 So, I'm a coach and I've found coaching to be a really powerful tool for helping people to unblock themselves, to find solutions on their own and ultimately become more self-sufficient. And when coaching people, I often find myself asking a lot of questions in the hope that the answers to those questions will help that person that I'm coaching or that team that I'm coaching explore an aspect of their situation that they might not have already explored or to consider things from another perspective. And ultimately, my hope is that that different perspective will help them address their situation in a different and then more effective way. Now, there's no such thing as a universally powerful question because questions usefulness very much dependent upon the context. But over the last 20 years or so, I have found a few questions that have been more useful on more occasions. And so, I thought maybe they'd be useful and helpful to you and ultimately the people you're coaching. And I'm sure you've got your own questions that you found really useful over the years and that'd be great if you could add them in the comments and we can start building up a little bit of a library of these things. But here are my top 10 coaching questions. What's your goal for the situation here? Now, at the start of any coaching conversation, we typically have a discussion about the goal for that session. And that might be something we just need to remind ourselves of when we get to a particular point in the conversation. But equally, it can be really easy sometimes to get dragged down into the weeds when looking at a particular problem. And when we step back and look at the bigger picture, the goal, sometimes things don't seem as important or relevant as they did before. Also, focusing on the goal opens us up to different ways of achieving that goal rather than just working out how to make this particular solution that we've got in mind work. If a future version of yourself were here, what would their advice be to you? Now one thing I really like about this question is that it breaks the temporal paradigm. It places that person in the future. It also encourages them to assume they've got wisdom to pass on to themselves. They're looking back at a situation that might, over time, have turned out to be less significant than it seems now. Alternatively, it could prove to be crucial, so it's even more important that they do the right thing, whatever that is, even if it's difficult. What's a really small step you can take now that would move you forward? So in general, I try and avoid extreme words in my questions, like what's the smallest step or what's the best idea you can think of? I try and avoid that because finding the smallest step isn't the goal. And you can actually waste a lot of energy evaluating two or three potentially good options when, for the purposes of our situation, any small step is good enough. And once we've got a small step, we can always embellish it or stretch ourselves. But our overriding aim as a coach is to try and enable forward momentum of any kind. So a small step that we could take to move us forward. Who do you think would deal with this situation brilliantly? Now there's a risk with this question that we're implying that the person we're coaching can't deal with this situation brilliantly. But ultimately, whatever they come up with is still from their brain. So even if they come up with this person would handle it brilliantly, they've come up with that solution. And it's often followed with, yeah, but I couldn't do that. And now we've got an assumption that we can look to work on. What value of yours would you like to dial up here? Now, if there's ever a hesitancy about what to do, by bringing things back to the kind of person they want to be or be more of, I often find it helps people feel more empowered, more brave, more action oriented. By focusing on a strength of ours rather than somewhere that we're lacking or an area of weakness. Also, I find has the potential to increase that sense of possibility. What need is not being met here? Quite a lot of my coaching conversations revolve around dysfunctional or undesirable behavior. And that could be behavior of somebody else, or it could be behavior of that person or that team themselves. And I've got a theory that every dysfunctional behavior is a symptom of an unmet need. And if we can identify that unmet need, then we might not even need to tackle the behavior itself. I find this question often has a good chance of shifting attention from the surface level presenting behavior to looking at where that might be coming from. What would you do if you had no constraints? Obviously, we all operate within constraints. I don't have a magic wand. I don't have unlimited money or an irresistibly persuasive demeanor. But starting with the assumption that we have no constraints can help us focus on possibility. And we can then start to look at some of the factors that may or may not need to be overlaid onto that fantasy scenario in order to make it more realistic. And one by one, we can start to analyze them, potentially debunk them, and then maybe mitigate them. How could you make this situation worse? I have to admit, I have a soft spot for this question because on the face of it, it's wrong. If I've got someone struggling with how to make progress, why on earth would I encourage them to make things worse? Well, there are two reasons really. One, because we often find it easier to think destructively than constructively. So at least we can start coming up with answers to our own questions again, new aspects to the situation. And that can actually lead naturally into constructive ideas almost by accident that flow starts going again. And the second reason I like it is that if nothing else, we can remind ourselves that things are already better than they could be. And we also now have the ingredients for a plan to, if nothing else, stop things from getting worse. Now, I've got a separate video on what I call the psychopath approach. If you want more information on this particular question and this idea. But how could you make things worse? Quite interesting. What are two other ways of looking at this situation? Now, ultimately on the face of it, this is a very simple question. But there are a couple of nuanced twists. So first of all, rather than looking at solutions, instead I'm asking for perspectives, different interpretations, points of view. And the other nuance is that I've asked for more than one. Now that in itself just plants a seed. That there are multiple interpretations available here. And the person that I'm coaching might not stop at two. Whereas if I ask for one, the chances are, I'll just get the other side of the story. And sometimes this could be coupled with a kinesthetic angle, asking people to literally get up and move to different parts of the room and look at the situation from another angle. And it could be different people's perspectives. It could be temporal perspectives, short-term, long-term, past, future, present, or emotional perspectives. Looking at it through different emotional lenses. Now, like I said at the start, all of these questions are contextual. But all things being equal, my favourite coaching question is this one. What are you assuming here that might be wrong? Now, I do deliberately stress the word might here. Because this is a gentle inquiry about what might be a false assumption we're holding. Now that could be an assumption about the situation itself. It could be an assumption about somebody's intentions. The consequences of an action we're considering taking. Could be an assumption about anything. And I'm not saying that I think they do have a false assumption, but I'm inviting them to do a quick sanity check of their assumptions and explore the possibility that there is another option somewhere. One more time, because I'm bound to get some comments about this. You can't just take these questions and drop them in at random. You can't be guaranteed that any of them will be of any use to anybody at any particular point in time. They're context specific. They might help. They might not. But in my experience, these ones have tended to be more helpful than others more often than not.