How to Prepare for a Coaching Session

Practical ways to help you feel clearer, calmer and better prepared.

If you’ve ever found yourself staring at a blank page before a coaching session, wondering what on earth to bring, you’re very much not alone. It’s easy to overthink it, especially if you want to make good use of the time. The good news is that you don’t need to arrive with a perfectly formed agenda. A little reflection beforehand can help you feel more focused, more grounded, and more able to get what you need from the session.

If it’s your first session

Your coach may have given you some reflective questions before your first session to get you started. If not, a simple place to begin is to ask yourself: what’s working well right now, and what do I wish was different? You don’t need to say the “right” thing or turn up with an impressively polished answer. It’s far more helpful to be honest than impressive.

Usually, coaching is working towards some kind of broader goal. You might be leading a significant change, trying to handle conflict more effectively, or working out whether your current role is still right for you. You may even be contemplating an upward move, a sideways move, or a full rip-up-the-rulebook-and-start-again moment. It can help to bring a couple of real examples of what’s feeling difficult now, along with what you’d like to be different. More confidence? More clarity? Better boundaries? Less second-guessing?

It’s also worth remembering that coaching isn’t only for when something is going wrong. You might be stepping into a new role, taking on more responsibility, or wanting to make your impact with confidence and authenticity rather than just hoping for the best.

A good coach can help you clarify what matters most and turn a vague sense of "something needs to shift" into a more useful focus.

If you feel comfortable doing so, it can also help to let your coach know about anything significant that’s going on in your life at the moment, such as bereavement, redundancy or a house move. These things affect your energy, attention and headspace, whether you’d like them to or not. It may also be useful to share anything about illness, disability, mental health or neurodiversity if adjustments would help the sessions work better for you. Often, small changes can make a real difference. Your coach will treat this information with care and confidentiality.

If you’re part-way through a coaching programme

It’s quite common to lose the thread a bit part-way through a block of coaching. What felt urgent at the start may not feel quite so relevant now, and that doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. It may simply mean something has shifted. Perhaps your circumstances have changed, the organisational context has moved on, or you’ve made more progress than you realised. It can be useful to pause and ask: what feels most important now? What am I still stuck on? What would make the next session feel genuinely useful?

If you’re towards the end of your coaching block

As you come towards the end of your coaching, you may feel you’ve made good progress and aren’t quite sure what you’d get from another session. That’s not a problem to solve; it may be a sign that the coaching has done what it needed to do. A final session can still be very useful for taking stock of what’s changed, identifying what helped, and thinking about how you’ll carry that learning forward when real life inevitably gets busy again.

Or things may feel less tidy than that. You may feel you haven’t made the progress you’d hoped for, life may have thrown in a few unwelcome plot twists, or you may simply feel disappointed that the coaching is ending just as it started to feel really helpful. All of that is entirely discussable.

Coaching doesn’t have to end on a triumphant flourish to have been valuable.

If you’re still not sure what to bring

First of all, don’t worry. Your coach is there to help you find your way, not to mark your homework. If you have several challenges on your mind, bring them all. There’s often a thread running through them that’s hard to spot when everything is whizzing around in your head. And if you genuinely can’t think of anything to bring, bring that too. It’s more common than you might think.

And if you’re still unsure, that’s OK as well. You don’t need to arrive with everything neatly worked out. Coaching can help you make sense of what feels muddled, notice what’s really going on, and decide what to do next.

If you’re thinking about coaching and want to explore whether it might be useful, I’d be very happy to have a conversation.