What Can I Expect
When I Work With a Coach?
What is the length of a coaching session?
Coaches vary in the length of time they offer for their sessions. Somewhere between 45 minutes and 60 minutes for a session is common.
What is the frequency?
When first starting out, it’s common to meet with a coach weekly. As you get into the work you may find that spacing out your sessions gives you time to incorporate the outcomes of your sessions into your life, or to execute the action steps to which you commit. As you go, you and your coach will determine the optimal frequency for your work together.
Where do coaching sessions take place?
Sessions may be held on the phone, via a video call, or in-person. The venue for your meetings will be determined by any number of factors like preference, mobility, whether you and your coach are geographically near to one another, or even how you came to the coaching relationship. For example, many organizations that provide coaching to their employees only offer that service through an online, video platform.
What do we do in a coaching session?
While the coaching session may begin with some initial pleasantries, the coach will typically move towards the primary activities of coaching soon after the session starts to make the most of your time.
The initial questions posed by a coach at the start of the session serve to outline the session’s:
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Focus.
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Purpose or “Why?”
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Goal or outcome.
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Measure of success.
As the client, you may choose to focus on a different topic each session, or there may be a central theme that you work on consistently over numerous sessions. A combination of approaches may characterize the series of sessions. For example, you may come to coaching to work on one area of your life, like an upcoming move or a job change, and that overarching goal remains the focus of most sessions. However, urgent topics, like an unexpected visit from your parents, may become the focus for a session.
While sessions may or may not wrap up neatly —some be paused and continued next session — the coach is responsible to invite from the client:
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A summary of the progress made toward the goal of the session.
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A description or list of take-aways from the session.
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What accountability looks like for any implicit or explicit action steps.
How long do we work together?
Committing to a series of coaching sessions at the start means you don’t ask yourself after each session if you are going to schedule the next one. Offloading that choice from your future-self sets you up for consistency and accountability, which gives you a more substantial benefit in the end.
To support their clients in this consistency and accountability, many coaches offer their services as a package of sessions. Coaches vary in the number of sessions they include in a package. Packages of eight, nine, or twelve sessions are common. Coaches also vary in whether they require payment for all the sessions in the package at the start of the contract, monthly, or with each session.
Typically when the contracted package has been completed, coaches and clients decide whether to enter into a new contract. Sometimes, coaches shift to a month-to-month agreement after the first package has been completed.
How do I know when I'm done?
Coaches and clients work together for as long as the collaboration is mutually agreeable.
If you start to feel like you have gained what you need from the coaching relationship, don't hesitate to bring that up with your coach. Your coach has been working with you towards the moment when you feel fully equipped to design your next steps and move forward in your life.
If you are the kind of person who continually ups the challenge in your life, your coach will be there to support you when you take on your next big stretch.