Therapists are trained to listen. But the skill of asking well — with precision, curiosity, and restraint — is one of the most powerful and least practiced tools in the clinical toolkit.
Research on the generation effect tells us that what clients say out loud, they own. What we tell them, they can dismiss, forget, or quietly hand back to us. The most durable therapeutic change often happens not when we offer the right insight, but when we ask the question that helps a client arrive there themselves.
This experiential lunch-and-learn is a practical skill tune-up for therapists who want to sharpen their use of Socratic dialogue — the art of guiding discovery through questions rather than direction. We'll examine the anatomy of a good question, explore the subtle pitfalls that close down exploration instead of opening it, and practice the discipline of staying in question mode even when every instinct wants to step in with a statement.
The centrepiece of the workshop is a structured paired practice: a questions-only mini session format where participants take turns working with a partner using nothing but questions — no reflections, no normalizing, no advice. It's a deceptively simple constraint that reveals a great deal about our clinical habits, our tolerance for not-knowing, and the remarkable things that happen when we trust a client to find their own way to the answer.
You'll leave with practical frameworks for opening, clarifying, deepening, and reflecting — as well as specific pitfalls to watch for, including questions with "but" in the middle, questions that start with "why," and the embedded assumptions that make a question sound open while quietly steering the conversation.
This workshop is suitable for therapists at any stage of practice. Whether you're early in your career building foundational technique, or a seasoned clinician looking to audit and refine, the skill of asking well is one that rewards return visits.
