Transcription Below
Welcome to the seven elements of a coaching session. When I first started coaching, I wanted a map. I wanted to know, okay, so what exactly does a life coach do? And in this video, I’m going to go through the seven elements of a coaching session.
This is exactly what a life coach does when they are providing a life coaching session. It is a map to the territory. So let’s jump in.
Element number one is the check-in. This is where clients ask, how are you? How are you doing? You chit-chat. It’s lovely.
This is where you can set the stage energetically. I do like answering these questions naturally, honestly, and telling them, if they ask me, how am I doing? I say, I’ll tell them what’s going on. Give them a sentence or two, 20, 30 seconds at most.
And then you go to element number two, accountability. This is a huge topic. I will make a whole video on accountability.
It really is that big. But in the seven elements, what we’re gonna look at here is simply a transition from how you are doing to, well, last time we talked, you said you’re going to do XYZ. How did it go? Did you or did you not do XYZ? And clients will say, yes, I did it, or no, I didn’t do it.
You can follow up with another question or two:
- How’d it go?
- What’d you learn about yourself?
- What did you learn about the situation?
- If you didn’t do it, okay, what was going on?
- How do you wanna relate to accountability?
All these kinds of things. This is a really important part because it provides a thread from session to session, but you don’t want this part to take over. And in this, at some point in time, you wanna ask your client, is this what you wanna look at? Or do you wanna look at something new? Because that leads into element number three, which is setting the agenda.
And this, I believe, is the most important aspect of any coaching call. It grounds the call. It acts as a foundation.
It acts as a place where you can always come back to and ask clients, okay, here we are in a coaching session. What do you want to look at? What would be useful for you to focus your time on? What’s the most useful thing to look at in your life? There’s a lot of different variations on this. I made a whole, again, another video on this topic alone at Coach Training EDU, we use something called a time model where you look at the topic, you ask about the importance, you ask, okay, so what can make our time measurable, the success of our time here measurable? And then you echo it in one or two sentences.
At most, sometimes I just like using words or fragments. The idea here is just to make sure that you’re on the same page with your client and you have a really strong foundation that you can always come back to this place if you need to.
This leads to the fourth element, which is exploration. And this is where the magic happens. The whole point of a coaching session is to look at that topic and then to explore. What you’re really doing is you’re not trying to solve a problem.
What you’re really going for is an insight, a deeper understanding or a realization that your client has about themselves. Now, if you have a strong agenda, if you have a session agenda, you can go back to that session agenda. You can ask a lot of different questions and at a certain point in time ask, okay, out of everything we’ve talked here, how does this relate back to the agenda that we started with? It’s really important to have that agenda and the exploration go hand in hand because the stronger the foundation of the agenda, the more you can go on those tangents and explore and then always come back to the session agenda.
That leads to element number five. Near the end of a session, it’s now useful to design action steps. Best practice is to look at the insights of a coaching session and then use those insights to prompt an action step to test the strength of the insight.
The ICF, the International Coach Federation, when they first got founded, they had 11 different core coaching competencies. When they revised those 11, they revised it down to eight and they took out a lot of the competencies around action and aligned those action competencies around insights because the biggest myth of coaching is that a coach gives great advice or tells clients what to do when in fact a great coach will never tell a client what to do. A great coach will ask questions that prompt an insight or action steps from the client.
And if you’re doing the exploration well, those insights will naturally lead into action steps that are exciting because clients wanna try them out. Ooh, let me try out this idea and see how this works in my life. This is a really useful structure and frame, especially for new coaches because new coaches tend to put action steps really quick in the process.
They ask clients:
- Okay, what do you wanna look at?
- How do you wanna do this?
And then they say,
- Well, have you thought about doing this?
- What about that? Well, what if you did this?
- If you knew the answer to your problem, then what would that be?
- Or what time in the past did it work really well?
- Well, could you do it again?
- And how did that make you feel?
All of those are kind of formulaic and not my favorite path or lines to take in coaching sessions because it tends to short circuit those deeper questions, those more curious and creative questions that help clients really get to those more fundamental elements of the deeper transformation of what they’re going for in their lives.
Now, element five, action steps, it’s still useful though because the action steps make the insights tangible. And that’s what you’re doing in element five here.
Then the last part of this is element number six, where you check in on the agenda, that original agenda. How did we do? How am I doing in this video? Did I accomplish the seven elements? Well, not yet. We’re at number six.
But the idea here is you check back. It’s a call back to the very beginning. It feels good. Clients go, oh yeah, like there’s a structure to this. And that structure helps provide value because you know where you’re going. You know exactly where you are on the map. You’re in element number six. You’re calling back to element number two or three.
Excellent. Yay, you’re doing your job. Client’s doing their job. You’re moving through it. Things are good.
And then the last one is logistics. Wrap up, when are we gonna meet again? How are you doing? How’d the session go? Great, see you next time. And this is where you get the practical things, housekeeping. And if you have any suggestions, ideas, things that you wanted to say during the session but did not say because coaching is not about giving advice, coaching is about deep listening and trying to find insights.
But if there is a book recommendation or just an action step that you just were dying to tell your client mid-session, this is the point, element number seven, to share that information. And after that, it’s rinse and repeat. That is a solid session and that is the map.
And remember, solid coaching is not about having the answers. It’s about creating space for your clients to discover their own insights and breakthroughs. And when you follow the structure, clients, they also learn to expect it.
They learn to work within it. And you give your clients these opportunities to craft insights that lead to that deeper transformation. If this framework resonates with you, if you wanna dive deeper into becoming a more effective coach, please subscribe.
Thank you to all those who have subscribed. And I’ll be sharing more practical coaching insights and tools and techniques that you can use along the way. And if you wanna share your tips or insights or breakthroughs if you’re a trained coach, it’s helpful to share it with new coaches.
This is the thing that really worked for me. I love to hear those ideas as well. And as always, thank you for watching and I hope to see you soon with some more content.
