Some years ago I was on the Board of Governors of the International Association of Coaching. At one of the board meetings we had to decide whether to allow advertising from a company selling distance learning and claiming to be able to teach people to coach in 16 hours.

I was outraged. I had recently designed a coach training programme for professional coaches that would take 16 months. How could anyone claim to be able to do it in 16 hours?

Then I remembered that, actually, I could teach someone to coach in 16 minutes (and I have since tested this repeatedly).

Obviously, there is a big difference between learning to coach and becoming a coach. Nonetheless, I can legitimately claim to be able to teach people to coach in 16 minutes. And the video above is some evidence for this.

How did this arise?

Many years ago, I had been asked to develop a coach training course for a company in Sofia, Bulgaria.

​My biggest challenge was to decide how to STOP coaches from offering solutions. Everybody likes to be helpful - especially when they can clearly see a solution to somebody else's problem. 

However, the concept of coaching is that by raising awareness we should be able to help others not only to find a solution for themselves, but also to learn a process that will enable them to repeat it in the future.

So it is very important NOT to offer solutions; only to provide the process.

But the brain abhors a vacuum.

So telling a coach not to offer solutions is unhelpful. Rather, we must provide an alternative.

Then I remembered a phrase I had learned many years before on an NLP course. 

"What would be the most useful question for me to ask you now?"

It can be used in any situation and, very importantly, it is non-directive.

Refining the idea

I have tested this approach with great success, and since added six "Trigger Questions". The idea is to establish a pattern in a coach's mind so that whenever they hear a particular type of statement their brain has an automatic response.

I believe that with sufficient rapport you could conduct a whole career as a professional coach using only the fundamental question. But it is much more flexible and less intimidating to combine it with the six triggers.

Whilst it is important to be disciplined and use only these seven questions during training, once the pattern is embedded more flexible questions will naturally arise.

The benefits

• As you use this process you learn lots of really powerful questions from the people you are coaching - thus expanding your portfolio of questions as you develop to becoming a sophisticated coach

• Since the person being coached has control of the questions they will be more adventurous in what they are prepared to challenge; prepared to offer questions that might have been too intrusive if suggested by the coach.

• The process can be totally content free. This means that a coaching session can be conducted without the coach knowing anything about the issues being addressed - not even what the issues are. As a result, inexperienced coaches - or managers, or parents of teenagers - can help with issues that are both private and sensitive.