THE ART OF CHALLENGING WEASEL WORDS

As a coach, and especially as a Meta-Coach, you test and challenge clients. It’s your job! It is what a client pays you as a coach to do. They want you to challenge them and hold their feet to the fire of reality. And so in the benchmarks for the core coaching skills, there is under the category of Questioning— “testing questions” and under the category of Supporting— “confrontation.”

Now most of the time the testing is around checking and confirming the strength of a client’s statements: “That’s what you want? That’s your commitment? And under confronting, you compassionately confront incongruencies and blind spots. Yet there’s another area for testing and confronting and that’s around weasel words.