Create account Try it on one session

Report structures

The life coaching session report.

A coaching report ends in the commitments the client made out loud. The four sections are wins, insights, commitments and next focus, and the commitments section is written in the client's own words rather than the coach's.

Coaching is the practice where the client does the work and then forgets they agreed to it. The hour is full of realisations that feel permanent and are gone by Thursday. A coaching report is not a summary of the conversation, it is the list of things the client said out loud that they would do, written in the words they used, so that the version they read on Thursday is theirs rather than yours.

01The four sections

The four names this kind of work gets, and nothing to fill in.

  1. 01Wins
  2. 02Insights
  3. 03Commitments
  4. 04Next focus

You are not choosing this from a gallery. You answer one question when you sign up and these four become the shape every comes back in. Any of them can be renamed, added to or removed, and your version is what you get from then on.

02A finished report

Not a blank table. The document, written out.

Invented client: James, senior manager, session 8 of 12, fortnightly.

Wins
Ran Monday's leadership meeting to the agenda and finished on time, the first time in five weeks. Said no to a project on Wednesday without offering an alternative, which he described afterwards as feeling rude and being fine.
Insights
What he has been calling a time problem is a saying no problem. He noticed this himself about forty minutes in, and the evidence he gave was that the two weeks with the least work were the two with the most refusals.
Commitments
Answer the next three requests with let me come back to you tomorrow, whatever they are. Write down what he actually said no to, so there is something to look at in two weeks rather than a feeling.
Next focus
The ten seconds before he says yes, and what is happening in them.

Every person, session and number above was written for this page. No real client is shown. The four section names are not samples: they are the sections the product fills in today.

03What clients ask for

Three things the reader of this report is actually looking for.

  • What they agreed to do, because by the time they need it they have forgotten the wording.
  • Something to look back at after twelve sessions that shows the arc rather than the last hour.
  • The exact sentence they used when they had the realisation, which loses its force the moment it is paraphrased.

04What goes wrong

Four mistakes, and each one costs a renewal rather than a mark.

  • Writing the coach's interpretation instead of the client's words. The insight stops being theirs the moment it is rewritten.
  • Commitments with no date. Everything a client agrees to in an hour sounds like this week and means never.
  • Recording the whole conversation, which nobody rereads, instead of the four things that mattered.
  • Sending it three days later, by which point the client has already had the week the commitments were for.

05How it gets written

Five steps, and four of them take no time at all.

  1. 01Record the session

    Record on a phone, a laptop or the call software you already work on, with everybody in the session having agreed out loud first.

  2. 02Upload the recording

    Upload the file when the session ends, or paste a transcript if your call software already made one.

  3. 03Read the draft

    The draft comes back in about a minute, in the four sections: Wins, Insights, Commitments, Next focus.

  4. 04Correct it

    Change anything that is wrong and add anything the recording missed. Nothing goes anywhere until you have done this.

  5. 05Send it

    It goes to the client under your own name and stays on their own page with every report before it.

06Where this came from

Two sources outside this company.

Nearby

Try it on one session

Bring one recording and read what comes back in these four sections. No account and no card, and the 7 day trial needs no card either.