Every coach in the living room has brought one card.
The group meets once a month in a flat in Jumeirah Village Circle to practise on each other, and tonight's game is simple. Write down the most powerful coaching question you know, fold it, drop it in a salad bowl, then draw one and ask it of the person opposite.
Delphine draws "What are you pretending not to know?" She asks it of the man across from her, who left banking to coach last year.
He answers in about four seconds. "That I need a haircut."
Everyone laughs. Delphine laughs hardest.
The bowl goes round. "What would you do if you weren't afraid?" "Who do you need to become?" "What's the cost of staying where you are?" Seven strong questions, seven quick, clever answers. The room is warm, and nothing in it moves.
Then it's the oldest coach's turn to ask Delphine something, and she doesn't reach for the bowl. She's been watching all evening.
"You laughed hardest at the haircut," she says. "What was funny?"
Delphine opens her mouth to say something light, and finds she can't. The bowl sits there for the rest of the evening with four cards still folded inside it, and nobody wants them.
Delphine and her group are composites. The bowl stands in for every list of powerful questions you've saved, and what happened around it is this guide's subject.
What makes a coaching question powerful?
A coaching question is powerful when it grows out of what the client has just said and invites them to look somewhere they haven't looked yet. ICF's glossary calls powerful questioning "the use of thought-provoking questions to stimulate deeper thinking and reflection in clients". Most of its power comes from timing and listening, not wording.
That definition sits in the glossary of the 2025 ICF Core Competencies, checked on coachingfederation.org on 19 October 2026. In the same document, questioning belongs to competency 7, "Evokes Awareness", which ICF defines as facilitating "client insight and learning by using tools and techniques such as powerful questioning, silence, metaphor or analogy".
The first behaviour ICF lists under it, 7.01, reads: "Considers client experience when deciding what might be most useful". A card drawn from a bowl can't do that. The oldest coach in Delphine's group did, because she'd been watching. We go through all eight competencies in the ICF Core Competencies explained.
Before you choose any training, you can talk it through with Sara, our veteran RS Method Master Coach. It's a free conversation on Zoom, twenty to forty minutes long, and it's about fit in both directions: whether our programmes suit you, and you them. Book a time through our apply page. Or read on.
Why does a list of powerful questions fail in a session?
Because it moves your attention from the person to the paper.
Every question in that bowl was powerful once, for someone, at a particular point in a particular conversation. Lifted out of that point, it arrives without the thing that made it work. "What are you pretending not to know?" can stop a client in their tracks forty minutes in, after they've circled the same decision three times. Asked cold across a living room, it's a party game, and it gets answered like one: quickly, cleverly and from the surface.
A list also changes how a session feels from the other chair. When questions come in sequence, the client can sense that the next one was chosen before they'd finished speaking. In our experience, people respond with shorter, safer answers, which leaves the coach nothing but the next line on the card.
And a list has a quieter job, which may be why so many coaches keep one. It gives you somewhere to put your eyes when a session gets uncomfortable. The bowl in Delphine's group wasn't really a tool. It was a handrail.
Why does a coach hide behind a borrowed question?
Because a borrowed question costs the person asking it nothing.
Think about Delphine's laugh. "What are you pretending not to know?" is a question she has never let anyone ask her. Before she trained as a coach, she spent four years in a job she knew was wrong for her within the first month, and that question points straight at those four years. When the man opposite turned it into a joke, the laugh that came out of her was relief. The question had gone past her without stopping.
That laugh works like a door on a closer. Whenever a conversation gets near those four years, it swings shut, softly and by itself, and she's on the other side of it talking about something else. A list of questions keeps that door in business. Every card belongs to somebody else, so she can ask the sharpest one in the bowl and never have to stand in the room it opens.
The RS Method meets a room like that with removal. The small dread a question can stir, the kind that rises whenever someone asks what you knew and when, is cleared at its source. A door with nothing behind it to guard stops closing, and a coach can ask "What are you pretending not to know?" and stay inside the answer, because nothing in them is waiting for the subject to change.
That's why RSCI starts with the coach rather than the question bank, and why its training opens where it does: the practitioner is transformed before the practitioner is trained. Each coach's own doors get opened in the cohort first, with supervision, long before a client leans on them. What's left once that's done is what we call coaching presence, and it makes the deeper attention in levels of listening in coaching possible.
If your own laugh has ever shut a door like that, it's worth knowing before you pick a programme. A free call with Sara is where you can find out whether a training that starts with your own work, as ours does, suits you now. Book it here.
Which questions work at each stage of a session?
Fewer than you'd think. Here are a few for each stage. Treat them as shapes, not a script, and let the client's last sentence decide whether you use one at all.
As it begins. "Where would you like to start?" Once they've started: "What would make this conversation matter to you?" Listen for the topic they mention last, or fastest. It's often the one that matters.
While they lay it out. "What's happening, in your own words?" Then: "What else is true about this?" This stage needs fewer questions than any other. A nod and a pause will often carry a client further than another question would.
When something lands. This is where a list does the most harm, because the best question here is usually built from what you've just seen or heard. In Delphine's group it was one observation and three words: "What was funny?" With a client it might be their own word said back gently, or: "What's it like to say that out loud?" ICF's behaviour 7.05, "Invites the client to share more about their experience in the moment", describes this stage well. If what opens up sounds like more than coaching can hold, such as signs of deep low mood or trauma, say what you've noticed and suggest they speak to a doctor or a qualified mental health professional. Our guide to what to do when a client cries covers that moment.
When they turn toward doing. "What do you want to do with what you've noticed?" Then: "What's one thing you'll actually do before we next speak?" The word actually gives the client room to say no to their own overambitious plan.
As it ends. "If you remember one thing from today, what will it be?" Then stop. Their words will serve them better than your summary.
That's nine questions across five stages, and most sessions will use three or four.
How can you shrink your question list to one card?
Try a one-card rule for your next five sessions, practice clients included.
- Write one question per stage on a single card. As it begins, while they lay it out, when something lands, when they turn toward doing, as it ends. Five questions, in your own words.
- Keep the card in your bag, not on the table. It's there if you need it. You probably won't.
- Ask a card question only when the client's last sentence calls for it. If you can't say which sentence, leave the card alone.
- After any answer that carries weight, let two breaths pass before you speak. Often the client goes on, and what they add is worth more than anything you'd have asked.
- When you do speak, build the question from what you just saw or heard. Their word, their pause, their laugh.
- After the session, write down the one question that moved things most, and where it came from. The card, or the client.
- After five sessions, cross off every card question you never used. Add any question born in a session that you found yourself asking twice.
What's left on the card is yours. Most of what you crossed off was there to keep you company.
What kind of training grows better questions than a list can?
Not a longer list, and not a cleverer one. These three do more.
- Work on the coach before the questions. The doors in you that a question can swing shut get attention first, in your own training, so a sharp question near one of them no longer sends you looking for a card.
- Practice where the unexpected happens on purpose. Our life coach training page, as it read on 19 October 2026, puts it this way: "Supervised practice closes the gap between understanding a technique and being able to use it when the person sitting opposite you does something unexpected." A list prepares you for the answer you expected. Practice with someone watching prepares you for the other kind.
- The credential described exactly. The ICF-accredited education inside our programmes is designed, delivered and certified by the Institute of Coaching and Mentoring (IICM), an ICF-accredited organisation. The ACC and PCC credentials are awarded only by the ICF.
There isn't a question anywhere in our razor. To witness. To hold. To walk them home.
If you're still collecting question lists, read Robert's free book before you collect another. It's called Why 88% of Life Coaches Fail, it runs to about forty pages, and it looks at why capable coaching graduates can still struggle to hold the room.
Not every sentence worth hearing ends with a question mark. Talya Whitaker's doesn't: "There are no words for how this has changed my life, changed every cell of my being." Those words are hers, about her own life, and they aren't a yardstick for any session you'll run.
Robert Simic, training the next generation.
P.S. If a list of questions is going to sit beside you at your next session, give one evening to the free book first. It's about the part of a session no list can reach.