Set Clients up for Success: 25+ Powerful Questions to Ensure Clients Complete their Actions

Do you have clients who say they’ll commit to an action but then don’t do it? It can be frustrating when our coachees don’t follow through. Especially since taking action—or doing things differently—is a big part of what creates change in our coachee’s lives.

So, what do we do when a client has said they’ll do something, but doesn’t follow through?

Well, first and foremost, we need to hold our coachees accountable. Because accountability is part of what people are paying for—and for some coachees it can be a big reason why they hired us.

But one step better than accountability is…

Yes, even better than holding people accountable when they don’t complete their actions is: helping set our clients up for success in the first place. This means ensuring the actions a coachee commits to are thoroughly doable.

In fact, helping clients create an action plan that works for them, that they can easily complete gets our coachees into a rhythm of getting their actions done. This creates a virtuous circle where completing one action leads to the next, and the next and the next… It helps them move forwards and makes them feel good.

So, how do we set our clients up for success?

First, we’ve hopefully done our “Goal Ecology“. That means we’ve reviewed our coachee’s goals to ensure they’re doable given their current lifestyle—and that they align with the coachees’ values and priorities. Because if a client is consistently not completing their actions, it can often be because it’s an unrealistic goal—or a goal that is not truly theirs.

Then, once we know the clients goals are what they truly want, we work on creating an action plan.

And an extremely important part of that is to discover what obstacles there are to action completion and success.

This is how we set our coachees up to succeed!

It’s much better to spend the time up front ensuring our coachees’ actions are easy to complete, than spending the time holding our clients “accountable” and figuring out what went wrong afterwards!

Did you know the SMART Acronym can be helpful for action-setting too? The SMART acronym (used for goal-setting) can also help when creating an action plan with a client. Consider if your coachee’s actions are: Specific: the more specific an action is, the easier it is to get started—and complete. Measurable: how will the client know their action is complete? How will they prove it? And remember that if you’ve chunked an action down, it may be that they spend XX minutes on a task, or review 10 listings etc. Actionable (by themselves): here we mean is the client able to action the item themselves? Are they dependent on others in any way? Do they have the A – Agency to get this done? Realistic: given the client’s lifestyle, current plans, career, family responsibilities etc. is this action realistic? Timebound: and of course any good action needs a date to be completed by. Learn all about SMART for Coaches here >>

So, how specifically do we create a great action plan with our clients?

Well, a great question to set your coachees up for success with their actions is this simple scoring question:

• “How would you score your level of commitment to completing this action, on a scale of 0 to 10” (where 0 is ‘absolutely not’ and 10 is ‘totally committed’)

Then, if their Commitment Score is less than 8—ask them what’s getting in the way, and work with them to address the obstacle/s (using the questions below) and then ask again for their commitment score.

Repeat until score is 8 or more.

And here are 10 questions to ensure your clients complete their actions/get round obstacles

Begin by reviewing your coachees’ actions.

A really great first question to help clients complete their actions is:

• When specifically do you plan on getting this action done?

Because the more specific we can make the date and time, the easier it is to deal with any obstacles, and the more likely our coachee will complete it.

And you can also ask:

• Where will you complete this action? (if it’s useful, get them to describe the location in more detail.)

Now your client can begin to picture themselves completing the action…

And here are 10 Questions to Identify Obstacles:

1. What knowledge/ information do you need to get started?
2. What could get in the way of you getting this done?
3. What obstacles do you expect to meet?
4. How might you get yourself off track?
5. What will you find (most) difficult about these actions?
6. How will you get in your own way? How might you sabotage yourself?
7. Who might impact your ability to complete this action?
8. What else could get in the way of you completing that action?
9. What other problems might there be? And what else? And what else?
10. If we were to meet next week and you hadn’t completed this action, what would be the reason? And what can we do about that?

Remember that when we come across an obstacle to our coachees’ success we have 2 key approaches: 1) Coach our clients so that those obstacles are removed 2) Adjust the action itself so it’s smaller, more exciting or easier to complete Consider how can your coachee adjust the action itself so that those obstacles are no longer a barrier? For example, if a coachee is spending the weekend at a child’s soccer tournament (which makes it hard for them to find time to work on their action), perhaps the action needs to shift to a later (or even an earlier!) date. Some areas of an action that could be changed include: The timescale of the action. The amount of time they commit. Chunking the action down into smaller steps. Teasing out and specifying some pre-actions to complete that make the “main” action easier to complete. IMPORTANT: And of course remember, that sometimes it’s the goal itself that needs to change!

And here are 15+ questions to make the action easier or more likely to get completed

Of course it can really help many of our coachees to diarise their actions—to actually create an entry in the calendar or daytimer. But alone that often isn’t enough. So first:

1. What needs to happen or be in place before you start this action? What is the very first thing you’ll need to get started?
2. How could you break this action down into smaller, easier steps? eg. choosing a fixed amount of time you will spend on it or a pre-step.
3. How could you make this action more interesting or even exciting to complete?
4. And if the action is dull, boring or unpleasant try asking:
   • Given that this action is dull/boring/unpleasant, how can you make this action bearable or a little more enjoyable?
     • You may also like to try our coaching tool: Stop Procrastinating – Get it Done!
   • How could you reward yourself when you’re done?
5. What are the outcomes you are looking for from this action and/or goal? What’s the specific result you want, and how does this help you?
6. What would be a reasonable timescale or deadline? What’s a deadline you could easily achieve?
7. What support do you need? And how could you get that support?
8. Who else could you share this action with for additional accountability?
9. What 3 things could you do to support yourself and make sure this gets done?
10. Where could you go or be that would make completing this action easier?
11. What other activities or commitments (if any) are you willing to let go of to achieve your action?
12. Suppose your unconscious mind could give you a signal to remember to complete your action. What would that be?

And connecting a coachee with their feelings is another powerful technique to help:

1. How will you feel while doing this action?
2. How will you feel once this action is complete?
3. And how will you feel if you don’t complete this action?

Lastly, for fun (and this question can also be very enlightening):

• If your life depended on it, how would you make sure this action got done?

Wrap-up

There are many, many strategies to help our clients achieve their goals and complete their actions.

Removing obstacles to success and amending the action or goal so that it’s more achievable are like the bread and butter of action-planning.

And getting super-focused on outcomes (the results they want) and connecting a client with their feelings are like the jam on top—making the whole taking action experience more delicious.

Ultimately, the best situation is to set our coachees up for success by creating an action plan that is so clear (specific), easy, exciting and meaningful that they can’t wait to get started.

Why not check out our Vision & Goal-Setting Toolkit to help clients set SMART, exciting, meaningful goals—and action plans?