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Impactful Coach
Episode 52Interview54 min

The Craft of Asking Questions with Stephen Nock

with Stephen Nock

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Show notes

A coaching podcast with Stephen Nock and Tobias Weghorn about sharpening your coaching skills through better questions and a stronger coaching presence. Using the episode’s intro as a starting point, Stephen and Tobi get practical about what makes a good coaching question (hint: it’s often less about the “perfect” wording and more about curiosity, tone, and timing). You’ll hear why what vs why questions can reduce defensiveness, how “And what else?” opens up new thinking, and how The Coaching Habit 7 questions can work as an everyday toolkit for coaches and leaders. They also explore journaling with coaching questions and Stephen’s And What Else coaching cards as a simple way to practice asking cleaner, more useful questions.


Key Learnings:

  • Build coaching skills by swapping “why” for “what” when you want depth without defensiveness (e.g., “What makes this important to you?” instead of “Why is this important?”).
  • Use “And what else?” as a repeatable prompt to move beyond first answers—especially for idea generation and getting to the real challenge.
  • Practice powerful coaching questions through journaling with coaching questions: write your first answer fast, then ask yourself what else is underneath it to find the question you’re really trying to answer.


Resources:

Episode Chapters:

00:00 What Do You Want? Why “What” Questions Matter

01:00 What Makes A Good Coaching Question?

06:00 What Vs Why Questions (And When “Why” Backfires)

15:00 The Coaching Habit 7 Questions As A Coaching Toolkit

17:00 “And What Else?” For Idea Generation And Deeper Insight

28:00 And What Else Coaching Cards: A 4-Step Question Flow

33:00 A Live Coaching Demo: Enoughness, Trust, And Not Knowing

41:00 Foster Trust: Working With Uncertainty In Coaching

46:00 Presence, Calm, And The Coach’s “I Don’t Know” Mindset

51:00 Where To Find Stephen + Journaling With Coaching Questions

Transcript

Full transcript, edited for readability. Every timestamp jumps the video to that moment.

Stephen Nock: I also think that the question "What do you want?" is a really difficult one. Sometimes a whole coaching process can revolve around this topic of the client not being able to figure out what they want, and that alone can be an incredible journey, to support someone to figure out what's important to them. That's a question a coach can also hold, that I can hold with deep curiosity. I can just be asking myself as I'm engaging with a client, "What does this person really want?" We don't ask the client why. We don't ask them this question, but we sit with this curiosity ourselves. And I think that "What do you want?" question is worth keeping as a foundation. Tobi: What makes a good coaching question? This question seems somewhat basic, but I think it's still super worth exploring on this show because, of course, the most fundamental tool of all coaching is the question. And this question about questions is what I explore with Stephen Nock. He's an American coach living in Berlin, the founder of &joy Coaching, and he's also, in my words at least, the question guy. He's the author of the "And What Else?" Coaching Cards, and since we met at an ICF coaching lab last year, questions have been the ongoing thread that kept us together. So today we dive in, and we get practical: why "what" often works better than "why" or "how" in coaching. We unpack the seven questions from the book The Coaching Habit and how Stephen uses them in coaching and also outside. We also look into Stephen's method for crafting questions, journaling, and of course we also do something that we do often on the show, but that still somehow came unplanned: Stephen coaches me a bit on what is the question that I need today. This took me somewhere unexpected, and of course we debriefed the process, looked into how Stephen came up with questions, and also why maybe what's underneath those questions matters much more than the question itself. So let's get going. Tobi: I would say let's hop right into it. I'm asking you: in the context of coaching, what makes a good question?

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