Coaching practices for The Morning Questions After a Loss

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For The Morning Questions After a Loss, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

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

• Every time something goes sideways we replay it looking for who dropped the ball, and the wins we never examine at all
• When I look back on my day it’s either all the ways I screwed up or a vague "it was fine"
• One bad day and I spiral, treating it like proof I’m failing
• Since they died, the whole ground I stood on is gone
• Everything is genuinely awful right now and any talk of "what would better look like" feels like a slap

Practices that may help

1. The Morning Questions
   Marshall Goldsmith’s morning questions are a daily active question routine in which you score yourself each morning on whether you "did your best" to pursue specific values-based commitments the previous day. The practice reframes self-monitoring from passive measurement ("how did X go?") to active responsibility ("did I try?"), which research on active questions suggests produces greater engagement and honest self-assessment. The evidence base is practitioner-clinical; large-scale trials are limited.
2. Run brief after-action reviews without blame
   After any significant outcome — success or failure — ask four questions together as a team.
   Psychological Safety in Teams
3. The three-question evening review
   Ask three questions before sleep: What did I do wrong? What did I succeed at? What could I have done better?
   The Pythagorean Evening Review
4. Weekly trend analysis from daily scores
   Review your scores at the end of each week to spot patterns rather than reacting to single-day noise.
   The Morning Questions
5. Map the assumptive world the loss disrupted
   Identify which of your core beliefs about life, self, and the future the loss has challenged.
   Meaning Reconstruction in Grief, Made Practical
6. Coping Questions
   When things seem terrible, ask how the person is managing at all — acknowledging and excavating their resilience.
   Solution-Focused Brief Therapy: Building On What Works
7. Construct a coherent narrative of the loss
   Tell the full story of the loss — who the person was, what happened, and what life is now.
   Worden’s Tasks of Mourning, Made Practical
8. Use structured debrief questions to guide any review
   Replace "how did it go?" with specific questions that move through each stage of the cycle.
   Structured Reflection: Kolb’s Learning Cycle in Practice
9. Run the four-question AAR within 24 hours of any significant event
   What was planned? What happened? Why the gap? What next? — answered while memory is fresh.
   After-Action Review: The US Army’s Tool for Continuous Learning
10. Close with "What was most useful for you?"
    The closing question turns the conversation into a learning that sticks — and teaches you what is actually valuable.
    The Coaching Habit: Seven Questions to Be More Coach-Like

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