Questions open windows and doors to new possibilities and horizons.
Posing beautiful, evocative questions is an art and lies at the heart of good coaching alongside other core skills that we are constantly developing.
In celebration of our 25th anniversary, we offer you 25 Powerful Coaching Questions, curated by Meyler Campbell Faculty, which you might like to add to your coaching toolkit. Depending on your Tutor(s), you may have already adopted, adapted and made some of your own!
A few questions lend themselves beautifully to partnership, so feel free to play with combinations, merging the magic in your practice.
For ease of reference the questions are first listed by Faculty members, then followed by a rationale as to why we find the question valuable.
There is a bonus section, from ChatGPT just for fun, so we can see how AI builds on our 25 powerful questions.
Thank you to our fabulous faculty for sharing their wisdom.
Enjoy!
The 25 Powerful Questions Co-Curation Team
Helen Duguid, Anna Phillips, Penny Moyle and Penny Terndrup
The 25 Powerful Coaching Questions
“A question not asked is a door not opened.”
Marilee Goldberg, The Art of The Question
- What other goals do you have that might take higher priority than this one?
- What is the problem we are trying to solve?
- How do you define success?
- What is your role here/in this situation?
- What would your closest person (partner, family member, friend, colleague …) say/observe/challenge/question?
- How can you be kind to yourself? (in this situation)
- Which part of you believes/feels/experiences this? Is there another part which is different?
- What are you assuming here?
- What do you care about/long for? …. (follow up question) Therefore who do you need to become or how do you need to be to live and act from that the majority of the time?
- Take a quiet moment to look inside yourself before you answer my next question: If you knew the answer (to your dilemma/question/problem) what would it be?
- Who are you pretending not to be?
- What would you do if you knew no one would judge you for it?
- What is the unmet need here?
- If you fully trusted your strengths to guide you, what would you do next? Or, If your top strength had the steering wheel right now, where would it take you?
- What’s emerging here for you? (follow up question) What feels most important about that?
- What makes [x] important to you?
- How are you doing, catching up with who you’ve become?
- Right, let’s play ‘Worst Case Scenario’! Imagine if (whatever the situation is) went wrong in the worst way possible: what would that look like?
- What would you say to a good friend who is in the situation you find yourself now?
- In 12 months’ time, what will you regret not having done now?
- During our discussion so far, is there a question that you hoped I would ask you that I didn’t?
- If we were to stop here (which we won’t), what would you be taking away/what would you have from the session? And what, if anything, would still be missing?
- What did you say you were going to do?
- What’s the biggest insight you’ve had from our time together today? Or what was most meaningful for you today?
- What else?