Beyond the Question: Eight Ways Inquiry Deepens Coaching
The first time you look into a tidal pool, you see what catches your eye.
Stay awhile.
An anemone opens between the rocks. Tiny urchins appear in places you thought were empty. Mussels crowd into crevices. Something you mistook for part of the stone moves.
The longer you look, the more the pool seems to contain. Nothing appeared because you looked. It was already there. You simply learned how to see more.
I think good coaching inquiry works something like that.
Coaches spend a great deal of time learning to ask better questions. Powerful questions. Evocative questions. Open-ended questions. Questions that aren't leading, stacked, complicated, or secretly advice wearing a question mark.
All useful.
But somewhere along the way, the question itself can become the object of our attention. A client finishes speaking, there is a pause, and somewhere in the coach's mind a small and surprisingly urgent search begins:
What should I ask next?
I know that search. Most coaches do.
Perhaps a more useful question for the coach is:
What am I curious about?
Coaching Inquiry Is Bigger Than a Question
When the ICF describes a coach as inquiring about or exploring something, it is tempting to translate that in our heads as the coach asks a question about it.
Sometimes that's exactly what happens.
But inquiry is larger than the question.
Inquiry begins with a willingness not to know. The coach notices something—a word, a contradiction, a shift in energy, a recurring image, an emotion just beneath the sentence—and becomes genuinely interested in it. A question might follow. So might an observation. A reflection. An invitation.
Sometimes, silence.
