Self-reflection questions for your coachee: by phase of the journey

Self-reflection questions for your coachee: by phase of the journey

Good self-reflection questions for a coachee are open, short and focused on the coachee's own thinking. They help someone see what happened, what they thought and felt, what they did and what they want to do differently next time. Below you will find questions for every phase: before the first session, during the conversation, after a difficult situation, halfway through the journey and between sessions. You will also read which homework assignments work well and how to choose questions without steering the answer.

In brief

• A reflection question serves the coachee, not the coach's curiosity. Keep it open, calm and short.
• Use different questions per phase: goal and starting point at the beginning, patterns during the session, choices and actions at the end.
• Models such as time-out reflection, the 5 G's and STARR provide structure when a coachee wants to unpack a situation.
• Homework works best when it is short, concrete and linked to the coachee's goal, and when you actually discuss it in the next session.
• Record answers and action points so that you and your coachee can see progress across the whole journey.

Table of contents

• What a good reflection question does
• Questions for the first session
• Questions during the session
• Exploring a situation with a fixed model
• From insight to a concrete action point
• Questions halfway through the journey
• Homework assignments between sessions
• How to choose questions and assignments without steering
• Keeping reflection and follow-up in one place
• Our perspective
• Frequently asked questions
• Sources

What a good reflection question does

Not every open question is a reflection question. At NONONS they make a clear distinction: a curiosity question serves the coach, a reflection question serves the coachee. "How long have you worked there?" gives you information. "What does this tell you about what matters to you?" gets your coachee thinking.

Good reflection questions slow the conversation down. They are calm, genuine and curious. After the question, you let silence fall. It is precisely in that silence that the work happens. Whoever quickly asks a second question takes that space away again.

Three characteristics to watch for:

1. Open: the question starts with what, how, which or where. A question that can be answered with yes or no shuts down thinking.
2. Without direction: there is no solution hidden inside it. "Shouldn't you have a word with your manager?" is advice in the form of a question.
3. About the coachee themselves: the question is about their own thoughts, feelings and choices, not about what others should have done.

Questions for the first session

At the start of a journey, reflection helps to sharpen the goal. The International Coaching Federation recommends having the coachee answer a few questions before the start. Freely translated:

• What do I want to achieve, change or tackle with this coaching?
• What is currently standing in my way?
• Where do I want to begin?
• When the coaching is finished, how will I know it was a success?

Have your coachee fill in these questions at home, for example as part of an intake form. Then the first session does not start from scratch. You can already see which language your coachee uses and where the energy lies. An intake form for coaching that includes these questions saves you a lot of time in the first conversation.

A few additional questions that often work well at the start:

• Why now? What makes you start with coaching at this particular moment?
• What have you already tried yourself, and what did that produce?
• Who notices when you change, and what would that person see?

If you also want to make the starting point visible across different life areas, a Wheel of Life is a good addition. Your coachee gives a score per area and you immediately have a shared picture. You can read more about this in our assessments such as DISC and Wheel of Life.

Questions during the session

In the conversation itself, the best reflection questions are often very short. They direct attention away from the story and toward the inside. NONONS gives examples such as:

• As you tell me this, what do you notice in yourself?
• What do you feel right now, as you say this?
• Do you see a pattern?
• What does this tell you about what matters to you?
• What do you want to happen instead?

The ICF adds a question that works well at the end of a session: where do you stand with this now, compared to the beginning of this conversation? That question lets the coachee name for themselves what has shifted in an hour. That makes the insight more solid than when you summarise it.

If you work with images or cards, a mirror conversation can help. A coach in Veenendaal describes how the coachee lays out reflection cards in three piles: not true, doubtful and true. For the cards that are clearly true or not true, you probe further: how do you see this reflected in your behaviour at work? Do you have an example in which this quality came to the fore?

