Many people put off coaching because they’re not sure what it involves. Will I have to talk about my childhood? Will someone tell me what to do with my life? Will it feel awkward? The short answers are no, no, and only for the first five minutes.
Before the session
After the free introductory call, I send a short questionnaire. It asks about your current role, what’s prompting you to look for coaching now, and what you’d like to be different in six months. There are no right answers, and a few honest sentences are more useful than polished paragraphs.
It also helps to notice, in the week before, the moments when your current situation feels most frustrating or most energising. Those moments are usually where the useful work is.
The first ninety minutes
The first session is longer than the rest because it does two jobs. The first is understanding where you are: your work, the decisions in front of you, and what’s been tried already. The second is agreeing what we’re actually going to work on.
By the end, we’ll have written down two or three goals in plain language. Not “be more confident,” but something you could recognise if it happened, such as “have a promotion conversation with my director by March” or “decide whether to stay in finance by the summer.”
Coaching works best when you can tell, at the end, whether it worked.
What coaching is, and what it isn’t
Coaching is a structured conversation about where you’re going. I ask questions, offer frameworks and challenge assumptions, but the decisions stay yours. It’s different from mentoring, where someone shares their own path, and from therapy, which often looks at the past to heal it. If therapy would serve you better, I’ll say so.
It also isn’t a series of pep talks. Most sessions end with one or two concrete actions to try before we meet again.
How to get the most from it
Bring real situations from your week, not just big-picture questions.
Say when something isn’t helpful. Adjusting the approach is part of the work.
Do the small actions between sessions, even imperfectly.
Notice what changes, and bring that back.
After the first session
You’ll receive a short written summary of what we discussed and agreed. If, after that first session, it doesn’t feel like the right fit, you can stop there and only pay for the time we’ve had. Most people, though, leave with a clearer picture than they arrived with, and a sense that the next step is smaller than it looked.
Sarah Lane
Career and executive coach in London. I help people at a turning point decide their next move, and then make it.
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