Source: Institute for Professional Excellence in Coaching
Powerful questions are open-ended, clarity seeking, probing, challenging, thought-provoking, future directed, solution oriented questions that cause a person to search for answers and new possibilities.
- What can you do about this?
- What about that makes it work?
- What other choices can you make?
- What’s another way to look at that?
- How can you reframe that to help you move on?
- What’s your next step?
- Please remind me of how you were able to do that.
- What did you learn from that?
- What will you do the next time?
- What works well?
- What is really bothering you about this?
- What do you think the main challenge is?
- What is stopping you?
- What do you want to experience?
- How will you demonstrate (that/your commitment, etc.)?
- How would you be able to live with that?
- What would that cost you?
- What do you need to get that done?
- How can you find out more about that?
- How do you think it will work out?
- What does your intuition tell you?
- Where do you believe that thought comes from?
- Where will that lead?
- What will you get out of that?
- How much time will that take?
- Give me another way to look at that.
- What is your backup plan?
- How can you make that more fun?
- What are the benefits in that?
- What is your game plan?
- Why is that important?
- What value is that to you?
- How can that help you?
- How will you feel if that happens?
- If you could redo that, what would you do differently?
- How will you celebrate your victory?
- What do you really mean by that?
- What is the worst thing that could happen?
- What is the best thing that could happen?
- How do you feel about that?
- How does that look/sound to you?
- If that doesn’t work, what else could you do?
- How does that idea sound to you?
- How does that fit into your plan?
- What seems to confuse you?
- What scares you about that?
- What happened next?
- If you were to change that a bit, what might occur?
- How would you have to change your thinking in order to do that?
- What belief could be holding you back?
- Where do you think the blind spot is?
- How would trying that feel to you?
- What do you think about that?
- How do you feel about doing that again?
- What are you tolerating?
- Who are you when you do that?
- How does or doesn’t that fit into who you really are?
- How does that idea fit in with your values?
- How did that work for you before?
- What really excites you about that?
- What keeps you going?
- Why aren’t things worse?
- What is it that you are really resisting?
- What are you willing to give up?
- Where are you limiting yourself?
- How can you stretch yourself there?
- When are you able to “bite the bullet” to get things done?
- What will recharge your batteries?
- How does that have meaning for you”?
- What if you do and what if you don’t?
- Where are you just settling?
- What do you need to do more of?
- What do you need to do less of?
- What about that fits into your purpose?
- What don’t you like about that idea?
- What is holding you back from experiencing that?
- What will it take for that to happen?
- If this situation were a metaphor, what would it be?
- If you could draw this situation out, what would it look like?