QUALITY QUESTION/ QUALITY LIFE

When the field of Coaching emerged in the early 1990s, one of the key distinctions of an effective coach was the ability to ask great questions. And because coaching was about enabling or empowering the client, instead of ‘telling,’ coaching arose as a way to elicit answers from a client which occurs by asking probing questions. In NLP and Meta-Coaching this led to a re-discovery of the Meta-Model as a source for how to think and ask specificity questions. It also led to the development of Meta-Questions—questions that take a person inside and to this day, most coaches still do not know or use.

To realize the power of questions, consider this summary statement: The questions you ask govern the answers you get. That is, questions govern answers. If you are not getting the answers that you anticipate will create resources or solutions, look again at your questions. Further, be careful with your questions. Why? Because the very terminology of your question typically determine the terminology of the answer. This is the problem with a great many of the questions asked in polls for public opinions about things. The questions are poorly designed. There is bias in the way the question is formed and phrased. Therefore the answers that result do not really measure public opinion. The questions create an answer that the designer wants.

Now given this, many times the ‘problem’ that a client brings to coach is a problem of the questions that they are asking. How about that! The problem is the question. Why? It’s because there can be no precise answer to a vague question. And what kind of questions do clients often bring to coaching? Vague questions! They also bring many unanswerable questions, ambiguous questions, assumptive questions, etc. No wonder the problem is the question.

What is a coach to do? What are you going to do? My recommendation is this: Question the question in such a way as to challenge it and expose its weaknesses. As you wonder within yourself, “What is this client actually asking?” Guide your client to make the question more and more explicit. Ask for specific references and examples.

• “What is the secret of success?” –\> Success in what specific area, doing what?

• “Why are my fears so real and uncontrollable?” –\> What are you afraid of? When? How did you learn this fear?

• “How come I can’t handle my wife’s manipulations any longer?” –\> What is your wife manipulating you to do? How do you know to call it ‘manipulation?’

Now because a vague question cannot be answered with precision or specificity—the only kind of answer you can get from a vague question is more vagueness, more ambiguity, and more errors. What’s deceptive is that when we hear a question, our brain’s tendency is to immediately answer. This is a basic bias within the brain. The brain, as an ‘answering machine’ makes it so that we cannot not answer a question.

This means that we are wired to solve problems and we are seduced to do so even when the question is ill-formed and unanswerable. Imagine that! An ill-formed and unanswerable question—and we jump almost immediately to answer it even though we don’t really know what we are trying to solve!

Perhaps we can put a warning on the coaching session: Beware of questions. Not all questions need to be answered; and not all questions should be answered. Well, they should not if you want to be sane and well! Sear this into your awareness: The quality of questions leads to the quality of one’s life.