No longer are coaches only valuable to athletes and business owners. Coaches are now able to help anyone to achieve their goals.
From losing weight to finding the career of your dreams a coach can help. There are also coaches who focus on multiple areas of your life which are known as life coaches.
Coaches guide you in making decisions, finding clarity, and imagining your future. They create a space where you can achieve success, but it’s up to the individual to take action and be accountable for reaching their goals.
Coaches are solution-oriented. Coaches differ from a therapist in that they focus primarily on the future. While barriers to success from the past may come up as present obstacles, if a client needs to discuss the past in more detail a coach may refer them to a therapist.
So, how does a coach help to inspire an individual to achieve their goals and determine a path for success? By asking powerful, open-ended questions.
Read on to discover 10 open-ended coaching questions a life coach may ask you during a coaching session.
10 Life Coaching Questions That Can Change Your Life
Change happens little by little. Open-ended questions can help you to start making these changes by getting you to think in a new and exciting way. Explore the following powerful life coaching questions you can expect during a coaching session.
1. What Does Success Look like to You?
Success is different for everyone. There is no one size fits all when it comes to individual definitions of success. By asking this question, a life coach can get to the heart of what’s important to you and what will make you feel like a successful person.
While society may lead us to believe that success is getting a house, starting a family, and earning a ton of money, this isn’t true for everyone. Some people view success as feeling good, being happy, and being surrounded by the people they love. So if a life coach asks you this question, really dig deep to discover an answer that feels right to you.
2. What Are Three Small Steps You Can Take to Start to Achieve Your Goals?
Long-term goals help us to keep our focus, but small changes and steps are needed along the way. For example, imagine that your long-term goal is to lose 40 pounds. To lose 40 pounds, you’ll need to start implementing small changes into your daily and weekly routine.
Three small steps may be to go to the gym twice per week, eat a healthy breakfast, and add in a vegetable to every meal. Once these goals are achieved and you feel ready to add more, then you can increase or alter your goals.
3. What Would the Perfect Solution to This Challenge Look Like?
Sometimes we face roadblocks. But, focusing on the problem can keep us stuck. When a life coach asks you this question, it prompts you to think of a solution.
When you think of a solution, then you can start to take action in affecting the change.
4. What Are Your Top Priorities?
Many of us have a lot of responsibilities and demands to keep up with. Sometimes these tasks can make us feel scattered. But, by discovering what your top priorities are you can begin to focus more on what matters most to you.
Using your priorities as a guide will also allow you to determine when to say yes and when to say no.
5. Why Are Your Goals Important to You?
Knowing why our goals are important to us can help us to feel inspired and motivated when our momentum slows down. This question also gets to the heart of why you actually want a goal and why it will make you feel good when you achieve it.
This question may also uncover some disempowering reasoning for why you are trying to achieve your goals. For example, if your “why” for losing weight is to please others then it may be important to discover why pleasing others is important to you. From there, you may discover that losing weight to feel healthy, energetic, and confident around others is actually at the core of why you want to lose weight.
6. What Are Your Strengths?
Sometimes people start out coaching believing that they need to focus solely on improving their weaknesses. But, this focus on “weaknesses” alone can bog you down and cause you to feel negative about yourself. We all have things we’d like to improve, but knowing our strengths can give us the confidence and belief in ourselves needed to implement long-term, valuable change.
7. How Can I Best Support You?
Everybody has different needs, especially when it comes to support. Some people want advice whereas others just need accountability. Learning a new skill from your coach may also be the support you need.
Life coaches won’t give you advice that you don’t ask for. But, if you need their advice and support, then feel free to ask.
8. What Excites You About Achieving Your Goal?
Many people view goal setting as a boring endeavor. By asking you this question, a life coach can take the pressure and boredom out of goal setting. If a goal doesn’t seem exciting to you on the surface then your coach can help you to determine what about this goal could excite you.
If the goal truly doesn’t excite you, then finding another goal may be in order before considering your original goal.
Allow yourself to get excited about your goals by imagining how good you will feel when you accomplish them. Adding in a bit of excitement will also give you more motivation and a sense of well-being when envisioning the future.
9. What Tools or Skills Do You Need to Be Successful?
Learning is a lifelong strategy for success. We may feel stuck in a certain area in our lives which may require learning a new skill. For example, if we want to eat healthier then we may want to learn how to cook.
A life coach can then provide you educational resources or help you to find a cooking class to take.
10. What Do You Think Is a Reasonable Timeline for Achieving Your Long-Term Goals?
As humans, we like to see results fast. Instant gratification always feels good, but our long-term goals will naturally take more time to achieve. By giving yourself a reasonable time period to achieve your goals you can relieve some of the pressure and focus on doing what you can in the short-term to achieve them.
Life Coaching Questions: From Inspiration to Action
Feeling inspired by life coaching questions like these is a great first step. Once we receive the inspiration, it’s time to take small steps into action. Your life coach can then hold you accountable for reaching your goals, and together you and your coach can make improvements and changes to your action plan along the way.
Want to receive the support of a life coach? Learn more about life coaches and request an appointment with a life coach today!