Notes and Takeaways from The Coaching Habit
When I read it: September 2022
Why I read it: This book was recommended to me by one of my mentors. I always find my conversations with him super helpful, so I asked him what his secret was. He told me he simply followed the framework in this book.
Go to the Amazon listing for the book or scroll down for my notes.
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My notes
About Michael Bungay Stanier
Michael Bungay Stanier is the founder of Box of Crayons and the author of The Coaching Habit. At Box of Crayons, Michael has trained more than ten thousand managers in practical coaching skills.
About The Coaching Habit
The Coaching Habit is a book about making you more coach-like, which means building a habit of staying curious longer and not rushing to give advice.
The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do
Advice is overrated
The NeuroLeadership Institute created the AGES model to explain the four main neurological drivers of longer-term memory. “AGES” stands for Attention, Generation, Emotion, and Spacing. Generation refers to “the act of creating (and sharing) your own connections to new and presented ideas.” Our memory retention increases when we take the time and effort to generate knowledge and find an answer rather than just reading it.
Advice has a limited chance of making its way into another person’s long-term memory. But if you ask that person a question, and they generate the answer themselves, the odds of them remembering multiply.
What is coaching?
Coaching is about helping others unlock their potential.
Coaching is a core leadership behavior. Effective leaders coach their people. They say less and ask more. They give less advice and ask more questions.
Most people don’t receive effective coaching because most leaders don't know how to deliver effective coaching.
Coaching and leadership
Part of your job as a leader is to create space for people to have learning moments.
According to Daniel Goleman in his article “Leadership That Gets Results,” there are six essential leadership styles, and coaching is the least used one because many leaders think they don’t have time for it.
Leaders often feel an overwhelming sense of uncertainty and anxiety. It can feel much safer to advise than to ask questions because advice allows the leader to stay in control of the conversation.
Asking more questions and talking less is hard.
When you ask questions instead of dispensing advice, it can make you feel less useful. Your impact is uncertain, and the conversation can feel slower because you give up control. Questions empower others.
The goal isn’t to stop giving advice completely. It’s to give less advice and delay advice until it’s needed. There are times when asking a question is the thing to do. And there are other times when sharing your answer to that question can increase its impact.
How to ask questions
You can ask too many questions. If you hurl questions at someone and don’t give them time to answer, it can leave them feeling dazed and confused. This feels more like an interrogation than a supportive conversation. When asking questions, ask one question at a time. Then be quiet and wait for the answer.
When you ask a question, ask it and shut up. Don’t beat around the bush. If you must have a lead-in phrase, try “out of curiosity.” It lightens any question, making it easier to ask and answer.
Silence is a measure of success. It often means the person is thinking and searching for the answer. Bite your tongue, and don’t fill the silence.
Coaching helps avoid three common vicious cycles.
Effective leaders use coaching to avoid creating overdependence, getting overwhelmed, and becoming disconnected.
Coaching helps you avoid creating overdependence. The more you help someone, the more they need your help. Effective coaching makes others more self-sufficient by increasing their autonomy and sense of mastery and reducing your need to jump in and take over. When you offer to help someone, you raise your status and lower theirs, whether you mean to or not.
Coaching helps you avoid getting overwhelmed. The more you lose focus, the more overwhelmed you feel. Effective coaching helps you regain focus.
Coaching helps you avoid becoming disconnected. The more meaningless work you do, the less engaged you become. Effective coaching helps you find meaning in any work because it is about helping others fulfill their potential.
Build a coaching habit.
Coaching is simple, and effective leaders should make coaching a frequent, informal habit. You want to ask more questions and prescribe fewer orders. You want to give less advice and be more curious. This coaching habit changes the way you converse with the people you influence.
Create a new habit in five steps.
When trying to build a new habit, it helps to understand how to change before focusing on what to change. To build a new habit, you need five essential components: a reason, a trigger, a micro-habit, deliberate practice, and a plan.
First, clarify your reason. What’s your reward for developing this new coaching habit? Make it about serving others if you can. Think less about what this new habit can do for you and more about how it will help others you care about.
Second, pick your trigger. Be as specific as you can. It could be during a recurring one-on-one meeting or whenever someone asks you for help. According to Charles Duhigg, there are five types of triggers: location, time, emotional state, other people, and the preceding action.
Third, define your micro-habit. It should be short and specific and take less than sixty seconds to complete. Focus on the first step or two that leads to the bigger habit you want to develop.
Fourth, schedule deliberate practice. Practice each building block of the habit. For example, when learning to serve in tennis, you might practice just tossing the ball in the air rather than practicing the whole serving process. Do it over and over again at different speeds. When you notice improvement, recognize and celebrate it.
Fifth, have a backup plan so you can recover when you fail. Resilient systems contain fail-safes so that when something breaks down, recovery is automatic.
Two types of coaching
There are two types of coaching: coaching for performance and coaching for development. Coaching for performance focuses on solving a specific problem or challenge. Coaching for development focuses on the improvement of the person facing a specific problem or challenge. It’s the difference between the fire and the person who’s trying to put out the fire. Adding “for you” to the end of as many questions as possible is a technique for making conversations more development-oriented.
There’s value in helping people focus.
Limiting choices reduces multitasking.
Focus frees creativity and reduces procrastination.
Don’t ask “why” questions in a coaching conversation.
When you ask someone a “why” question, you put them on the defensive. It can come across as “what the hell were you thinking?” Stick to questions starting with “what” and avoid questions starting with “why.” When you’re tempted to ask a question with “why,” reframe the question so it starts with “what.” For example, instead of asking, “why did you do that?,” ask “what were you hoping for?” or “what made you choose that course of action?”
Use TERA to make people feel safe.
According to Michael Bungay Stanier, when you are coaching someone, you can influence their brain to view a situation as rewarding instead of risky. The TERA acronym is an easy way to remember the four primary drivers that influence how the brain reads a situation. T is for tribe. The brain asks, “are you with me or against me?” E is for expectation. The brain asks, “do I know the future, or don’t I?” R is for rank. The brain asks, “are you more important or less important than I am?” A is for autonomy. The brain asks, “do I get a say, or don’t I?”
The 3P model
The 3P model is a framework for choosing what to focus on in a coaching conversation. Typically, challenges center on three things: 1) a project, 2) a person, or 3) a pattern of behavior. A project could be anything they are working on. A person could be any relationship that impacts what they are working on. A pattern of behavior could be an approach they take that impacts what they are working on. When coaching someone through a situation, you can work through the 3P model with them to explore the challenge at each level.
The seven essential coaching questions.
In his book The Coaching Habit, Michael Bungay Stanier suggests the following seven coaching questions:
The kickstart question - “what’s on your mind?”
The AWE question - “and what else?”
The focus question - “what’s the real challenge here for you?”
The foundation question - “what do you want?”
The lazy question - “how can I help?”
The strategic question - “if you’re saying yes to this, what are you saying no to?”
The learning question - “what was most useful for you?”
These questions work well in all forms of conversation, whether synchronous or asynchronous.
These questions work with anyone: colleagues, bosses, and family members. Most specifically, they can transform one-on-ones with your direct reports.
1: The kickstart question - “what’s on your mind?”
Meaningful conversations do not come from small talk or a recurring agenda. The question, “what’s on your mind?,” gets the conversation going in a way that sets up effective coaching. It works because it’s open and invites people to share what matters most to them at the moment. That could be something exciting them or it could be something causing them anxiety. You never know what you’re gonna get. The typical trigger for this question is the start of a conversation.
2. The AWE question - “and what else?”
The question, “and what else?,” encourages deeper sharing while helping you avoid jumping into advice-giving mode. The first answer someone gives you is seldom the full answer. Asking “and what else?” with genuine interest is a simple way to stay curious and learn more about what someone is most worried about. In general, it works best to ask this question at least three times and no more than five times. “There is nothing else” is the response you are seeking. The typical trigger for this question is when someone has said something you want to advise about. When you ask, “and what else?,” you’ll often find that the person comes up with the idea you were going to share on their own. And if they don’t, then you can offer your idea.
3. The focus question - “what’s the real challenge here for you?”
When people start talking to you about a personal challenge, what they first share is rarely the actual problem. The question, “what’s the real challenge here for you?,” is about getting to the heart of the challenge, so you can focus on solving the real problem instead of wasting your time with surface-level symptoms. The “for you” pins the question to the person you’re talking to, forcing them to face what is truly challenging them and helping them avoid the distracting temptation to talk about other people or projects as the problem. The goal is to create a moment of silence where you see the person thinking and figuring out the answer. A variation of this question is: “If you had to pick one of these to focus on, which one here would be the real challenge for you?”
4. The foundation question - “what do you want?”
The question, “what do you want?,” forces the person to confront what they really want, which most people aren’t clear about. When we understand what another person wants, we enter an interesting and worthwhile conversation. If the person answers flatly, you can force further clarity by following up with a variation, “but what do you really want?” What we want often goes unsaid. Even if you know what you want, it’s often hard to ask for it. You make up reasons about why it’s not appropriate to ask. And even if you know what you want and are courageous enough to ask for what you want, it’s often hard to ask for it in a clear and understood way. This question focuses the person on the outcome they desire, which is often enough to clarify their next step.
5. The lazy question - “how can I help?”
The question, “how can I help?,” will save you hours. When you ask someone how you can help, it forces them to make a clear and direct request, and it keeps you from making poor assumptions about how to help. The question keeps you curious. An alternative version of the question is “what do you want from me?” And a way to soften this question is to start with “to make sure that I’m clear….” Regardless of the answer you receive, you have a range of responses available. You can say “yes.” Or you can say, “no, I can’t do that.” Or you could say, “I can’t do that… but I could do [counter-offer]”. And finally, you could buy yourself time by saying, “let me think about that” or “I’m not sure—I’ll need to check a few things out.” The goal here isn’t to avoid providing an answer. It’s to get better at helping people find their own answers. You might reply with something like: “That’s a great question. I’ve got some ideas, which I’ll share with you. But before I do, what are your initial thoughts?” And then after they answer, you can push them further by following up with, “what else could you do?”
6. The strategic question - “if you’re saying yes to this, what are you saying no to?”
The question, “if you’re saying yes to this, what are you saying no to?,” asks the person to clarify their idea and commit to it. This question forces the individual to think through what it will mean to create the space, focus, energy, and resources to execute their idea. The 3P model can come in handy here. What projects do you need to abandon or postpone? What people do you need to manage expectations with? What patterns of behavior do you need to let go of? Some of your best replies here will be FANTASTIC. I LIKE IT. GOOD ONE. NICE. YES, THAT’S GOOD. MMM-HMMM
7. The learning question - “what was most useful for you?”
The question, “what was most useful for you?”, requires the person you are coaching to articulate their learnings from their interaction with you. Asking someone, “what was most useful for you?” forces a quick reflection on what is worth remembering. This question will typically have the person focus on one or two key takeaways from the conversation. Helping people learn is difficult because they often don’t learn when you tell them something. Instead, they start learning when they can recall and reflect on what just happened. “What was most useful here for you?” is a strong and positive way to finish a conversation.
Random anecdotes:
According to Charles Duhigg, if you don’t know what triggers a bad habit, you’ll never change it because you’ll already be doing it before you realize it.
Peter Senge introduced a tool called “The Five Whys,” a self-explanatory process to work backward through a story to find a root cause of “a pernicious, recurring problem.”
In a school of therapy known as “solution-based” therapy, they have a go-to question called the miracle question. Several variations exist, but the gist is: “Suppose that tonight, while you’re sleeping, a miracle happens. When you get up tomorrow morning, how will you know things have suddenly improved?” The miracle question helps people to imagine what a better life looks like more courageously. It forces people to think through a desired outcome without getting stuck on “how” and becoming discouraged.
The world is full of accidental inventions. William Perkin accidentally created the first synthetic dye, mauveine, while trying to cure malaria. Alexander Fleming accidentally created our first antibiotic, penicillin. The Post-it Note was the accidental result of a failed superglue.
The peak–end rule refers to the idea that a person’s evaluation of an experience is disproportionately influenced (i.e., biased) by the peak of the experience (i.e., the most intense point) and the ending moments of the experience.
Random quotes:
“What people think of as the moment of discovery is really the discovery of the question.” —Jonas Salk
“If there are no stupid questions, then what kind of questions do stupid people ask? Do they get smart just in time to ask questions?” —Scott Adams
“Answers are closed rooms; and questions are open doors that invite us in.” —Nancy Willard
“We live in the world our questions create.” —David Cooperrider
“Ask the right questions if you’re going to find the right answers.” —Vanessa Redgrave
“Without a good question, a good answer has no place to go.” —Clayton Christensen
“The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.” —Michael Porter
“Being busy is a form of laziness—lazy thinking and indiscriminate action.” —Tim Ferris