Recently in Coaching for Excellence we have been challenging participants to ask questions which are less than ten words long.  Early on in our coaching we could have written the book The Art of Powerful Questions and it would have been full of articulate and well crafted words.  In fact, the most powerful questions are

• and?
• Mmm?
• Silence!!

• Juggling in 3D 410: Overfull
  In coaching, if you keep asking good questions without letting your client use the one you already asked, that is also a hazard.
  
  
• Juggling in 3D 400: Swan Pedalo
  On the latest 'Coaching for Excellence' course, we asked the participants to form questions that were all less than 10 words long. The result? The people receiving the questions moved really quickly towards finding their way forward. Complexity and overasking can make us go round in circles and get stuck!
  
  
• Juggling in 3D 357: Valuing intuition
  Diane writes: "A couple of weeks ago I needed to contact one of our coaches. I called her home number, work number and mobile. Moments after I had left my last message my phone rang and it was the person I had been trying to call. She had just thought it would be good to talk with me - she had no idea I had left three messages! This is something that happens to me very often. A person comes into my mind and moments later they ring. I wake up thinking about someone, drop them a card and then find out that the card arrived at just the right moment for them. This is intuition.
  
  
• Juggling in 3D 317: What is a good question?
  Having said that there is one really good question that I use in many of my coaching encounters when someone is really struggling to decide between two or more courses of action to take I will ask: "If you do A, what is the worst thing that can happen?" This is an excellent question, simple and elegant. Very often, after a little reflection the client will respond by saying: "There isn't really a worst thing." Voila! Within the next few minutes the decision is made and the action agreed upon. Now that was a good question!'
  
  
• Juggling in 3D 254: Ouch
  The "Ouch!" questions are usually devastatingly simple but move the presenter forward in a very dramatic, and often costly way. One of the best "Ouch!" questions I have ever been asked was, "The bus will only pass this way once, are you going to get on it or not?" I had been prevaricating about a job offer, I wanted the job but I was presenting lots of reasons why I could not take it. The "Ouch!" question really hurt, I had to commit or let the job go. The ensuing problems were met and dealt with, and I ended up saying yes to the best job I ever had. The question could have been even simpler, "Do you really want this job or not?"
  
  
• Juggling in 3D 171: Why Not Why?
  Why can be a difficult question to answer. It can be very subjective. Often when we ask people - why - they struggle to answer. Change the language, and ask the question again and all kinds of possibilities open up: