leadership

Creating a Coaching Lesson Plan

Use a detailed road map to stay focused and help clients find results.

Every great trainer and/or coach who thrives in his or her business has a plan. In my early days of personal training, I learned that giving clients too much information too soon was overwhelming and often led to failure. Gradually, I discovered I needed a repeatable plan—a plan I could follow to support clients in attaining their goals in a successful, esteem-building manner. My background as a teacher provided insight into how to move from A to Z: outline a great coaching lesson plan. After several years of trial and error, my personal training lesson plan had evolved to include these steps: conduct an initial interview; identify the client’s goals; perform an assessment of the client’s physical status; design an exercise program; provide thorough program instruction; and encourage weekly follow-through.

With coaching, it is equally important to develop a successful lesson plan. A carefully thought-out coaching lesson plan makes it possible to provide clients with the right amount of information at the right time. The previous installment of this “Coaching Fundamentals” column (“Carving Out Your Coaching Niche,” June IDEA Trainer Success) helped you identify your target clientele and what you want to coach. This installment will help you identify the skills you specifically want to cover in your coaching sessions (i.e., your coaching lesson plan) and when and where you want to coach.

What Do You Want to Cover in Coaching?

Identifying what you want to cover in your coaching sessions, and in what general order, will make your job as a coach focused and manageable. Although genuine “coaching” is about the client’s agenda and needs, a good coach will always have an overall plan for progressing from one session to the next. Until I clearly identified the skills and topics that my coaching clients needed to grasp in order to be able to reach their business and personal goals, I was “winging it” from session to session. To deter- mine what I wanted to teach my coaching clients, I combined essential concepts I had learned in my coach training with skills I intuitively knew people needed to manage their lives. Over a couple of weeks I invested some time in putting my ideas and thoughts on paper and narrowing down my coaching lesson plan. Keeping in mind that my target clientele was “women interested in serious improvement in at least one of three areas: physical fitness, work/life balance and managing their own business,” I developed “9 Skills to Master to Live Well,” a lesson plan I still use today (see the sidebar on page 15). This coaching lesson plan encompasses all the skills I believe my coaching clients need to know to live successfully and physically well in life and business.

Some clients whom I coach already grasp and practice some of these skills, so no extra teaching is needed in those areas. I am also not wedded to the order. My goal is to reach and teach clients at their point of need, presenting concepts and life skills they can learn and apply in any situation for the rest of their lives. As I work with clients, I progress through this skills list with them, focusing more time on the skills they do not possess and less time on skills they have already mastered. For example, many business coaching clients who hire me to help them organize and grow their personal training or coaching businesses are in dire need of guidance on living within their current income. As a result, we may first work on “controlling spending and debt,” to take the pressure off their immediate stress so that they can move forward.

How Do You Create Your Coaching Lesson Plan?

To begin developing a coaching lesson plan to use with your clients, let’s assume you want to focus your coaching practice on helping clients lose weight. Use the following questions as a guide to determine which skills your coaching lesson plan might include: