Quality Questions = Quality Responses

It’s been a long time since I posted a blog, and today, I decided it was time.  After delivering an event earlier this month on how to hold space and consciously focus our responses on deep reflective listening, and only asking questions that help the speaker, rather than me the listener, L. Michael Hall’s article serendipitously arrived in my email and I thought it was too good to not share. 

Below I’ve taken creative license with Michael’s article on ‘Quality question/Quality life’, added in my take on his article and included a few quotes for good measure. 

Coaching for me is about empowering the client to enable themselves.  Helping them reflect on their thinking and create solutions that work for them.  Michael highlights in his article “the questions you ask govern the answers you get”.  Think of the many surveys and polls you may have participated in over the years … often the questions are biased to achieve the answers the questioner/Poller wishes to receive.   The same often occurs in coaching conversations where the coach can get caught up in the story and then work hard to help the person solve their problem, and this is not coaching.  It’s helping someone to solve their problem.  If the coach asks questions that help the coachee to resolve their problem then that’s coaching. 

Questions starting with what and how invite a coachee to speak, reflect and think in different ways than before.  As a coach, I don’t need to know the history or story behind a problem or issue.  Once I know what a coachee seeks, I can then begin to ask questions to help the individual sink into their experience of the issue and consider it in different ways, potentially uncovering skills and past events they already have already successfully navigated, which may assist them in achieving their desired goal or outcome. 

Wow!  Well, you might not be thinking that.  I sure am.  When I first learned this, I couldn’t figure out how I could get what I wanted from a coaching session for myself, if my coach didn’t know my whole story. In detail.   One thing I know from my NLP tool kit is, the more I tell a story, the more it becomes ingrained in my neurology.  And when I continually lean into and live into an unresourceful story (by sharing it with as many people who will listen), I may forget how to get out of the story and into what I really want.  Do you know people who have become their story?  I do.  I’ve been one of them. 

So – how can I support someone, without knowing their story?  Sometimes it can be cathartic to share the story and that’s totally fine. Once it’s told, focusing on what the person wants next is key which includes reflectively listening and asking questions that help the speaker to help themselves. 

What are the questions I hear you ask?  Asking ‘What …’ questions and ‘How …’ questions are helpful for the speaker.  Reflecting back the thoughts they articulate help them to hear themselves and the questions help them to navigate the situation or issue they’re dealing with. 

When a client brings questions, rather than an outcome?  What then? 

Here’s what Michael has to say … “Now given this, many times the ‘problem’ that a client brings to coaching is a problem of the questions that they are asking.  How about that?!?!  The problem is often the question being asked.  Why?  Often, there is no precise answer to a vague question and often, clients can bring vague questions to coaching sessions.  They also bring unanswerable questions, ambiguous questions, assumptive questions, etc.  No wonder the problem is the question.

What is a coach to do?  What are you going to do? My recommendation is this: Question the question in such a way as to challenge it and expose its weaknesses.  As you wonder within yourself, “What is this client actually asking?”  Guide your client to help them make the question more explicit.  Ask for specific references and examples.

help them to get clear on their question.

… a vague question cannot be answered with precision or specificity—the only kind of answer you can get from a vague question is more vagueness, more ambiguity, and more errors.  What’s deceptive is that when we hear a question, our brain’s tendency is to immediately answer.  This is a basic bias within the brain.  The brain, as an ‘answering machine’ makes it so that we cannot not answer a question.

This means that we are wired to solve problems and we are seduced to do so even when the question is ill-formed and unanswerable.  Imagine that!  An ill-formed and unanswerable question—and we jump almost immediately to answer it even though we don’t really know what we are trying to solve!

Perhaps we can put a warning on the coaching session: Beware of questions.  Not all questions need to be answered; and not all questions should be answered.  Well, they should not if you want to be sane and well!  Sear this into your awareness: The quality of questions leads to the quality of one’s life.”

To summarise, clarify questions and ask questions which help the speaker.  Remember to listen. 

Thanks Michael.

From: L. Michael Hall, 2026 Neurons #31, July 27, 2026, Problem Solving Expertise #30