How to Coach Yourself and Others Techniques For Coaching | Page 25

The risks inherent to this kind of questions are:
- they often yield very short questions that do not contain
supplementary information (yes, no …)
- there is always the chance of influencing the coachee’s
answer, especially when our question is of a suggestive
nature (example: “you wouldn’t know by any chance
whether …”, “you wouldn’t want to …” or: “do you think
A, or would you rather say B …”
Generally, people tend to use too many closed questions and
not enough open questions, with the likely outcome of not
receiving all the useful information that they might get
through the use of open questions. Instead of learning about
the coachee’s story, they might end up with a biased story
that is limited in content and influenced by their own
assumptions and prejudices.
A special kind of probing question is the mirror-question in
which all, but mostly only the last part of a sentence is
repeated:
“I have tried everything!”
“It was not a nice chat”

- “Everything?”
- “Not a nice chat?”

THE QUESTION TUNNEL
1. Open:
e.g.
“What does … mean to you?”
2. Probing:
e.g.
“Which of these objectives are most
important to you and why?”
3. Clarifying:
e.g.
“So, what you really want is …?”
4. Closed
e.g.
“What will be your first step?”

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