at times it makes sense to do it explicitly. If you want to try it out with someone it can help to ask a few questions before and after to make sure that you stay on track, and that you got the person where they wanted to go.

Questions you could ask before a coaching conversation

• What do you think is the most important thing for us to focus on?
• What would you like to achieve by the end of this?
• What strengths do you think you could leverage to get you there?
• What risks should we watch out for?
• What’s stopped you from making progress on this in the past?

Questions you could to ask after a coaching conversation

• How do you think you went?
• What would you change if we were to try this again?
• Is there something we missed that you’d like to talk through in another session?

Coaching during the bad times

Bad times are inevitable, which is why I like to have a few questions ready for when someone has something troubling them that they want to talk out. Be careful about which questions you use when. If someone has gone through something that has really upset them, it’s more important to ensure they feel heard before you get into problem solving mode. People also love to have a vent, and they may not actually need anything from you. Give them a chance to talk it out, and then ask if they are looking to talk through options on how to approach it.

• Have you ever been in a situation like this before? What worked?
• What are your personal barriers to approaching this situation?
• What matters most to the person you need to get onboard?
• What support would enable all parties to grow through this?
• What could you do to help the person you need to get onboard?
• How might you enable curiosity for learning from this situation?
• How clearly are expectations defined?
• How does this situation serve the other person? What do they gain from keeping it this way?
• How might you demonstrate the impact this situation is having on you?
• Are there ways you can uplift others’ mana without reducing yours?
• What recognition is most meaningful to you?

Conclusion

Thanks for having a read. As usual I’m sure there are a bunch of things in here that you were already aware of, but I hope I’ve given you at least one new thing to takeaway and try out yourself!