There’s an art to doing this of course – you need to have good rapport with your client first, to listen closely to what they say, to use clean language that uses their words and phrases rather than your own, and to trust yourself to find the right question or questions that will provide the key that opens the door…

This approach is based on the presupposition that clients already have the resources and answers inside of them.  Your job as coach is to help them tap into those resources – be it knowledge, skills, ideas, confidence, passion, dreams – and then watch the new avenues and opportunities open up before them.

I found a great example of powerful questions at Liz Strauss’ Successful Blog.  It’s simple but totally to the point:

"What do you do well that other people come to you for help with?"

Her question has generated some really thoughtful reflections and comments – you might enjoy checking them out.  If you do delve into the comments I wonder if  you’ll be as impressed as I was with the way Liz coaches the people who are taking part in the conversation: providing positive feedback, picking out the key words in what they’ve said, offering encouragement and further ideas and questions to chew on.  For me this is a great example of powerful, supportive coaching in action.

Do you have a favourite coaching question that helps you unlock the door?  Either to your own treasure chests of resources or – for you coaches out there – those of your clients?

I am now reasonably confident with a ‘sentence’ like <img src =”http://example.typepad.com/image.jpg” />. I can tolerate a whole ‘paragraph’ of HTML code appearing on my screen without panicking and running off elsewhere. There have even been moments when I’ve started to enjoy it: the search for the missing ” / ” that’s messing up a page; borrowing a bit of code from somewhere else and finding it just works… perfectly.

One small triumph was to add an image link without losing my visitors (a key piece of advice from BlogAngel Claire.) As I was working on it I found myself wondering: what is it that’s driving me on to do this? What’s allowing me to achieve these things that I couldn’t have dreamt of a few weeks ago?

The answer was partly determination. But I also realised I was holding a very powerful belief in my mind. It ran along these lines:

I know that it’s possible.
Therefore it is possible for me.
It is simply a matter of how*

This is almost word for word for one of the presuppositions of NLP. It goes like this.

“Possible in the world and possible for me is only a matter of how. There are no limitations in a person’s ability to learn. If any other human being is capable of performing some behaviour then it possible for me to also perform it, through the process of modelling.”

To be honest it’s one of the presuppositions that I have found less than totally to ‘try on’. I catch myself thinking of all the things I clearly “can’t do”. And yet here was a brilliant example of the presupposition working in practice. Holding that belief in mind was enough to get me to crack the code. Possible in the world = possible for me.

And if I can use this to start talking HTML… where might it take me next?!

* How in this example might include cutting and pasting code; using trial and error; seeking help: searching Google, e-mailing Claire, trawling through the Typepad Knowledge Base.