When coaching, in our mission to craft the very highest quality questions, we just need to keep in mind the structures that can guide us – one of them being to ask questions that access the right brain. There are literally hundreds and the key is to find your own favourites – ones that are very much personal to you and your own style. There are 5 categories and so the left brain can have something to do (task it with asking one from each category for example) while our right brains come out to play. Right brain questions contain the energy of hope, possibility – and most importantly human connection. We don’t need to understand the other person’s problem – we simply need to understand them.

Possibilities

One of my favourites is ‘what ideas are you playing with at the moment’, because it deliberately uses the word ‘play’. The question conveys an acceptance that having a bit of fun or not taking things too seriously is ok, thus taking some of the pressure off the other person, and it also gives the steer that maybe the answer lies in thinking more creatively – maybe even inviting others in to play too. And notice the power of the simplest of right brain questions ‘what else?’. This communicates that this could well be other solutions it’s simply we’ve not uncovered them yet - and then watch them do the ‘flicky eye contact thing’ as they go deep into their neo cortex, mining for possible answers. The harder you make them work here, the more likely they are to find a little jewel of an idea within their own brains.

Emotions

The right hand side of the brain is where we feel our human emotions - not the mammalian, primeval, limbic emotions such as anger, disgust and fear, but the more ‘human’ emotions such as jealousy, joy, sadness, shame, guilt, disappointment, pride. Whether we like it or not, it’s our emotions that are so often in control. Neural research has demonstrated that our decisions are not made by our conscious minds - we just think we are making conscious decisions. The fact is we make all our decisions emotionally and then use logic and reason to justify them. Under pressure, we tend not to ask people how they are feeling, since we are looking for logical and rational solutions, and frankly because we are afraid of the ‘messiness’ of human emotions or even being rejected for asking a question that has so clearly come from some fluffy training course! But that is to block a profound and arguably the richest source of data and fuel for the other person. If we coach them without giving them permission to access and honour their emotions, we are severely limiting their performance.

But this is also where we will need to be on our mettle as Coaches, because particularly with emotional questions, you may need to repeat the question until they answer. Here’s a game you can play with left/right brain dynamics. Ask someone a ‘feelings’ question - how do they feel about the current issues they face, etc., etc. Then listen, inevitably and predictably, to their answers “I think...” (left brain). Politely say you understand that’s what they think, your question was how they feel. Play the game until they get the point, or until they hit you.

Right brain questions are so hard because we land on the first glimpse of an idea that we think is novel like a eureka moment and then the left brain tyrant immediately swoops in to process it into action, slamming it into the bank and shutting off any further innovation. To continue at this point seems random, pointless and frankly a waste of time. It’s been proven that gut feel is actually the adaptive unconscious having learned from prior experience – but we are simply unaware that we have learned, thus it’s just a feeling, a sense (that we potentially end up not trusting).

What else? – the most powerful right brain question; the left brain banks the first acceptable idea that comes along! But we need to ask “what else” until the person has dug into the furthest crevices of their mind and has truly exhausted their thinking and their ideas.

Imagination

I also really enjoy giving people some challenge on achieving their objective in half the time, or with ten times the cash – in other words examples that are SO far outside the current thinking that only NEW thinking can encompass them. One of the things that people are guilty of when they are stuck in a bit of a fear rut, or when they cannot escape the restrictions of thinking in a risk free way, is that they tend only to think incrementally – a sort of kaizen way of improving things in small if inexorable iterations. Trying to improve something by 5% is severely limiting of itself in the type of thinking people apply to the problem, whereas being forced to think about doubling something or halving the time taken forces a completely different approach.

And notice the classic questions to power the imagination - blank sheet of paper, magic wand, start again……….these questions work like magic because everyone wants to access the power of their imagination and be liberated from their anxiety.

Embodiment

The embodiment questions again really facilitate the incredible power of the right brain to think like someone else and even to instantaneously fill ourselves with the qualities of another. When we bring an admired character or even their hero into the room, in a heartbeat the person feels all of the qualities of that person that they so admire. It’s impossible for me to bring my Dad to mind, without me immediately having his qualities inside me and to immediately predict what he would think and do in my place. Amazingly useful data for me to consider, and 30 seconds ago that data was denied to me. And then you asked me a question. This is also the place where we can appeal to the nobler motives of the other person, bringing in guiding principles or values, or getting them to consider a higher purpose, thus lifting them out of the anxiety of the current drama.

Senses

And finally trusting our instincts, our senses, our gut. Since we make most of our decisions emotionally, gut feel is an incredibly important part of this. And so are our senses. Notice the classic ‘what does a great solution look like?’ which I promise will immediately invoke the flicky eye contact thing as they search for a visualization. We are incredibly visual creatures, with 70% of the processing in our brain being in pictures.

All because we don’t know how to have creativity as an integral part of our culture, as opposed to something that we have to manufacture specially with offsites and workshops. And this is the key – we need to make creativity a normal part of the way we do things, and to celebrate the respective strengths and roles of BOTH sides of the brain.

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift, and the rational mind a faithful servant. We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift” Albert Einstein

100 years ago he knew that we were already creating a world that was far too dominated by left brain thinking. I wonder what Mr Einstein would make of our modern day corporations? I am sure he would marvel at our achievements. But I suspect he would weep at our stupidity. We all work in massively left brain dominated corporate cultures, where hitting deadlines and targets has become the almost sole measure of our performance and of our worth. This denies us our humanity, and it denies our organisations any sustainable quality.

If we are going to gain access to even the smallest part of that untapped potential in people, the KEY is the right hand side of the brain – that is where the untapped potential lies, in more creative ways of thinking, problem solving and working. So our job as a coach is to create space for people to use the right hand side of their brains, by creating structures for them to think differently – and of course we do THAT by asking great open questions.

Article excerpted from “And The Leader Is… Transforming Cultures with CEQ” by Gareth Chick

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