[Coaching Tool] 45 Powerful Coaching Questions

Great coaching questions will help your coaching client gain greater clarity, take action, and enter a whole new level of discovery.

The best coaching questions are usually open-ended questions that illuminate opportunity, creative expansion, new possibility and a fresh perspective. Your goal is to allow your client to uncover what their true outcome is, without influencing the answers.

We’ve gathered 45 powerful coaching questions you can use with your coaching clients that are broken down by the outcome.

Download this handy tool below!

Let’s dive in!

Building anticipation

Questions to ask to build anticipation or excitement about the outcome are:

1. What is possible?
2. What if it worked out exactly as you wanted it?
3. What excites you most about what’s next?
4. What does your intuition tell you?
5. How would life be if it all worked out?

Assessing a situation

Questions to ask to assess to the current situation are:

1. What do you think of it?
2. How do you feeling about it?
3. What do you think is best?
4. What resonates most with you?
5. How does it look to you?

Getting clarification

Questions to ask to assess to gain clarity on a subject are:

1. Tell me more about that?
2. What do you mean?
3. Can you give me a little more context?
4. What part is not clear yet?

More context

Questions to ask to allow your client to provide more context are:

1. Tell me more about that…
2. What else?
3. What other ideas do you have about it?
4. What does this make you think?
5. How do you feel about it?

Evaluating a situation

Questions to ask to evaluate the risk or opportunities are:

1. What is the challenge?
2. What opportunities exist?
3. How does this fit in with your major outcomes?
4. How does this align with your goals?
5. What is your view of it all?
6. What do you think this means?
7. How does this align with your values?

Getting clear on an example or vision

Questions to ask to clarify the vision are:

1. What is an example?
2. What would that look like?
3. Such as? / Like what?
4. What would success look like to you?
5. What would failure look like?

Exploring a situation

Questions to ask to encourage your client to explore this topic more are:

1. What is here that you’d like to explore?
2. What would you like to learn more about?
3. What part of the situation have you not explored?
4. What other angles can you think of?
5. What is one other way or possibility to explore?
6. What are other options?

Diving deeper

Questions to ask to encourage your client to dive deeper into this topic more are:

1. If you could do it over again, how would you do it differently?
2. How could you someone handle the?
3. If you could do anything, what would you do?
4. If you had to change what you were doing what would you change?

Incorporating fun

Questions to ask to encourage your client to enjoy the journey are:

1. What does fun mean to you?
2. What would be funny about the situation?
3. What can you do to make this more fun?
4. How do you want it to be?
5. How could this be more fun for others?

Download the coaching questions sheet below.

A great book we share in Performance Coach University is called “Co-Active Coaching”, which inspired some of these questions. Ready to level up your coaching and leadership game? Want to make a big impact in the lives of others? Add more power to your purpose with our 12 week online Performance Coach certification course. Apply here: Course overview & Application