What to expect in a session?

What to expect in a business coaching session

If you’ve never had a coaching session before, it can be quite difficult to try and understand how it actually works, what it looks like and what you can expect.

So this video is about helping you understand a little bit more about what you can expect from coaching and the coaching sessions themselves.

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When and where?

Coaching sessions are held either face to face or online using tools like GoToMeeting or Zoom which work brilliantly, and are either every week or fortnightly.

Preparation

A coaching session requires a degree of preparation from you and me, so in advance of each session you will complete something called a coaching focus sheet. The coaching focus sheet helps you take a step back and think through what’s going on in your world. So many business owners don’t take their valuable time out to ask themselves important questions about how the business is doing, what the challenges are, and how you are doing, as an owner and leader. The focus sheet is designed to get you to think through all of those big questions, and it takes about 20 minutes to complete. This time will give you a really good understanding of what’s going on in your business, and puts you in a great position to understand what you want to talk about and what you want to get out of your coaching session.

Some additional context

Now some additional context for you before we even start any of the coaching sessions. As you may have found out from some of the previous videos, there is a alignment session that we have to onboard you into the coaching process, which effectively helps us understand what the goals are for the business. We will create a 12 month plan for your business which will be chunked down into plans for each quarterly that form a structure for your regular coaching sessions and becomes an essential component of the overall coaching process. This context is important because when you are reviewing your week and completing your focus sheets, you also need to take stock of the projects that you are working on.

How long are the sessions?

The initial alignment session which we have when you start your coaching journey with me is for 3-4 hours and this is when we agree on your goals for the business and put together an annual plan. Your regular coaching sessions are for one hour on a weekly or fortnightly basis.

What happens in a coaching session?

The coaching session will start by us agreeing the outcomes and then we’ll get to work. Whether the outcomes are business or team challenges, opportunities that you want to talk through, strategic planning or leadership and personal development, my job in the coaching session is to listen and to help you understand the reality of what’s going on. I will ask you the important questions to help you gain clarity, to ensure that you are examining things from all sides to help you identify relevant options and I will help you make a decision on what you want to do. We’ll work through the agenda points that have been raised, we’ll make the decisions that we need to make and at the end of the session, we’ll agree the actions that need to be implemented between that coaching session and the next one.

My expectations of you

My expectation is for you to have completed the things that agreed to complete in your last coaching session. I am there to sense check you, to make sure that you are following through, doing your best work, keeping your promises and delivering on the things that you need to deliver.

The coaching cycle

That coaching cycle then repeats each week or each fortnight and that’s where the magic happens. We discuss things, we make important decisions, things are followed through and actions are taken. When challenges get in the way of progress, your coaching sessions provide a space where you can properly talk things through and gain the clarity that you need.

That’s why coaching works and that’s why you get the results. My job is to keep you focused on business owner work, to keep you focused on the strategic work and to keep you focused on achieving the results that you want in your business.