Exploring a situation with a fixed model

Sometimes a coachee comes in with a concrete situation: a meeting that got out of hand, a conversation that lingered. In that case, a fixed sequence of questions helps. This prevents the conversation from circling around the same feeling. Three models that Dutch coaches use a lot:

Time-out reflection

The exercise collection Reflectie #Zo dus! from the professional association BPSW describes the time-out reflection as a quick way to reflect on your own, in 2 to 3 minutes. It revolves around four questions:

1. What is actually happening now?
2. Which thoughts and feelings are going through me?
3. How am I reacting to this situation?
4. How would I want to do it?

The nice thing about this model: your coachee can also use it during a meeting, conversation or break. So it is also a good exercise for between sessions. Anyone with more time can do a 15-minute deepening with the same material, with questions such as "What makes me tense?" and "Which skills did I use?".

The 5 G's

The 5 G's help when thoughts and feelings run together. You go through Event, Thoughts, Feelings, Behaviour and Consequence. A related form is the thought report from the handbook Coachen als professie. In it you ask, among other things: which thought came up automatically, just before I started to feel this way? And what conclusion did I draw? Then comes the question of what that conclusion says about yourself. In this way, limiting beliefs often surface by themselves. Our worksheet for limiting beliefs is a good next step.

STARR

STARR stands for Situation, Task, Action, Result and Reflection. The last step makes the difference: what do you learn from this and what would you do differently next time? The strength of STARR is that the reflection does not get stuck in vague terms. It keeps returning to concrete behaviour. Questions for the Reflection step:

• What went well, and what made that happen?
• What did you do at that moment, and did it work?
• Would you do it the same way next time?
• What would you do differently, and why that in particular?

From insight to a concrete action point

An insight without a follow-up quickly fades. That is why a good session ends with questions that translate the insight into behaviour. The model "What? So what? Now what?" helps with this. The Reflection Toolkit of the University of Edinburgh explains that the final phase should produce a concrete plan. A sentence like "I will do better" is not enough. Questions for that phase:

• What do I need to do to make this go better in the future?
• What do I need in order to stick to my plan?

A second model from the same toolkit is Roger Greenaway's four F's: Facts, Feelings, Findings, Future. In the Future phase you ask: how are you going to use what you have learned? What choices do you have? What plan can you make?

The reflection material from Inner Development Goals Netherlands makes it even more concrete:

• How can I use this skill in my next meeting?
• What can I do differently from Monday to practise this?

A practical rule of thumb: an action point is only finished when your coachee can say what they will do, when, and how they will know it has succeeded. If you want to conduct this conversation in fixed steps, use our GROW model worksheet. The Will step fits precisely with these questions.

Questions halfway through the journey

Halfway through a journey is a good moment to look back together. The ICF recommends then considering where the coachee started and where they stand now. After that you ask whether they want to keep the original course or adjust it. Questions that help with this:

• Looking back at your goal at the start, what has changed?
• What are you proud of, and what are you not yet satisfied with?
• Does the goal from back then still hold, or do you want to adjust it?
• What do you want to do differently in the second half of the journey, including in how we work together?

This conversation goes a lot more easily if you have the answers from the intake and the action points from earlier sessions to hand. Then you talk about what actually happened, not about what you remember of it.

Homework assignments between sessions

Most of the work happens between sessions. A study by Passmore, Day and Wang of the University of Reading shows that coaches use homework widely. How the coach presents it, which words they choose and what kind of assignment they give all help determine how engaged the coachee is and how much value they see in it. The word "homework" conjures up school memories for some people. "Exercise for this week" or "something to experiment with" can sometimes land better.

A counselling and coaching practice distinguishes five types of assignments. Below with examples:

Writing exercises and WOOP

The NOBCO, the Dutch Order of Professional Coaches, describes in a science blog that solution-focused writing exercises work well. A question such as "What could be a first small step to solve this?" gives people more confidence that they can solve the problem. They also more often come up with a plan and carry it out.

The same blog mentions Gabriele Oettingen's WOOP exercise. WOOP stands for Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan. Your coachee writes down:

1. Wish: what do I want to achieve in the coming period?
2. Outcome: what is the best thing this produces, and how does that feel?
3. Obstacle: what within myself holds me back?
4. Plan: when that obstacle appears, what will I do?

