SO YOU’RE GOING TO GATHER INFORMATION

If you want to coach effectively, you always begin with information gathering. If you don’t, then you are more than likely to end up coaching to your agenda, not your client’s. In coaching, this is fundamental. Unlike the other helping professions, a coach is not an expert regarding what a client needs or wants, the client is. So you have to ask.

That brings us to the next question, how? How do you do intelligence gathering with your client so that both of you are crystal clear about the subject of the coaching? For the Meta-Coach, the answer is easy and obvious— the well-formed outcome questions. Take the 18 WFO questions and ask them for the purpose of seeking to understand what your client really wants. This is what we begin teaching in Module I (Coaching Essentials) and it is what we try to drive home in Module III (Coaching Mastery). Why? Because that pattern of questions is very, very powerful and, simultaneously, does many other things.