During coaching sessions, I accompany clients along their growth journey and use creativity to generate possible alternatives and stimulate forward movement. Creativity is powerful and shows up in many forms through questions — and it must be trained.
When the questions addressed to the coachee stem from genuine curiosity toward the person in front of us, and not from the desire — sometimes the irresistible need — to gather information, we find ourselves in a creative process.
And it is precisely here that I can look at the coaching journey as a protected and safe space in which to play around, cultivating insights, discoveries, and learning.
Curiosity goes hand in hand with creativity and innovation, but also with lightness and learning — and from learning comes, consequently, the transition to choices. 1, 2, and 3 is a rhythmic step.
This rhythm, these steps in a coaching session, highlight how, on the contrary, those questions asked to sift through data, to seek confirmation, or questions fired at a fast pace that leave no time for reflection, feel almost like an interrogation rather than a peer‑to‑peer exchange. They lack key elements: trust and the intimacy of the exchange, which arise precisely from curiosity, from not knowing and yet staying with the client in the present moment. And so, to train curiosity, I ask myself:
Who is in front of me? How much does my client know about their own life? What are they discovering together with me?
Shh, silence… let them reflect…
By training curiosity, as a coach I manage to establish a sort of flow with the person. You move together almost like in a dance, collaborating to find new paths.
Being curious is a key behavior within coaching competencies to facilitate the client’s development and growth process — it is part of presence, and it can be trained.
For example, through these two exercises:
1. Nourish your curious self
By learning to ask questions simply out of curiosity. In this way, there will be no right or wrong answers, only answers FOR your client.
2. Convey curiosity and train it in others
By showing your vulnerability, your not‑knowing, and when you don’t know an answer, you say so. Think of the training: I don’t know! Say it out loud — it’s almost liberating!
Showing vulnerability is an attitude that generates accountability in the other person and facilitates exploration and trust. And then, as a coach, you don’t settle — you stimulate deeper reflection in the client by asking what else could it be…? And if…?
These prompts can help go beyond what is already known, support reflection, and from there generate awareness. And it is this awareness that allows the client/coachee to make decisions. When the client becomes aware, they gain a new point of view, and from there the step toward action arrives in a heartbeat — actually, with a paso doble, as a friend of mine would say!