Other assignments that work well in practice: making a list of worries and dividing them into "within my influence" and "outside my influence", and then working for a week only on the first list. Or writing for five minutes each day about a fixed question, such as: at what moment today did I feel it was becoming too much, and what did I do then?

How to choose questions and assignments without steering

The temptation to ask a question that already contains your own idea is strong. That is understandable, because as a coach you often see earlier where the problem lies. Yet reflection only works if the coachee takes the step themselves. A few check questions for yourself:

• Do I already know which answer I want to hear? Then it is not an open question.
• Is the question about my coachee's goal, or about my own curiosity?
• Can my coachee honestly say "I don't know" to this, without it feeling like failure?

Different touchstones apply to homework. A good assignment is short and achievable, concrete, linked to the coachee's question and inviting. Agree on three things: why this assignment, how your coachee will approach it, and how you will discuss it next time. The last of these is often forgotten. An assignment that does not come back in the session feels like a loose task. Next time it is then taken less seriously.

If you want a clear picture of where your questioning technique stands, take our self-test for coaching skills.

Keeping reflection and follow-up in one place

Reflection only truly pays off when you can follow it across several sessions. What did your coachee say in week two? Which action point kept being left undone? Where was the breakthrough? With scattered documents, emails and chat messages you quickly lose that overview.

In Exantur you record session notes as observations, insights, breakthroughs and action points. Those notes are searchable. You follow goals, progress and check-ins between sessions, and assignments stay linked to the right coachee and the right journey. Your coachee has their own portal. There they view goals and progress, fill in check-ins, keep track of accountability (keeping agreements and showing what they have done) and prepare for the next session. Read more about the portal for coachees and about our accountability software.

Reflections are often very personal. Exantur stores data in the EU, in Frankfurt, and supports logging in with an additional check (MFA). A data processing agreement is available. In this way we help you to handle this data carefully and in line with the GDPR, the European privacy law. The Mini subscription costs €19 per month or €190 per year. You can find all packages on the pricing page.

Our perspective

We see it every week with coaches: the questions are good, but the answers get lost. A coachee writes something beautiful in a check-in, and three sessions later nobody remembers exactly what it was. Then reflection starts all over again.

That is why we built Exantur around the coaching relationship itself, not as a generic client system. In our view, an insight is something different from an action point, and a breakthrough deserves a place of its own. If you record those differences, after a few months you see the story of a journey. Your coachee sees it too, in their own portal.

Our experience is that reflection becomes strongest when it continues between sessions. A short check-in, a question to prepare for a session, an action point that stays visible. That does not require big assignments. It requires a fixed place where it all comes together.

Martijn

Frequently asked questions

How many reflection questions should you ask in a session?

Fewer than you think. A good reflection question needs time and silence, and a second question too quickly afterwards takes that space away. It is better to choose three questions that really land than ten that you simply work through.

What is the difference between a coaching question and a reflection question?

A coaching question is any open question you ask in a conversation, including to gather information. A reflection question focuses on the coachee's own thinking: what they notice, feel, believe and want. That question serves the coachee, not the coach.

What do you do when a coachee does not do the homework?

Turn it into a moment of reflection rather than a reproach. Ask what got in the way and what that says about the goal or the assignment. Often the assignment was too big or not clearly enough linked to what the coachee themselves wants.

Can a coachee also reflect without a coach?

Yes. Short fixed questions, such as the four-step time-out reflection, are precisely meant to be used on your own. Do discuss the answers in the next session, so the insight has a follow-up.

Sources

• ICF: 3 Practical Tips to Create Reflection in Coaching
• NONONS: Vragen stellen in coaching
• Coaching in Veenendaal: Reflecteren in een spiegelgesprek
• BPSW: Reflectie #Zo dus!
• Coachen als professie: Formulier Gedachtenrapport
• University of Edinburgh: What? So what? Now what?
• University of Edinburgh: The four F's of active reviewing
• Inner Development Goals Netherlands: reflection material
• Passmore, Day & Wang: Hands up for homework
• Counselling.nl: Homework in coaching
• NOBCO: Huiswerk voor de coachee

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