Using Coaching Questions to Deepen Everyday Conversations

Are you aware how coaching can be used to enhance and enrich everyday conversations with your family, friends and co-workers?
 
Coaching questions can positively impact communication, enabling more powerful connections and interactions with people in our lives: family, friends, colleagues and so forth.
 
Asking questions can support people to go on a journey of discovery within themselves: identifying and creating conscious awareness of what is going on at an unconscious level or beyond where they have thought before. Getting curious can assist those we are conversing with to view or experience a situation or belief from another perspective which can open up new possibilities.
 
What are coaching questions?

• Open-ended: These questions do not call for a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer. Instead they encourage the person to reflect and to provide more details when they respond.
• Powerful or thought provoking: These questions allow for the creation of new awareness or deeper understanding of an idea or concept or opportunity or challenge or an experience. This comes from trusting the person we are speaking to knows what is going on for themselves below the surface of what they present in a conversation, and this includes what is said not being said.  

Some potential coaching questions to ask during everyday conversations can be:

• What's coming up for you?
• What new awareness are you creating about this situation?
• Say more about that…
• What are you learning from this?
• What perhaps is missing from this scenario that you haven’t thought of yet?
• What would your intuition say?
• What is your heart saying about this?
• What does your gut say?
• What would be different if you achieved your goal?

Using coaching questions in the workplace
 
Coaching questions can be used effectively in the workplace. For instance, during performance appraisals, or when giving feedback to team members. Using coaching questions can shift the conversation, and lead to a more productive appraisal session. One way to do that is by starting the session by asking “What would you like to get out of this meeting?”
 
Also, instead of saying, “This is what you did well”, you could ask the person to describe times when they felt successful. By asking them to share first, you will give space for them to create awareness about their own strengths and successes. You can also ask what they have learned from situations that could have gone better, thus supporting them to grow and evolve and take ownership of their results and experiences.
 
Coaching questions in your personal life. 
 
All too often we hear from parents they find it hard to communicate with their children, or spouses struggle with certain conversations between one another. When we fall into familiar patterns of communication with our friends and family, we often ask the same questions and receive the same responses. For instance, questions that begin “Why did you…?” might come across as sounding judgmental, even if that is not our intention. However, if you ask a different – potentially thought provoking question - you can get a different response, which could then open up a whole new avenue of better communication.
 

 
As Yasmeen Hasan, Empower World Associate and ICF Associate Certified Coach, says, “When I went through the Empower World coach training I understood how powerful  coaching questions can be, and I started using them in my daily life with my husband, with my kids, with my colleagues at work. And I understood how it enriches a conversation, even if it's not a coaching session”
 
As Yasmeen points out, coaching questions used in everyday conversation can be  “key to having good relationships with the people around you, and supporting these people that you love: the people that you interact with the most, to get the best out of their lives as well” 
 
As we get into the habit of asking these questions, they can become a part of our everyday conversation, strengthening our communication and relationships.
 
Listen to the Empower World Coaching and Leadership podcast, episode 118 to hear Jeanine Bailey speaking with Yasmeen Hasan about using coaching questions in everyday life, with some examples of how this can transform a conversation.

Be empowered.

To learn more, listen to the Empower World Coaching and Leadership Podcast, Episode 118 here.

Episode-118 can be found here: 

Direct Link: http://bit.ly/2BTWuBd
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