50 Great Coaching Questions

Guest Post by Darren Poke

One of the key skills to being an effective coach is learning how to ask the right questions. 

As a Life Coach with over ten years experience, I have been able to build up a sizable number of coaching questions that I’ve used effectively and I thought that I would try to catalog some of my favorites for this post.

I was trained in the GROW (Goal, Reality, Options and Way Forward) Model, so I’ll be listing these questions under the relevant section.

Goal:

1. What must you accomplish in the next 12 months?
2. What would you like to focus on today?
3. What’s important to you at the moment?
4. What are you working on at the moment?
5. What challenges are you struggling with at the moment?
6. How can you word that goal more specifically?
7. How can you measure that goal?
8. How can you break down that goal into bite-sized pieces?
9. How can you word this goal using positive language?
10. What do you want to be doing in five years time?
11. What’s your ideal future?
12. Where is your life out of balance?
13. What is the legacy that you want to leave?
14. What new skill do you want to learn or develop?

Reality:

1. What’s working well for you at the moment?
2. What isn’t working well at the moment?
3. What have you done so far to improve things?
4. How does this goal impact your spouse/partner?
5. What’s the excuse that you have always used for not achieving your goals?
6. What aspects of your life will be impacted by reaching the above goal?
7. What is the biggest obstacle that you are facing?
8. What are you afraid of?
9. What are you passionate about?
10. What are you willing to endure to see your goal become a reality?
11. Is that a need or a want?
12. Where are you sabotaging yourself?

Options:

1. What do you think you should do first?
2. What would be the most helpful thing that you could do now?
3. If money wasn’t a restriction for you, what would you do?
4. If time wasn’t a restriction for you, what would you do?
5. What would you do if you weren’t answerable to anyone?
6. What would (enter name of relevant expert) do in this situation?
7. What do you sense God is telling you to do?
8. If you were guaranteed to succeed, what would you do?
9. What’s the best use of your time at the moment?
10. If you could only do one thing this week, what would it be?
11. What can you do better than anyone else in your organisation?
12. What books should you be reading to help you achieve your goals?
13. If you went to your boss with this problem, what would they suggest?
14. If you saw someone else in your situation, what would you suggest they do?
15. If you had 50% more confidence, what would you be doing that would be different?
16. If you weren’t holding anything back, what would you be doing?

Way Forward:

1. What are you going to do in the next 24 hours?
2. How committed are you in reaching this goal?
3. On a scale of 1 to 10, how motivated are you to achieving this goal?
4. What will it take to turn that 6 into a 9?
5. Who do you need to speak to about this goal?
6. How are you going to celebrate reaching your goal?
7. Whatever your first step is, can you think of anything that might stop you from doing it?
8. Is there anything else that you need to consider before starting?

Do you have any other coaching questions that you would like to add?

Darren Poke, from Melbourne, Australia, is a life coach, motivational speaker, resume writer and blogger who aims to encourage, equip and inspire the people around him.  You can connect with Darren on his website:  advantageresumes.com.au and his blog:  betterlifecoachingblog.com