How to Start Your Coaching Sessions So They Practically Run Themselves
The opening of a coaching session predicts so much of how successful the session is. At The Coaching School, where I trained and sometimes still lead trainings for coaches inside organisations, our guideline is that the first 25% of any session should be focused on contracting for that conversation.
Countless people have talked about the importance of framing the problem in order to solve it. Perhaps most famously, and most-often attributed to Albert Einstein (who almost certainly never said this), is the idea: ‘If I had only one hour to solve a problem to save the world, I would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem, and only five minutes finding the solution.’
Coaching can feel like that, and almost all the struggles coaches might have in a session can be helped by making a clear agreement on the work for that session.
Mike Toller (Episode #32 of the podcast) sometimes talks about coaching as being about structure and space. In my view there is almost nothing as important for creating the space for transformation as the structure of a well-framed session objective.
How to Use These Openings
Coaching is not prescriptive. Aliveness and presence in a session are more important than any particular set questions. And yet it can be useful to have some set plays, especially when it comes to the start of a coaching session.
The four below are openings that I regularly use with clients, although I should say that they almost never come in these exact words and they almost always have other questions or reflections in between. More than that, they don’t always happen in the first 25% of the conversation. Like (not) Einstein, if it takes you 55 minutes to get the answers to these questions, that is time well spent: once you have the answers, everything else becomes easier for you and your client.
Use the ideas here by playing with them in your coaching sessions, making them your own. Use the energy of them in your own words. Practise and play and see what the impact is on your coaching.
The Questions Aren’t Everything
If you play with these questions and, when you’ve done that, you want more support to use these frameworks or create more powerful experiences for your clients, you might be interested in joining The Coach’s Journey Community.
It’s my flexible, affordable group coaching programme for coaches who want to create thriving coaching businesses and thrive as people while they do it. I’d love to see you there.
But in the meantime – wishing you all the success in supporting your clients to create what is possible for them.
Thanks for the work you do to make tomorrow’s world better than today’s,
The PCC Opening
1. What would you like to focus this coaching session on?
2. What makes that important to you to focus on today?
3. If we focus on that, what’s the outcome that you want to have at the end of this session?
4. What do we need to cover, or address, or resolve in order to get to that outcome?
When I was preparing to record sessions to get the ICF PCC Credential, the ‘test-taker’ in me came to the fore. ‘What do I need to do to get good marks in this test?’ was the question I brought. And so when my supervisor, Katie Harvey (Episode #1 of the podcast) explained that, essentially, if you ask a question each about the first four PCC markers, you will pass that part of the call, the test-taker in me jumped for joy. I asked those questions – the questions above – in the sessions I recorded, passed my test… and learned something new.
These four questions are an incredibly powerful opening for creating effortless coaching sessions focused on the needs of your client. I started using them all the time in my coaching sessions and of all these frameworks, this is the one I use most often.
When I last trained coaches, I shared these with them as a ‘cheat move’ to make that first 25% of the session more straightforward. One of the students reflected, after using this, ‘I don’t even really understand that last question, but when I ask it, everything gets easier’.
What the last question does, if you ask it with curiosity and a client rumbles with it, is map out the coaching session for you.
If in doubt of where to go, ask.
The ‘The Gap’ Opening
1. What do you want to have happen?
2. Why haven’t you done that already?
3. What do you want from this conversation so that you can do it?
I once heard the coach, consultant and author Fred Kofman say, ‘No gap, no coaching’. These three questions, inspired by Kofman’s work, get to the gap – between someone’s life now and how they want it to be – right away.
‘What do you want have happen?’ or a question like that, opens up the conversation – what does the client want to be different in their work or life? It could be asked as ‘What do you want to have happen in your life that isn’t currently happening?’
The second question, I sometimes preface with ‘This might sound a bit cheeky, but…’ And it opens up the gap: why haven’t they done the thing already? What is holding them back?
The third question does what Claire Pedrick (see below) would call Rightsizing. It says, what can we two do together today to help you with that?
The ‘Simple’ Opening
1. What are we doing today?
2. How shall we do it?
3. How will we know that we’ve done it?
Claire Pedrick (Episode #44 of the podcast), in her book Simplifying Coaching offers the STOKeRS framework to think about ‘simple beginnings’ to a coaching session… but she then simplifies it even further. She says all those questions (the ones in STOKeRS) are there to get shared answers to the three questions above. With the right clients… you can just ask those questions.
Try it.
Simple.
The ‘Extraordinary’ Opening
1. What can I coach you on today?
2. What do you want to have at the end of the session that you don’t have now?
3. What would make this an extraordinary conversation?
It was a transformational moment for me when I listened to a recording of a session on a Coaches Rising Summit and heard Rich Litvin coach for the first time. His boldness and presence created something extraordinary for his client.
‘I want to be able to do that,’ I thought.
And so I played, particularly with one the questions I’ve heard Rich use many times. What would make this an extraordinary conversation?
What I found is, far more often than I would have imagined, what someone thought of as extraordinary, was possible. Our sense of what’s possible – often – doesn’t really work.
Some coaches find the word extraordinary too much, but what I’ve discovered is that most clients respond to it as it is meant. That is: beyond ordinary. In a way, isn’t every coaching session like that? Isn’t extraordinary a requirement for coaching?
My favourite time to ask the question is when someone says ‘Well, I don’t know what’s possible in a coaching session,’ or, ‘Well, realistically, it feels like we could do…’ Then I say, ‘Sometimes it’s fun to play with that – if we didn’t have to be realistic, what would you LOVE to have happen in this call? What would make it a really extraordinary conversation?’
You can also take the pressure off: ‘I don’t know if we can create this thing, but it feels powerful to know that that is what you really want.’
If you and your client are willing to invite the extraordinary, then the extraordinary becomes more possible.