Planning your coaching sessions

Life coaching forms and templates

The great thing is that there's no one right way to conduct your life coaching business. In reality, there’s a lot of freedom when it comes down to how you want to interact with clients and gather information for advice, treatment, and support. However, when you do go through your sessions, it is important that your plan incorporates some tips of life coach feedback forms to ensure you don’t miss any vital information! These cover the following elements:

Agreements and conditions - You need to make sure that you lay out all the terms and conditions of your meetings with clients, so they can know exactly what to expect when meeting you.

Goals - One of the most important things you could do is outline the goals, objectives, and outcomes concerning your meetings. What does your client hope to achieve?

Tools required - It’s also necessary to consider all the essential tools to help clients solidify their commitments, and to stay on track in sessions. 

Health and wellbeing - It’s also important to conduct regular health and wellbeing checks and depending on the stresses at hand, there are plenty of life coaching resources out there that can aid anxiety management.  

Six tips to structure your life coaching session

To help structure your sessions more efficiently, we’ve collated the top six tips to ensure that you’re able to make a positive change and impact your clients. While there are various ways to provide support for your clients, such as life coach packages, having a clear session plan can guarantee that you’re assessing the entirety of client concerns, and are able to address every issue at hand. 

1. Give support: It's generally great to examine their week, how past meetings have been, and to offer thanks for their attendance, as well as for taking the step to reach out for support. There's no hurry to get straight into the session, and taking the time to chat casually can put the client’s mind at ease. It’s an excellent way to build trust and rapport, which always goes a long way when it comes to professional relationships. 
2. Zero in on responsibility: This is where you can both meticulously describe what worked and what didn't following the last meeting. In the event that this is the client's first session, spend some time assessing what they want to get out of future meetings. This can be anywhere from 5 to 10 minutes, and it’s important that both you and the client are on the same page. 
3. Talk about the present issue: Naturally, you ought to invest the most energy in discussing what the client is currently concerned about. After all, their current state of mind is the reason they’re seeing you! Discussing their current problems provides you with clearer direction when it comes to finding solutions for their challenges. 
4. Rethink: It now and again serves to reexamine their interests from an alternate point of view, and this is where you come in. Support the client by utilizing your experience and expertise to help with what is going on. Viewing problems from a different perspective can provide excellent insight and clarity that otherwise would be missed. 
5. Plan: Based on all the information shared, it's great to collaborate and consider various methodologies that can assist with enabling the patient and progress.
6. Course of action: By the end of the meeting, your client ought to have a hardened action plan that frames what they are to chip away at before their next gathering with you.

Preparing for your life coaching session: A checklist

A key component of life coaching sessions is actually the preparation that comes beforehand. You should always spend time planning for your upcoming appointment with clients, in order to ensure that every session is productive, structured, and able to deliver solutions and supply high outcomes. One of the best ways to plan is to send out an intake form so the client can answer some initial questions. These forms are typically sent out in advance, such as 24 hours before, so the client answers everything and nothing valuable has been missed. It’s an easy way to get the nitty-gritty details out of the way, so you can focus on the important stuff! If you’ve seen the client before, you should also spend time revising notes from previous sessions to refresh your mind as to what you’ve previously worked on, and what needs reassessment. In terms of packages, if your client is attending a specific program session, you should also have a quick look over your package outline to ensure you remember what details need to be covered. 

What to do right after a life coaching session?

Following your session, you should also consider a number of components to ensure you learn from each experience and interaction you have with your clients. Doing so allows you to fully engage and coach your clients effectively, as well as improve outcomes across time. As a result, factors that should be considered include:

Review notes - The best thing you can do after each session is to review your notes! Each time you do this, you can learn about potential challenges that you may encounter in future sessions, weaknesses that need work, as well as what new information you gathered. 

Follow-up email - It’s often considered good practice to send out a follow-up email to let clients know what to do following their session. As you probably know, it can be very easy to forget plans, so sending a follow-up email serves as a good reminder for clients. 

Prepare! - Following your life coaching session, and once you’ve revised all information, you should spend time preparing for your next client. This way, you can formulate some rough ideas as to what strategies are needed, and you can go into meeting your client with confidence. 

Take home message

Planning life coaching sessions is an absolute must when it comes to meeting your clients, as it serves as the backbone for all your program of events, and allows you to tick off everything that needs to be addressed. It ensures no information goes unsaid, and that you’re able to effectively deliver high-quality support to clients, and achieve higher outcomes. We understand that the process can be tedious, and somewhat confusing with all the resources available out there, however, we hope this article has helped solidify your understanding. Life coach planning can actually be a highly rewarding and fulfilling task, and with the right structure, you can ensure you prioritize and satisfy client needs. It doesn’t have to be complicated, and if you incorporate the above tips, you’re well on your way to success in the life coaching industry!  

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Further reading:

• Want To Be A Successful Life Coach? Learn These 10 Lessons First
• Life Coaching In The Digital Age