Coaching Fundamentals: What happens during a typical coaching session?
- Sarah-Beth Bianchi
- Jun 7, 2023
- 8 min read
Updated: Jul 6, 2023
Coaching is a growing field, which means that many people are discovering coaching and trying it for the first time. But if it’s something you’ve never done (or even heard of) before, how do you know if it’s right for you? One of my goals for this blog is to share posts that help you familiarize yourself with personal and professional coaching, and determine if it’s something you think might benefit you. For today’s topic, let’s talk about what a typical coaching session is like. In this case, I’ll describe an online session but in-person sessions will look fairly similar.
Getting prepared
As the client, one of your responsibilities is to come into your session with a topic in mind. This doesn’t have to be a fully-formed thought or an action plan - that’s what the coaching session can help you work through. But you should come into the session with an idea of what you want to work on. (I can talk more about choosing your topic in another post!)
Before you join your online session, you should prepare your environment. You’ll be doing a lot of talking, so it’s a good idea to get yourself a drink that you can sip on during the session. If you like to use a fidget device while you’re talking or you want a notebook or whiteboard to jot things down during your session, now’s a good time to put those things close by.
Do whatever you need to make your space as private and free of distractions as possible - mute notifications on your phone or computer, set up your lighting, and close any windows or doors that might let in outside noise. Ensuring the privacy and comfort of your space will give you the freedom to fully engage in the process without worrying about who might be listening or how the leaf blower outside is spoiling the mood.
Joining your session
When you join the session, your coach might use small talk to help you both make that transition from daily life and into coaching mode. When I’m coaching, I tend to follow a pretty standard pattern to kick off the session: we spend a minute or two chatting, then I ask if we’re ready to dive in. If yes, then I officially kick off the coaching with the question “How are you coming into this session?” (More on this question in a moment.) Think about the rituals in your daily life - what things do you do over and over that help you make a transition in your day? Morning ritual - wake up, open curtains, brush teeth, eat breakfast, get dressed. Night time ritual - wash face, put on pajamas, read book, turn off lamp, go to sleep. These rituals offer the comfort of predictability and signal our brain to switch gears in our day. This ritualization to kick off our session means that it can feel really frictionless to transition from daily life to coaching mode.
When I ask “How are you coming into this session?” it is an invitation to share how you are feeling and what thoughts might be top of mind for you as you enter the session. Did you just have a stressful meeting and you’re having trouble shaking off the tension? Are you looking forward to a vacation that’s starting in a few days and feeling vacation-brain setting in? Sharing these top-of-mind items helps us both understand what might impact your way of showing up in the session. I say “help us both understand” because it can be pretty enlightening for a client as they take stock of their current mental state at the beginning of a session. In a lot of areas of life we are forced to compartmentalize the many things that impact our state of mind, but in coaching it’s often good to vocalize those various factors so that we can understand the different push and pull happening in your mind and body. That being said, you always have the ultimate decision about what to share and what might be too raw to voice right now if you have really heavy things going on. So use this time to share what makes sense for you.
Wow - all that and we’re only 5 minutes into our session!
What’s the topic?
As I mentioned before, your role as the client is to bring a topic to the session. Your coach will ask you to tell them about the topic in your own words. And then they’ll ask some questions to further define and clarify the topic. Your coach might ask questions about the words you’re using and what they mean to you. This has a dual purpose - the coach wants to be sure they’re understanding the meaning you have behind the words and not putting their own assumptions onto your words, and they are also helping you take some time to fully define the topic for yourself. Talking through words, phrases, emotions that are shining through as you speak, and other nuances can help you uncover your own assumptions and meanings and worries and hopes about a topic. The coach might ask you to restate the topic a few times during this exploration process to see if you’ve refined the topic or perhaps changed its focus during this initial exploration.
Once the topic has been established, you’ll move into talking about the change you’re looking for. By bringing this topic to coaching, what are you hoping to make different for yourself? What would an ideal state look like or feel like for you? This exploration can go in a lot of different directions - sometimes clients haven’t ever thought of their topic in terms of a future vision - they just know that something isn’t working right now or is causing discomfort or pain. Having a partner to talk with about the desired state can make it safe to see a different reality and start working towards it. Or sometimes a client will have a vision for the future and uncertainty about how to get there. Having space to talk through those uncertainties can help you tweak your expectations or build confidence in getting to an ideal future state.
