How to ask the question WHY can help you in your personal development and how it is used in Life coaching

In my personal development coaching practice, asking a question WHY? plays an important role in the outcome of the session for the coaching client.

Why? is quite a strong question to use. When i first was studying my life coaching diploma, using the GROW model (which is one of the fundamental model of life coaching, also called performance coaching) I was told not to use the question starting with why. There is a meaning for it.

Using Why in a question can generate a defensive answer. Depending on the tone can be authoritative like: Why did you do that? Why did you go? etc. In the life coaching practice the answer that start with “because” pulls the person back in the past and can generate defensiveness.

Continuing my studies and evolving to a developmental personal coaching, the question WHY was introduced again and used and i got a bit confused about using or not using.

The Meta coaching System of neurosemantics uses Why in the well formed outcome model that enables the client to get clarity on what they want.

Asking first what the person wants get him to get a feel of how it will be like to achieve what he wants and then WHY he wants it, it generates an inquiry question. WHY in this case is to find the meaning behind what the person want, and it is important for the coachee to know why he wants what he wants or does what it does.

In this case WHY is to understand the meaning and so to improve performance. Without meaning performance is weak.

From the meaning and performance axle created by Michael Hall cofounder of neurosemantics and trainer of the meta coaching system, performance is driven by meaning and the meaning comes from WHY we do what we do.

So depending on the context where it is used, question about WHY can be developmental or detrimental to a coaching session

Inquiry about how you can discover the meaning and purpose about what you do and how you can use it with coaching sessions.

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