How do you respond when your coaching client says “I don’t know” to one of your questions?

I was recently asked this question by one of my group coaching clients and in this article I want to share with you how I was originally trained to respond, how I respond to this now, & I invite your suggestions on the topic.

It’s OK to Not Know!

The first thing I want to say about this topic is that it is totally ok to not know the answers to things.  When I am training clients and they ask me questions there are many times where I genuinely don’t know the answer and I just need to say “I don’t know” or “Let me do some research and get back to you on that.”  

However when there is a question that is being asked about something that is internal to them, for example you ask your coaching client what they want to achieve or what they believe about something about their truth and their answer is “I don’t know” many times it is an excuse to not think.   They are avoiding doing the work of thinking through to get the answer.

How I Was Originally Trained to Respond

When I was first trained as a coach and as a Neuro-Linguistic Programmer I was taught to respond to “I don’t know” with what we refer to as the “As if frame”.  

This is the frame of mind where you imagine “as if” something was true and to generate an answer that way.

The specific question I was trained to ask was something along the lines of, “Imagine as if you did know.  If you did know, what would the answer be?”

This is a great question to get someone to think outside of the box of “I don’t know” and I don’t discourage people from asking in that way.  This guides the client to imagine/construct an answer to the question.

How I Currently Respond to “I Don’t Know”

Currently I still invite my clients to construct the answer but I go about it a little differently.

The first thing I will do is what we refer to in NLP as “a pacing statement.” A pacing statement is basically meeting someone where they are currently before leading them to somewhere different.

The pacing statement I typically make in this situation is “that is correct, you don’t know…”. This allows me to maintain rapport before I challenge them to generate a new answer.

Another frame I may set as a coach is “If I was asking you questions you already knew the answers to you wouldn’t be getting much out of this coaching session because you would just be telling me what you already know!”

After I pace them I invite them to go inside and construct an answer.

“That’s right, you don’t know…. Yet. And so I invite you to go inside, take a moment to think about it, and let me know when you have an answer.”

To me, “I don’t know” means “I don’t know yet” and this way of thinking about it allows you, as a coach, to trust in your client’s own resourcefulness to create their own answers and to generate their own solutions.  

Final Words

So now you know my current way of responding. When the client says “I don’t know” I let them know that means “I don’t know yet” and I invite them to go inside (a downtime state) to find an answer and come back out to me (an uptime state) when they’ve constructed an answer and share with me what they’ve created.

Whatever they generate as an answer is probably not going to be ‘perfect’ in the final sense of the word but it will be good enough and it will be better than the blank space of unmapped territory that they had before thinking it through.

Having generated an answer for themselves they will take much more ownership over it and beyond just allowing them to construct their own answers, at a higher level, you are training them to do the work of ‘thinking’ for themselves which is one of the values of working with a coach.

Do you have any questions, comments, or other recommendations or methods for how to handle these situations? If yes please leave them here.