Goal is focusing on the goal, Reality is clarifying the current situation, Options is exploring approaches, and Will is the willingness to act.
The model seems very simple — essentially a process of setting a clear goal, identifying problems, thinking about problems, and solving them.
Behind the GROW growth model is a coaching mindset. A coach differs from a teacher or a consultant: a teacher transmits knowledge and skills, a consultant provides solutions, while a coach helps people learn to grow on their own. A successful coach isn't necessarily a top performer in a particular field — a coach's expertise isn't domain expertise. If the field is too specialized, it can lead to people worshipping the coach and believing whatever they say, turning the coach into a teacher, or it can create dependence with people expecting everything to be handed to them, turning the coach into a consultant. So a coach's so-called expertise should be the coaching itself — being someone around whom a person can learn to grow on their own.
Use a coaching mindset to guide the other person to set their own goals, identify their own problems, and solve them on their own, so they can grow. So how do you guide them? Replace suggestions with questions, and use questions at every stage of GROW. Don’t tell them what they should do; ask them what they want to do. Don’t tell them, “Aren’t you pretty good at this?” or “You can’t do that”; ask them what their strengths are and what problems they’ve identified. Don’t tell them, “You’d better do it this way”; ask what solutions they’ve thought of. And in the end, don’t tell them, “That approach won’t work as well; this one is better.” Ask how they want to proceed. If there’s no major issue, let them do it and give it a try. At most, remind them of what might happen, ask how they’ll adjust, and whether they have a backup plan or anything like that.
If you want someone to grow faster, questions are more effective than suggestions. Suggestions amount to lecturing, which puts people off. They may feel that what you say isn’t necessarily right, may not agree with it, and may not listen to you—which creates resistance. But when you guide them with questions, all their ideas come from their own minds. They become proactive and engaged, remember the ideas more clearly, put them into practice more easily, and grow faster.
But this model works only if a prerequisite is met: both parties share the same goals, and those goals are positive. If you ask someone what they want and they answer, “To coast through life until I die,” or ask what their strengths are and they say, “I can eat and sleep,” then they’ll just keep growing downward like a sweet potato. They aren’t cooperating with you, so you can’t get them through GROW.
The same model can also be applied to personal growth. The approach is to develop a coach within your own mind to ask yourself questions. But if you want to grow, the questions cannot be superficial; they must be pressing, because many coaches are relentlessly probing. So you need to question yourself layer by layer like such a coach: make the goal specific enough, examine the current situation until you truly understand yourself, explore your options until there are no more possibilities, and question your actions until they can be put into practice. Is this goal challenging enough? Is this the whole situation? Is there no better option? Can I start doing it immediately? Only then can you unlock your potential.
In addition, you can combine other models in these stages to find answers. So now we understand that the value of the model does not lie in its surface meaning, but in establishing a coaching mindset: replacing advice with questions, using probing questions to unlock potential, and enabling people to achieve a state of personal growth through self-practice—self-calibration, self-repair, and self-motivation.