Often, when I ask individuals what they attribute their success to, they frequently mention an individual who helped mentor or coach them at critical junctures in their journey. The people they refer to are rarely coaches with formal training, but rather people who just took an interest in them and what they were doing.

Coaching is a foundational skill for every person looking to develop others, whether direct reports, peers or your own children. Although coach-specific training is wonderful to have, you can actually make an impact without it by using three simple words: “Tell me more.”

At its core, coaching is not about a coach giving advice, telling people how to go about their lives or how to teaching people do specific tasks. That would be consulting. Coaching is really about listening and creating an awareness in someone that enables them to find new possibilities for action that include thinking, being and doing. The International Coach Federation (ICF) has several core competencies that coaches need to demonstrate in order to achieve certification, including active listening, which is defined as the ability to focus completely on what the client is saying and not saying.

The phrase “tell me more” is a powerful, open-ended and direct statement. It demonstrates to your counterpart that you are interested and listening. More importantly, it helps both of you to obtain clarity on the topic as well as identify its importance and the results that are expected. It never fails to amaze me how the use of this simple phrase can help the person you are talking with create an awareness for themselves of the beliefs, assessments and possibilities that they had not previously considered.

Remember, though, none of the above works if you are not listening in an authentic, genuine and curious way. Listening takes focus, uninterrupted by the voice in the back of your head. If you are truly listening, you are seeking to understand a person and not preparing to give advice or respond. Do not feel compelled to respond as soon as someone stops talking. Those few moments of silence are often when the real discovery and deep thinking happen.

The process of coaching can be analogous to peeling an onion one layer at a time. While you have to be careful about overusing this phrase, you can use it several times in a single conversation to keep peeling back the thoughts, beliefs, assessments, emotions and moods that may be in the way of a person seeking clarity on an issue. This new awareness will often help a person see patterns in their own behavior that allow them to take action and achieve what is important to them.

Author Michael Bungay Stanier has a similar question in his book The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever, which he calls the AWE question. “And what else?” is another elegantly simple question that provokes discovery. He offers four practical tips for the AWE question that equally apply to “tell me more:”