By Dr. L. Michael Hall (Co-founder of Neuro Semantics)
As you know, the first question in Coaching and especially in Meta-Coaching, is “What do you want?” And that’s because the client sets the agenda.
So we ask—
∙ What do you really, really want from this session?
∙ What can we explore and create that will have the most
transformative difference for you?
∙ What do you want from this session that will improve the
quality of your life?
Recently, however, in various Coaching Mastery programs (Meta Coaching Module 3), I have heard some coaches mis-use these questions. Now if you had asked me prior to the benchmarking sessions that I did if a person could misuse such questions, I would have probably said, “No, probably not; at least I can’t even imagine that.” But now having seen them misused, here is another distinction to add to your repertoire of how to conduct a coaching session.
The Misuse of the “What do you want?” question
What I observed from several coaches in several coaching sessions was the following. The coach would ask this question, “What do you want?” The client would offer either a statement or a story indicating that they wanted something. Sometimes it was clear, but more often than not, vague and convoluted. After that the client would then described more about his or her life situation, and then the coach would ask the What do you want? question again. This led the client to identify another outcome. The client would explain some more, the coach would then again ask, What do you want?, the client would offer another outcome. And so it would go. For the whole session!
By the end, the client had specified numerous things (5 to 8 things) that he or she wanted and the session ended without actually coaching to any of those outcomes or even getting clear about what the client really wanted.
What is the misuse here? It could be several things: The lack of inferential listening, the lack of testing questions, the lack of an acknowledgment with a focused inquiry about the outcome, and/or the lack of grounding the outcome.
What to do?
Testing Questions enable you, as a Coach, to ground the outcome into a commitment. These yes–no questions test the decision and commitment of the client:
“So you want to work on dealing with your anger? That’s what you want most?”
“So the best use of our time today is to focus on answering the why question, ‘Why do you always end up spending your money and saving nothing?"
Grounding Questions then enable you to follow-up and get sensory-based information from that commitment and then you can follow-up with another testing question:
“So what will you see or hear or feel when you have ‘dealt with your anger?’ What will that look like or sound like? If I saw you in a situation that triggers your anger and you have dealt with it, what would I see in you? How would you be responding? .... [answer] and that’s what you want from this session?”
“So when you get the answer to the why question, you will have explanations about the context, the situation, the beliefs, the drives, the frames within you that stimulate and trigger you to spend and not save? And that’s worth your time and effort? ; [response] ... and after you get the why you will be able to change things? ... [“No.”] Oh, so is that what you want, to be able to change your spending habits and start a saving habit?”
The last example also includes inferential listening. Implied in the statement about wanting to know why, is wanting to know why so that I can change things. Why else would the client bring it up? The client has not said it explicitly, but it is there implicitly. It is implied. So you can infer it from the statement. The client may not even know that he or she has implied it. So when you present it and ask about it, you are using your inferential listening to offer feedback and test how it sets with a client.
[Infer: to derive as a conclusion from facts or premises, guess, surmise, hint, suggest. Infer implies arriving at a conclusion by reasoning from evidence. Imply, implication: to involve or indicate by inference, association, or necessary consequence rather than by direct statement, to contain potentially.]
Inferential listening is deep listening to what is implied within the client’s statements. It is more than just listening to the surface words of a client. To do it requires that you put that as a question in the back of your mind:
What is my client suggesting, hinting at, implying, etc.? What is implied but not said overtly by this statement?
Finally, make an acknowledgment of what the client says, then offer a focused description of the outcome and inquire if this is what the person wants. This is a pace, pace, pace, lead pattern.
“So I hear that your quickness to anger in some situations at work has not served you well and you want to deal with the speed of going into an anger state so that you can slow it down and shift to a state in which you can be less reactive and more able to listen and carry on a conversation, is that what you want?”
“So you want to create a way to shift from your pattern of spending and develop a new habit of saving, you’d like to understand some of the old frames and motivations that have kept the old pattern intact, and you’d like to shift them to create new frames and motivations that will support a new habit, is that right?”
Anticipate that you might not have it just right, and ask the client to explicitly correct any part of it that is not right. Once you hear something that the client wants, do this repeatedly. Iterate this process over and over helping the client to formulate what they want. The misuse of the What do you want? question arises from assuming that the client already has a well-formed description of the problem to solve or the challenge to take up. The client probably does not! And that’s good —after all, that’s why the client needs you as a Meta-Coach to help formulate that.
So when a client answers the What do you want? question, acknowledge it, test it, and ground it. Then hold it as the client’s outcome frame until or when the client changes it.
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