Life Coaching Lessons: Questions To Get Clients Talking

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Are you a life coach in Sydney or want to run your own coaching business? It’s a great career that enables you to work your own hours, help people, and develop a multitude of skills along the way.

When coaching and training to become a life coach you’ll learn how important it is to nurture your clients in an environment that is safe, a place where they can fully open up, reveal past hurts and be honest about their patterns in order to break through and shift their thinking.

Matching life coaching with NLP techniques is a fantastic way to build rapport quickly and ensure a safe environment.

Create a Safe Space

When I say environment, I don’t mean a physical space. You don’t need mood lighting and antipastos. The actual space you choose is very flexible. If you studied to be a life coach in Sydney with us you’re not limited to only coaching clients in Sydney. You can choose between online or face to face, from your own home, in a suitable co-working space or at your coaching office anywhere in the world. Most of our Sydney life coaches operate from home, and have clients all over the country.

The trust you create, either online or in person, enables massive breakthroughs. It’s a thin line though. In order to get the breakthrough you also need to press just enough, ask some tough questions, and maybe trigger your client into facing reality, either knowingly, via a challenge, or unknowing, via internal reflections. What often happens in that case is that ego comes in.

Ego is not a very great state of mind. It keeps us stuck, it keeps us miserable, and it leaves us without any power to create choices, change or make decisions in our life. If your client gets into ego state it usually means a break in rapport and no result from that session.

The tricky part is that the ego is also there to keep us safe. To help us survive.
Whenever we feel threatened or challenged, ego is the first thing to jump in and come to the rescue. That can mean battening down the hatches, closing off, getting angry, playing the victim or giving up.

In this Life Coaching Lesson, we look at questions you can use to get clients talking.

To start with, introduce yourself and the coaching process. Ask if they have any questions to allow them to feel fully able to trust you and what you do.

Open-Ended Questions

Anything that can be answered as Yes or No is a closed question and causes conversations to stall. (Are you? Do you? Can you? Have you?)

Asking open-ended question requires your client to give more than a one-word answer, which opens the doors to conversation and lasting change!

Who
What
When
Where
How

Meta Model Questions

If a person is looking at the big picture and can’t see any details or can’t relate themselves to a bigger concept, Meta questions are used to specify a problem. It provides details and distinction, cutting through generalisations that may be preventing a client from seeing the truth.

• What specifically…?
• What are examples of this?
• According to who?
• What would happen if you (did/didn’t)…?

Milton Model Questions

If your client is stuck in negatives, Milton Model questions are designed to chunk up and get to a positive place. The study of NLP believes that all intentions have a positive drive, even if the surface looks destructive or negative. If your client is stuck in negatives and can’t find positives use the following questions:

• For what purpose…?
• What is this an example of….?
• What is your intention….?

Seeing Projections and Patterns

If a client goes into ego the fastest way back to an open place is to pull them up on it.

Once they have education on Cause versus Effect, highlighting an instance where they are living in effect is enough to bring them into conscious awareness and get back on track.

You can also ask questions that help uncover the trigger that caused the ego to take charge.

• What was the trigger there?
• How is that a reflection?
• Where do you see that playing out in other areas of life?
• Where do you see that as a pattern?

Questions for Rapport

Here is a fun challenge for you. Next time you are at a bar or party and you are meeting new people, challenge yourself to only ask Who, How, What, or When questions. People love to talk about themselves, and love to find points of similarity. People who are like each other, like each other!

You will quickly find that you are the most popular person in the world, all through the process of building rapport. This means you will naturally be helping more people and making more friends. Remember, your network is your net worth, so who doesn’t need more friends!?

Test it out, and let me know how you go.

Kindest regards,

Matt Catling