Melissa Walker of Heyday Coaching pens a monthly blog with tips for helping you achieve your own peak success, happiness, and vigor.
One of the biggest challenges for me as a coach is to resist the temptation to tell clients how they can fix things. Often a client will outline a dilemma or a problem, and my first impulse is to scroll through the list of possible solutions in my brain and say, “You can fix that by doing _________________.”
In this season of giving, I’ve been thinking about this business of fixing things for others and chronic advice giving. I’ve concluded that advice should not be on my gift list.
Not all questions are created equal, of course. Some kinds of questions are very directive. They tend to invoke narrow perspectives or even to make the person who is questioned feel defensive. Open-ended questions, on the other hand, invite a person to approach a problem from a new direction or to use a new lens to look at a situation. Open-ended questions are powerful, so powerful that in coaching, we call them “powerful questions.”
