Posted on November 5, 2009 by Stephan Wiedner

You understand the benefits of coaching and you want to be held accountable to your weekly action plan. You find a coach or coaching partner but you keep missing your coaching sessions. Or even worse, if you’re the coach, the coachee keeps missing the scheduled sessions.

It’s frustrating and disappointing.

Like anything, coaching only works if you do it. So how do you make sure coaching doesn’t become just one more thing you should be doing in your already busy life?

Part of the answer is to form an agreement (download a copy using the icons to the right) – what I call the Declaration to Coach – between the coach and coachee and here is a quick guideline for crafting the simplest agreement to make you stick to the coaching.

1. Coach for a pre-determined amount of time

Start your coaching by specifying a duration that you will commit to coaching. As humans, we are hard-wired for starts and stops caused by seasonal changes. Farmers work during the growing season and rest in the winter. The semestered school system that we are all familiar with is similar. The first weeks of the semester start off easy and they are followed by intense exam periods. In most coaching relationships, there will be some early stages of exploration and goal setting followed by intense efforts to meet your deadlines.

As a minimum, I suggest coaching for at least 8 weeks although 12 is a better amount of time to experience and verify the results. And if the coaching is going really well and you are getting good value, you can always start up again or extend it for another fixed amount of time.

Please note that a lot of coaches and coaching programs advocate coaching for 6 months or more. I’ve even seen 3-year programs. That’s great because it forces you to make a bold commitment but the programs include structured exercises, review periods, and feedback cycles to keep the coaching exciting and new.

What you want to avoid is no end-date at all. You don’t want to coach for an underdetermined amount of time. Like a “SMART” goal, you want your coaching to be time-related and focused.

Just make sure that during a lengthier coaching commitment, there is enough variety and flexibility in the coaching that it doesn’t become exhausting or boring. The best way to do that is to tie the coaching to a specific goal.

2. Use coaching to achieve a goal

95% of coaching occurs between the sessions. If you are not committed to taking action every week, the coaching will become a waste of time for you and your coach. The best way to ensure consistent progress and stimulating coaching conversation is to create goals that coincide with the end date of the coaching.

When I start coaching with a client, one of the first things I ask them is to determine their top three objectives for the coaching. Usually they say things like:

• get in shape
• make more money
• get a better job.

These are great starting points to creating specific, measurable, attractive, realistic, and time-sensitive goals that can be achieved within a 2-month, 3-month, or even 6-month time frame.

Here are some sample goals that can be derived from higher level objectives.

Objective: Get in shape
Potential Goals:
– train for and participate in a 5 or 10 mile race
– lose 10 pounds by eating healthier and working out regularly
– sign up for a dance class

Objective: Make more money
Potential Goals:
– Save x dollars each week for y weeks
– Make at the minimum 5 sales calls a week
– Spend an hour a day following the stock markets
– start your own business

Objective: Get a better job
Potential Goals:
– Quit my current job by the end of next month
– Send out at least 3 resumes each week
– Apply for post-secondary education
– Attend a professional development workshop

If you can’t think of a specific goal that you want to achieve, spend some time in the first session(s) to brainstorm some goals. Even if the goal you set is not addressing the biggest “pain” in your life, by achieving it you will improve your self-discipline and generate an uplifting sense of accomplishment that will positively affect other areas of your life. And ultimately, setting goals will give the coaching more purpose and ensure that you show up for your scheduled sessions.

3. Choose a consistent time and place to coach

What’s a more convincing statement? I’ll write a blog post by noon next Tuesday – or – I’ll write a blog post next Tuesday morning after I get out of the shower and before I eat breakfast. I hope you said the second
statement.

What makes it convincing are the details, specifically time and place. I told you what I would do, when I would do it (time), and where I would do it (place). Researchers have discovered that we can follow through on intentions with much greater success if we consider future place and time. Notice that I stated that I would write the blog post some date out in the future after my shower. Even if I forgot that I made that commitment, I am likely to remember it while taking a shower because the act of showering will trigger my memory.

Now what if I said I would write a blog post every Tuesday morning after showering and before breakfast? I ask the question because coaching is not just a one time thing. To answer the question I need to consider whether the place and time can be maintained from week to week. Is it realistic to expect that I will be home to shower every Tuesday morning with time to write a blog post afterward? Maybe. Maybe not.

The upside of choosing a consistent time and place is that it is easy to remember. The downside is that you need to verify that you have chosen a time and place that can be repeatable and makes practical sense given your daily schedule.

Personally, I like to do all my coaching between 8am and 10am on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays because during those times the office is quiet, I rarely have meetings, I am awake and alert, and it follows my morning bike ride. Furthermore, I don’t like to have firm commitments on Mondays and Fridays because I like to know that on short notice, I can take a day off and book a long weekend or spend the whole day doing important, non-urgent activities without interruption. (If you are familiar with the The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey, important, non-urgent activities are also known as quadrant 2 activities).

So choose a place and time that works for you and your coach or coachee. If you like mornings, do mornings. If you like afternoons, do afternoons. If you like the park, coach at the park.

As a side note, I prefer to coach in person when it is practical to do so. The 2009 ICF Client Study reveals that 60% of clients prefer coaching in person too. If you can meet in person, I recommend it because there’s something nice about being able to look someone in the eye. I wouldn’t say it is better than coaching on the phone. It’s just different.

4. Print and Sign the Agreement

Ink your “John Hancock” onto paper. This makes it official. This makes it real.

Download a Coaching Agreement

For your convenience, we’ve provided the simplest, most effective coaching agreement possible. It includes everything discussed in this blog. We’ve provided it as a PDF as well as in .doc format so you can edit it to suit your needs. To download the files, use the links below or the icons found in the box above.

The simplest, most effective coaching agreement – in Word (.doc)
The simplest, most effective coaching agreement – as a PDF (.pdf)