Three Power Questions
As a coach I love questions.
In fact, questions are coaching. It’s the willingness for the coach to be open to asking and not knowing that allows for the client to create their own answers – and the actions that follow.
Here are three of my favorites:
What do I really want?
When you take the time to really think about what you want you can look at what you’ve been getting more intelligently. You can compare your actions to your results, in light of the results you want. When you do this you can choose more wisely.
How can I do it?
Implicit in asking how is “I can.”
When the only thing between you and your desired result is method you make progress possible, likely even.
The how of anything is almost always available. There’s little that anyone wants to do that hasn’t been done before, by someone, in some way – and they leave clues. More often than not, someone has written a book (or something similar) about the experience. (And, of course, a coach can help with the “how” of anything you want to create!)
Be willing to ask “How?” The method is there, somewhere.
What can I learn from this?
So many encounter difficulty, or un-ease, or frustration, or “failure” and get angry, or withdrawn, or resigned, or hopeless.
The key theme with any of those reactions is that they shut-down the opportunity for the experience to be valuable – to be a piece of information that can be converted to wisdom.
This “wisdom” gets created when we take an experience and look at the inputs and the result and ask “How can we change the inputs to create the desired result?”
When we look at problems, or “failures,” in such a way – as lessons – we can learn and grow from experiences.