Coaching practices for Awe Question Stanier

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Awe Question Stanier, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• I wave through arguments on my side that I’d tear apart in a heartbeat if the other side made them
• Every time I question someone’s decision they get defensive and start justifying themselves instead of actually thinking, and I can’t figure out why my questions keep landing like accusations.
• I’m one click away from escalating this
• There are a few ways to read the view I’m up against, and I keep reaching for the flimsiest one because it’s the easiest to knock down
• I’m grinding hard on "how do I fix this" and a quiet doubt keeps surfacing that I might be solving the wrong problem entirely

Practices that may help

1. Apply the double-standard check: would I accept this reasoning if it pointed the other way?
   Test whether you are holding your team’s arguments to a lower bar than the other side’s.
   The Scout Mindset
2. The Coaching Habit: Seven Questions to Be More Coach-Like
   Michael Bungay Stanier’s seven questions — from "What’s on your mind?" through "What was most useful for you?" — are a practical system for coaching conversations that takes less than a minute to learn and a career to master. The framework is practitioner-derived from behavioral coaching practice; its mechanisms are grounded in autonomy support, self-determination, and the generation effect. The questions work because they shift the cognitive labor back to the person who owns the problem.
3. Steelmanning
   Steelmanning — popularized by Daniel Dennett as a core intellectual virtue — means reconstructing an opposing position in its strongest, most charitable form before responding to it. It is the deliberate inverse of strawmanning. The practice is well-established in philosophy and structured debate; direct experimental evidence for its effects on reasoning quality is limited, but its mechanism is logically sound.
4. Replace "why" with "how" or "what"
   "Why" sounds accusatory; "how" and "what" invite problem-solving.
   Calibrated Questions, Made Practical
5. Investigate before escalating
   Ask one honest clarifying question before taking action on an assumed motive.
   Hanlon's Razor: Never Attribute to Malice What Stupidity Can Explain
6. Find the strongest version of the opposing view
   If there are multiple ways to interpret a position, choose the most defensible one.
   Steelmanning
7. Question the question itself
   Before answering a question, ask whether it is the right question and whether it is framed to produce useful answers.
   Socratic Questioning
8. Make justice the criterion for action in relationships
   Ask, in every significant interaction: what does justice — giving each person what they are genuinely owed — require here?
   The Stoic Discipline of Action
9. The Witness Stance
   The witness stance is a contemplative practice in which you observe your thoughts, feelings, and sensations from a position of stable, non-reactive awareness — the "observer self" — rather than being fused with or driven by them. Drawing on traditions from Vedanta to ACT, the approach has mechanistic plausibility and overlaps with well-studied decentering practices, though the "witness" framing itself has not been independently trialed.
10. Uncover the real problem with "What’s the biggest challenge here?"
    The stated position is rarely the real problem — ask for the challenge behind it.
    Calibrated Questions, Made Practical

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