Helping Your Clients In Deciding What To Do

During a coaching or mentoring session, when your clients decide on an action or set of actions to achieve their goals, it is very easy to accept the action or actions as what the clients want to do without asking any further questions. You will probably then encourage your clients to provide more detail and set timescales, as well as action plans.

However you may find that when your clients arrive for the next meeting they haven't completed the action or actions agreed. There may be many reasons for this but one reason may be that you had not explored the potential action or actions enough with them in the previous coaching or mentoring session, such that they have got to the right action for them to take.

There are several techniques and sets of questions that can help with exploring the potential action or actions and we have highlighted a very useful one below.

Cartesian Questions or Consequences Matrix

This is a set of questions that you can ask your clients to enable them to thoroughly explore the potential action they are thinking of taking. The questions that you ask your clients are:

What will happen if you did it?
What will happen if you didn't do it?
What wouldn't happen if you did it?
What wouldn't happen if you didn't do it?

Your clients may also find it very helpful to write the answers in a grid or matrix so that they can see all the potential consequences in one place.

The usefulness of this set of questions is that it enables your clients to fully explore the potential action from different angles as well as looking at what will or will not happen if they take the action and what will or will not happen if they do not take the action.

If you have not used this set of questions before you may find it useful to consider an action that you are considering taking and to ask yourself all of the questions. This will enable you to see the usefulness of this sequence of questions and give you ideas as to when it is appropriate to use it with your clients.

If you would like supervision for your coaching or mentoring please refer to the Makin It Happen – Supervision & Support for Coaches & Mentors website at http://coachmentorsupervision.co.uk or contact Liz Makin at Liz@makinithappen.co.uk.

This article first appeared in the April 2009 edition of the Makin It Happen – Supervision & Support for Coaches & Mentors newsletter. Please click here to Sign up for our email newsletter.