The Coaching Habit: Seven Questions to Be More Coach-Like
Seven questions that make you more useful than advice — and why they work
What are the seven questions in The Coaching Habit and how do you use them?
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.
Most managers who want to coach more end up coaching less because they do not know what to say when they stop advising. Michael Bungay Stanier’s seven-question system gives you the words. Each question is designed to do specific work: to open the conversation, to surface the real issue, to build self-efficacy, or to embed the learning. Below are the seven questions as distinct practices, each with the mechanism behind it and an honest read on the evidence.
Practices
- Open with "What’s on your mind?"
The best opening question is also the most open — it invites exactly what the person most needs to talk about.
- Ask "And what else?"
The first answer is rarely the most important one — "And what else?" pulls out the one that actually matters.
- Ask "What’s the real challenge here for you?"
The presenting problem is rarely the actual problem — this question cuts through to what really matters.
- Ask "What do you want?"
People often know what they want but haven’t said it — asking directly surfaces it and shifts from complaint to intention.
- Ask "How can I help?" instead of assuming
Telling people how you’ll help before finding out what kind of help they want is one of the most common management errors.
- Ask "If you’re saying yes to this, what are you saying no to?"
Every yes is a yes-at-the-expense-of-something — making the trade-off explicit is the most useful thing a coach can do.
- 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.
Practice this with IX Coach
IX Coach: 7 days free, then $40/month (about $1.30/day).
Related concepts
- The Leader as Coach: A New Management Paradigm
How managers can shift from advice-giver to capacity-builder — and why it matters
- Motivational Interviewing, Made Practical
Evoking change talk, the spirit behind it, and where the evidence is real
- Psychological Safety, Made Practical
The team climate that lets people speak up — and how leaders create it