The Solace of Open Spaces, or Building Relationships of Trust
I like to use questions to challenge people and organizations, but questions can also be used as intentions to guide attention. When we use questions as intentions, we all look more closely, more deeply, finding solace in those open spaces.
Cleaning Up Your Questions
Clean language is worthy of a deep dive all its own, and one day, I’ll get there. But today is not that day. This is the day to focus on how Clean language can help you to clean up the questions you use in coaching and mentoring sessions, in organizational retrospectives, and in any conversation with clients. Here is the question that drives this blog post: As coaches, how do we clean up our questions?
Three Types of Coaching Questions to Include in Coaching Conversations
I then asked this question, “What is it like to live amongst beauty?” The response from the client was immediate and powerful: tears.
But do you see what happened in that question? I used the client’s language about beauty and their home to ask a powerful, meaningful question. I played off their words, their imagery to deepen the context of the conversation. The strength of that first question helped us to have a meaningful, productive session, culminating in a course of action that brought them immense joy. I doubt that we would have gotten there, however, without that first, great question.
Three Types of Coaching Questions You Should Never Ever Ask During Coaching Conversations
I’ve heard that said, many a time. And up until I began coaching and fell in love with questions, I believed that statement. However, while there may not be a poor question, there is most definitely a poor type of question. I should know—I’ve tried to ask those types of questions and had my coaching sessions fall short of where they could be.
As a coach, there are three types of questions I avoid in coaching conversations. By bringing them into the open, I’m hoping to help you avoid them, too.
Standing in Curiosity, or One Impossible Thing at a Time
For me, curiosity is anything but easy. I like to know the answer. I like to give answers. I like to be the smartest one in the room. I like to be right. I have to fight to get to curiosity and then fight even harder to stay in curiosity. I ask good questions, heck I even teach how to ask questions, but even I know that I’m too much head and not enough heart. Curiosity often feels insurmountable, that impossible thing for me to climb.
Mentoring Matters, or Making a Case for Hope
I realized that that I’d left something unnamed: hope. In a nutshell, mentoring is about hope. When I mentor, I have hope for those that come after me, I give hope to those following, I am building for a future that I will never see. I hope for better things. There is, I think, hope on the other side as well. The person being mentored (ideally) receives hope, too, not just knowledge and skill and experience, but in knowing that someone else believes so strongly in them that they’re willing to give the most valuable thing they have: time.
Unraveling with Questions...
And that got me to thinking: are good questions a way to add space around a knot?