Melissa Walker of Heyday Coaching pens a monthly blog with tips for helping you achieve your own peak success, happiness, and vigor.
A couple of summers ago I wrote a blog post about the challenge of building and maintaining good habits. The habit I wanted to (re)build was weight training. After moving to a new house and the resulting disruption of my daily habits and routines, I was having trouble resuming my (pitifully limited) weight training practice.
Last week, my husband and I had a handyman in to take care of a few small household repairs that had accumulated. One of the tasks on the list was to repair the loose bottom step in our unfinished basement. My husband led him down the stairs, stopping halfway down to switch on the light. The handyman said, “You know, I can move that switch to the top of the stairs for you.” And he did. In less than half an hour, he had moved the light switch.
I ask new clients to complete a series of reflective questions before we begin our work together. Some questions are about the coaching relationship: “What approaches encourage or motivate you?” Others about the client’s life: “What are you proud of?” or “What has been your biggest disappointment?” or “If you could change one thing about your life so far, what would that be and why?”
One of the most important questions I ask is “What is your most common self-limiting behavior?”
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.”
It feels like life has stopped. We were living our lives, moving from one thing on the schedule to the next. We were taking steps to achieve some important goals—maybe haltingly or maybe swiftly and confidently. And now this. And it feels like whatever progress we’ve made these past months has been swallowed up in a sea of uncertainty.
