I recently received this wonderful email from a beginning coach.

Dear Brian,

I am a beginner coach from Mumbai, India. I have been following Chad and you by reading your books and mails and they have helped me tremendously in my coaching practice.

I listened to your podcast on Questions to NEVER Ask and have a question for you which has been troubling me. In my coach training we were taught to ask this question – “What actions have you taken so far with respect to the desired outcome?” once the coaching agenda and expectations for the session are set. However I see this is one of the questions Never to be asked as below:

Looking to the past – What have you got so far? What have you tried so far?

Please can I have your thoughts on the same. I would like to develop my practice as a spiritual coach and I seek guidance from you and Chad.

Thanks so much

Warm regards

Ruth

Here is my response:

Ruth,

Great question! This is not intuitive. It does appear to be a helpful question. However there are a couple of problems with the question.

Imagine you see a man trying to pick an apple from a tree. It is out of his reach. He jumps, but he isn’t even close. He finds a box and stands on it. It is a little wobbly, but he can manage to stand on it. He reaches high for the apple, but it is still out of reach.

He is out of ideas. Out of desperation, he calls me, his coach.

Let’s say I look to the past.

I ask, “What have you tried so far?” He recounts the jumping and the box. I can see that he is trying to narrow the distance from himself to the apple. So I ask him, “Do you have a ladder?” He says, “No.” Cleverly I ask, “Can you climb the tree?” He answers, “No.”

Now we are both out of ideas, and no closer to picking any apples.

We’ve accomplished two things.

One, the man has put his brain into recall mode rather than innovation mode. He isn’t generating new awareness. He is instead regurgitating failed attempts.

Two, the man is beginning to think there is not a solution to his problem. Recounting his attempts reinforces in his mind that if there was a solution, he probably would have found it.

And maybe we’ve accomplished a third thing. We are now leaning toward the likelihood that there is not a solution. Our brains have started with his solutions and then begun to narrow our thinking from there.

Instead a better place to start is to widen our possibilities. We often try to do this in three ways.

1. 1. What makes this issue important to you? (look deeper)
   2. What would you like to this situation to look like in the future? (look forward)
   3. What are some other ways of looking at this situation? (look wider)

Out of all the questions we could ask, we’ll find that looking to the past will usually give us the least help. Again that is surprising, but we have found it to be true.

Let’s pick one of these better questions and return to the struggling apple picker. We’ll explore a shift in perspective (option # 3).

I ask the man, “What are ways that apples detach from trees?”

The man’s perspective was “How do I get these apples from the tree?” I change the perspective from the man to the apple. People rarely think from any perspective other than their own.

The man’s brain goes into an innovative mode. He is thinking of new things rather than recalling old things.

He suggests, “The wind might blow them out of the tree. Or a squirrel might chew one off. Or a heavy rain might dislodge them.” These are interesting answers.

“How else?” I prod. Let’s keep the innovation going.

“Boy I don’t know. Well, I guess you could shake the tree. Maybe I could knock an apple loose by throwing a rock. Maybe my son could get on my shoulders.”

We have yet to build some action steps, but we have widened the possibilities and shaken loose the likelihood that there are other strategies to pursue. We realize as the coach that we don’t (and never will) have all the information. Rather than gathering all possible information, we as a coach can instead stimulate the client’s thinking. We don’t best stimulate by going to the past.

The past is an easy place to get stuck, so I rarely take my clients there. Instead I try to get them to see something new.

Thanks for listening to our podcast on Questions to Never Ask. Let me know what you would love for us to talk about next.

Blessings,

Brian