Insights and plans
Especially if you're a goal-oriented person, it can be very tempting to jump into making plans or finding solutions to the challenges you’re bringing into the session. Spending time at the beginning of the session to explore the nuances of what’s happening for you can be the key to coming up with a plan that addresses the root of what you’re looking to achieve. In my experience, once a client gets more clarity about their topic, the ideas for how to take their next steps come quite easily. It’s like a blockage has been removed and the solutions flow more freely!
What those solutions or action plans look like depend entirely on the nature of your situation. Your topic and vision might translate to a larger-scale change in your life, so that day’s session will focus on the first steps you can take on that path. Or the topic might narrow down to a fairly straightforward set of actions to help you accomplish a specific goal, so you’ll work on identifying and scheduling specific tasks.
Through all of this, the coach will work with you to reach the outcome you are looking for from the session. They’ll contribute ideas or ask questions to help uncover where you might have gaps in your plan, or challenge your thinking if you seem to be straying from your stated goals or values. In this way, the coach is functioning as a thinking partner to help you get your ideas out into the open, reflect on them, and choose the next steps that align with your desired outcome. Rather than mulling over these ideas on your own, you have someone else supporting you to work out the details.
As you might have noticed, coaching is a very future-oriented and optimistic process. It is focused on helping you find the resources and motivation to make the changes you identify for yourself. And coaching is a creative process, in that you are generating ideas and refining them to create a new way of moving forward from a session. As you come to the end of the session, you will have a set of ideas that you can turn into next steps.
Reflection and closure (and more reflection)
Similar to the ritualization of the session opening, I also have a fairly consistent ritual to close a session with my clients. I like to ask my clients two questions: What have you learned about this topic? And, what have you learned about yourself? By spending the last couple of minutes reflecting on the exploration and work they’ve just completed, clients tend to have some of the ah-ha moments that make coaching such an insightful and rewarding experience. Being able to look back on the process, clients can realize where they might have been stuck and what they need to do to avoid being stuck in the future. Or they can get energized from realizing they had a lot of great ideas to help them tackle what lies ahead in their next phase. Or the learning might be more mundane - a realization that the solution was fairly obvious, but it took slowing down to reflect in order to see it. It’s debatable what provides more value from a coaching session - the plans you come up with, or the insights you gain from reflection.
When the coaching session is complete, we say goodbye and close the meeting. At this point, I recommend taking a few minutes to reflect on the session and capture your key insights and the next steps you identified in the session.
I use a few prompts that I find helpful following my coaching sessions. You can use these prompts, or make up your own to help you capture your learnings and integrate them into your next steps.
What was the topic?
What was the outcome of the session? (i.e the plan or next steps)
What did I learn?
What is the first thing I’m going to do to put this learning into action?
A phrase that I hear over and over again as a coach is that “the most important work happens in between sessions”. What this refers to is the work you will be doing to take your outcomes from coaching and turn them into action or change in your life. You can refer back to the notes you’ve taken to stay on track with your plan, or to help you stay true to your goals even if complications arise while you’re doing the work to move through your plan. And if you need to rework parts of your plan as new information or complications crop up, you might consider bringing that part of the plan back to a coaching session for further refinement.
I’ve based this description on my experience both coaching and being coached, and what I’ve learned through my coach training. Each coach will have their own style or may have creative ways to enhance the process. But the essential elements I’ve covered should be consistent with a typical coaching session:
Prepare your topic and your environment for the session
Come into the session and explore the topic and its nuances to get to the core of what you’re looking to improve or change
Partner with your coach to generate ideas and define your next steps
Reflect on what you’ve learned about your topic and yourself
Sign off the session and capture your learnings and your plan
Move forward with your new insights and the energy to tackle that change you want to make!
Do you want to learn more about coaching and how it can support you? Leave a comment below or send me an email with your questions. Or book a discovery call to discuss what coaching could look like and mean for you.
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