The Coaching Habit is a method that uses the principles of coaching that many organizations nowadays are using to develop their employees and organizations widely, both in our country and abroad.
We can see this from coaching courses, such as building Teamwork with Coaching or Coaching Skill for employees, supervisors or executives, or even Life Coaches and others. That is why the admin wants us to understand this matter and try to apply it to work or life. Maybe it will give us some results that we may have been looking for for a long time.
The principle of coaching is to bring out the potential and efficiency of people, which may be in work, life, sports competitions, or exercise, etc. Currently, being a coach is one of the most popular careers. Each coach will choose to be a coach in his or her area of expertise for people who want to learn and develop themselves in a specific group or maybe individually.
“Coaching is an art that people say is easy, but difficult to do.”
Coaching is not suggesting or forcing the coachee (Coachee, pronounced as coachee) to do this or that, which is different from consulting and asking for someone’s opinion. But the coaching process is supporting and encouraging the coachee so that they dare to ask, learn, and act in the right way to give them the opportunity to reach their goals in their own style and methods.
The book The Coaching Habit – Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever is a useful and inspiring book for many people all over the world. The author, Michael Bungay Stanier, is a senior partner at Box of Crayons, a company famous for coaching organizations to have a corporate policy of doing less good, doing more great. In this book, we will learn his coaching tips and how they use them to support and lead their coachees to reach their goals.
Opener Questions: Find powerful questions to quickly and deeply open up a conversation.
One reason why people don’t dare to start coaching is because we don’t know how to start. Many people are afraid and worried that the questions during the initial conversation may be boring or annoying in the eyes of the coachee. In this book, they say that if we want to keep doing it, then we will be fine. Because most people often have this kind of anxiety and stick to superficial and boring conversations that do not bring any benefit. And here are 3 situations that we may have encountered or have experience in starting conversations, such as:
1. The small Talk Tango
Don’t miss this. This is a time for small talk, small things, to reminisce about the past relationship. It’s a process of building a memory of who he and we are to each other. But then we may feel so lost in the conversation and think, “Seriously, what are we talking about?” After 8 minutes out of 15 minutes of idle chatter (let’s talk a little bit, but don’t digress for too long and go off topic).
“Casual chat is just a bridge we use to get into the important conversations we want to have.”
2. The Ossified Agenda
It is a meeting or a conversation with a set agenda. This type of conversation is talking to the same person, place, time and agenda. We may say that it is a boring and tasteless meeting because it can drain the energy of all the people who attend the meeting or the conversation. This type of agenda talk is very good if it is arranged only once a week or a month. Even though it is boring, it is a process that brings us to the important points and matters.
“Answers close doors, and questions open doors, inviting us into conversation.”
3. The Default Diagnosis
This is the real introduction to the important conversation. We no longer ask questions, just talk about the topic directly. Most of the time, all participants in the conversation already know and are well prepared about what they want to talk about. The conversation response is a joint problem-solving process for what is needed.
“If you dig at the wrong root of the problem, no matter how fast and smart you dig, it won’t help.”
Almost every way we think of as safe to start a conversation is a failed one. We need to choose what we say that is appropriate, appropriate for the time, not too revealing and not too secretive.
For example, “What are you thinking about?” is a question that invites people to enter a deeper conversation, to delve deeper into their thoughts and hearts. They will start to decide for themselves whether to speak their mind directly or to hold it in and give some hints. But this is not a question that will tell you everything, it is a question that helps to motivate the coachee.
Scary Questions: The World’s Best and Most Powerful Coaching Questions
It’s a question that has a magical quality to it. It seems effortless to explore, yet it produces more answers than we might think. It reveals us to the coachee as a person of wisdom, insight, awareness, and responsibility.
If you ask, “What else?” for this matter, there are 3 reasons why this question is the scariest one for people who have to face these questions (because it is a question that makes them think quite a bit), which are:
- First, it increases decision-making options.
- Second, you have control over your emotions and feelings.
- Thirdly, it is buying time for yourself.
4 Tips for Us on Asking “What Else?”
To make our scary questions work, we need to do the following things in conjunction with each other:
- Show curiosity and sincerity. Once we have chosen the scary questions, it will prevent us from getting into a boring Q&A conversation.
- Ask again and again. Start by understanding the natural law of human beings. People tend not to like to ask and answer the same thing repeatedly. However, the method that experts recommend is to ask again and again as an experiment. And what we do next is to observe the results of the experiment that we have asked.
- Identify success. “Nothing.” This answer is the one we have been looking for and waiting for. It means we have brought the coachee to the end of this question. Take a deep breath and shoot out a new question instead.
