The following is an excerpt from Top Coaching Techniques.

Instead of floundering around, you’re actually working on some exciting, inspiring goals. So, you start with what do you want, and help them. Some questions you can ask that might help elicit that are things like, ‘What’s one thing you’d love to change?’ ‘Is there anything in your life that you hate?’ ‘Is there anything in your life that you’d really love to have more of?’ Another good one is, ‘If there was a goal that might be even too big for you to achieve – but if you could have anything in the world, you’d probably go for it – what would that be?

Client: OK, yeah.

David: OK, now another way to break that down when people are having trouble, is to ask them about different areas of their life and go through the standard areas; relationships, finances, health, career. Go through that and just ask them to maybe score each one out of ten. That will tell you pretty quickly if the client is saying, ‘Oh, I just have no idea what I’d work on with a coach.’ That will tell you pretty quickly which area is not so hot.

Client: Yeah.