What would you actually be signing up for? With coaching, that question rarely gets a concrete answer. The word is fuzzy, and nobody wants to book an hour of something they can’t picture. That fuzziness, more than any doubt about whether it works, is what keeps capable, skeptical people away.
What happens in a coaching session?
A coaching session is a confidential one-on-one working conversation, and you set the agenda: whatever is most on your mind that day is what we work on. Early sessions explore where you are and where you want to go. Ongoing sessions work a live issue through questions, options, and a commitment to act on before the next one. The format and pace adapt to you.
You bring topics like a difficult workplace conversation you’re avoiding, the promotion you want and haven’t asked for, or challenges with team members who keep missing deadlines. If you arrive with nothing particular in mind, an opening question (“what do you want to work on today?”) finds it within a minute; something always is. And how long the work runs varies as much as the topics: we could spend ten sessions on a single important presentation, one or two on practical solutions to a pressing problem, or months on longer, deeper work. Beginning sessions dig into who you are and what you want; ongoing ones build on that and get to work faster.
The middle of the hour is mostly questions, and this is where the craft lives: precise questions, aimed at assumptions. What are you actually optimizing for here? What have you already tried? What are you pretending not to know about this situation? Questions like these encourage reflection, and reflection is how we get down to the root of the problem and uncover the skills worth developing, improving, or refining to deal with it. Fairly often, about twenty minutes in, the topic changes, because the problem you booked the session for (“the team keeps missing deadlines”) turns out to sit on top of the real one (“I’d rather redo the work myself than have the confrontation”), and the one underneath is usually the more useful place to spend the time. Surfacing that layer is most of the value, and it’s the part you couldn’t have done alone, because you can’t see your own blind spot from the inside.
That root can be worked at more than one scale: working through one dreaded presentation at a time, or building the foundational skills that take you to a place where no presentation is dreaded anymore. And some sessions aim at nothing more than getting through a hard week, because the deeper work can’t happen when there’s no mental bandwidth for it.
When a session needs more structure, a simple framework from my coach training provides it: GROW. Goal: what do you want, from the situation and from this hour? Reality: what’s actually true right now? Options: what could you do, including the ones you’d rather not consider? Will: what will you do, and by when? It’s one useful structure, not a formula; some sessions follow it start to finish, many never need it.
Either way, a working session converges. Your reasoning gets tested out loud; expect pushback, that’s part of what the hour is for. Then a commitment before the clock runs out, small and falsifiable: have the conversation by Thursday, delegate the next proposal untouched, draft the ask and send it to me. Not homework for its own sake. It’s the experiment where either success or failure provides useful, actionable data for the next session.
The next session opens with what happened. That accountability is half the mechanism. Things get done between sessions because a person you respect is going to ask, and you’ll be in the room when they do.
What a session isn’t
It isn’t therapy, and coaching is not a replacement for therapy. The line between the two is fuzzier than tidy definitions admit: people come to coaching stuck, unsatisfied with a career, or feeling down, and none of that necessarily signals a mental-health concern. The working difference is direction. Therapy explores the past to heal in the present. Coaching explores your aspirations, opportunities, and roadblocks in the present to move you toward the future; a coach doesn’t diagnose, but asks, reflects, and helps you test changes in the real situation. If persistent anxiety, depression, or old wounds are getting in the way of progress, therapy is the right room, and a good coach will say so directly. Coaching alongside therapy is common and works well.
It isn’t advice, mostly. You’re the expert on your situation, and answers you generate hold up in practice better than answers you’re handed, though where I have relevant experience, you’ll hear it plainly, flagged as opinion. And it isn’t cheerleading. Encouragement you can get anywhere. Paid encouragement is worse than none, because it teaches you nothing.
What it asks of you: honesty, doing the thing you said, and tolerance for direct questions. What it doesn’t ask: any belief in anything. The method is just clear thinking, applied to your situation, on a schedule, with accountability attached. Skeptics tend to like it more than they expected to.
If you want to know what your version of the work would look like, the free intro call is where to find out. It starts the same way every session does, with whatever is on your mind. There’s nothing to prepare.