- Move on when the time is right. If we feel like we should end the conversation, we know it’s time to move on. A powerful phrase we use to end a conversation is “So, basically…” or “Anything else?” This ends the conversation while still leaving the door open for more questions if either party wants to ask more.
Lazy Questions: Find useful questions for your coachee and make things easier.
Coaching is about trying your best to make progress for the coachee, or in other words, adding value to the coachee. What a coach must do is to be as useful to the coachee as possible in adding that value.
“Is there anything I can help you with?”
The power of this question is two times greater than that of a normal question. First of all, it forces our coaches to state what they want clearly and directly. As coaches, we will never know what they really want or have ever wanted. Only when we know this can we act in a way that is useful and meets the needs of our coachees.
“What do you (the coachee) want?”
This is another version of “How can I help you?” which is a more blunt version. However, as coaches, we have to be careful when using this question, such as with facial expressions, eyes, and tone of voice. If you ask this question with an annoyed tone or irritated eyes, the coachee may misunderstand you and make them not dare to tell you directly what they need (a conversation that may end in failure).
Strategic questions: Questions that reach the heart, which require good strategy.
While this may sound a bit scary or technical, the actual practice is not as complicated as it may seem. We should start by asking the coachee to think about something they agree with. When they answer “yes” or “agree,” it’s time for our strategic questions, such as the following:
“You said yes, so what didn’t you say?” or “Seriously, what did you say was yes?”
These two questions will help bring the coachee out of the shadows by getting them to think back to the question they just answered “Yes” to. They are now going into the process of thinking about whether they have made a mistake or misunderstood it by asking this question.
In fact, there is another way of asking strategic questions that allows us to cover both types of negations:
- The refusal that is applied to the option that is automatically eliminated when we say yes, and understanding the types of refusals or saying “no” will help us as coaches understand the meaning of the decision.
- A silent denial is a denial that shines a spotlight on how to create the space, focus, energy, and resources we need to say yes.
Rejection in an undeniable situation
Unfortunately, many of the people we work with often put us in situations where saying no becomes harder, where saying “yes” or “yes” becomes the default culture. No matter how hard we want to say no, we can still say “probably” or “maybe”.
“The secret to saying no is learning to say yes more slowly.”
The speed at which we agree is the same speed at which we get into trouble. Slowing down our agreement is like trying to keep our curiosity alive. Let’s try asking these questions first:
- Why are you asking me?
- Who have you asked?
- When you said it was urgent, what did you mean?
- To what standards must this work be completed? And when?
- If you say you can’t do it all by yourself, what part would you have me do?
- You want me to stop working on my stuff and come do this?
But trying to act curious, not understanding what they’re saying, and asking the same question over and over again can actually provoke three different responses:
- People who are no good will tell us to stop asking those annoying questions and get on with the job.
- Answer with a well-prepared answer to every question, but it will be a win for us because it means we can say that he has prepared well for you to do what he wants.
- He doesn’t have the answers to our questions, but is willing to find the answers for us, until he eventually gives up and never comes back.
Learning Question: Find out how to end a conversation in the smartest way possible.
Helping coachees learn what they lack is difficult. Sometimes we may feel like hitting them over the head again and again, but we can’t do that. Instead, we must do the opposite by pushing them forward in a professional manner. This is something that coaches need to remember.
- Coaches don’t really learn when you tell them what to do.
- Coaches don’t really learn when they are asked to do something.
- Coaches start to learn when they start to forge a new path for themselves, when they have the opportunity to reflect back and see what happened as a result.
“What is the most useful thing for you?”
Scholar Chris Argyris coined the term “ double loop learning ” 40 years ago: if the first phase is to solve a problem, the second phase is to start creating a learning phase based on the topic at hand. And in this second phase, they seek new insights, make new connections, and finally learn.
Why is the question “What is most useful to you?” important?
There are many questions we can ask to progress the learning process. For example, “What did you learn?” or “What were the key points?” or “What are the important things to remember?” These are all good questions, but the question “What was most useful to you?” is one that gets us as coaches to where we need to go:
- Help make the conversation useful
- It allows the coachee to identify what is most important to them.
- It can make the coachee’s answers personal, personal feelings, or personal experiences.
- The person asking here is the coach, so they will get honest feedback.
Conclusion
Opening questions are the gateway to a conversation that keeps both parties focused and open to what’s to come. Scary questions are the best coaching questions. They act as tools to bring the client to self-awareness. Lazy questions save time, strategic questions save time for work, and learning questions help the client find what they have learned and what they need.
All of these methods, even if we are not professional coaches or have not studied coaching skills, we can practice and apply them to our teams or people around us to help them see the way out and to create better results.
