On my journey to MCC (Master Certified Coach) credentialing with ICF (Int’l Coach Federation), I’m having conversations with many MCC coaches about their views of coaching as well as getting their direct feedback on my coaching.

As a result, I’m really surprised at how many different opinions I’ve collected about asking a simple question “How do you feel about that?”

It looks like everyone agrees that feelings are important, but many feel (no pun intended) that asking that question is a bad coaching choice.

Some feel that the “feeling” question is not being specific enough. That argument doesn’t make any sense to me at all. Wouldn’t that be the very reason to ask it – so that our client could have the space to reflect and identify his/her feeling and make it specific? It’s up to our clients to identify their feelings and make them specific, it’s not up to us. It’s about increasing their awareness to how they feel. And, if they have difficulty identifying their feeling/s – that’s going to serve as a great indicator in terms of their ability or a lack of it to identify what they feel & their EQ awareness, which they can choose to focus and work on with their coach upon that discovery.

It gets better…  Since, according to them, this question is not specific enough, they suggest asking  “What are you thinking?” instead. Does that make any sense? In what way can it possibly be more specific? We are just asking our clients to access their thinking instead of feelings – that’s all. “Thinking” is just as general as “Feeling” in that context, isn’t it? What am I missing here?

And some coaches say that we shouldn’t ask that question because some clients may not know how to access their feelings. According to ICF  we must view our clients as “whole, creative and resourceful”. Wouldn’t anticipating  that your clients wouldn’t know what they feel suggests a lack of believe that your clients are really “whole”? A person who is whole should be able to access both their thinking AND feelings. We are not robots, we are human beings. Trusting that your client can only access thinking and not feeling, is like saying that they are half whole or, even worst, not human enough. Only humans – as opposed to computers  (built on logic and void of feelings) or animals (have feelings but can’t think them through) – can not only have feelings, but also are able to use their thinking to analyze them.

Another BIG concern is that if we ask about “feelings”, we’ll get into the realm of therapy. I don’t believe it’s the case. However, it’s getting too long for one blog post. To be continued…

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