Assessment First Action

When you first talk to your client, you'll have a chance to ask questions and perform a simple assessment.

Typically, this assessment comes in the form of short set of one to five questions that get sent automatically to new clients (via your Coach.me welcome message).

The right questions can accomplish the following:

1. Get the bigger picture. By finding out why the client has picked a goal and how they expect that goal to change their life, you'll have more context for how to adjust and personalize your coaching during the rest of the cycle.
2. Identify blockers. This way you can know what needs to be worked around and what put together a plan for removing them.
3. Identify your client's expectations. You'll start to be able to identify personas that need to be coached with different techniques. You'll also be able to correct expectations. Nothing ruins a coaching relationship faster than mismatched expectations.

Here is a welcome message from a coach that contains a simple assessment in order to achieve the goals above (while also giving background on the context and expectations of coaching). Feel free to copy and edit this for yourself.

Thank you for signing up for coaching with me.

You can send me a message at any time and I'll respond as quickly as I can. I make sure to check in with all my clients by 3pm Pacific Time.

My process is based on building momentum, so one of the first things we'll do is find a first step that you can take toward your goal. But before we do that, I need to hear more about your goal and why you hired me.

Here are a few questions to kick off the process.

1. What goal do you want to achieve and why?
2. What would your life be like if you achieved this goal?
3. Describe your perfect day?
4. Describe your typical (not perfect) day. What's stopping you from achieving your goal?
5. How do you hope my coaching will help you? If you've been coached before, do you have any preferences about how I should coach you?

My goal is for you to see major results within two weeks. I'll use your answers to the questions above to explain the process for getting there.

These are related skills and strategies we'll talk about in the training. You may have already learned the first one.

1. Active listening

It is crucial that you summarize and repeat back your client's goal so that they know you are paying attention. More here: https://github.com/coachdotme/digitalcoaching/wiki/Active-Listening

2. Personas

You can go as far as offering a personality test in order to learn how you should personalize your approach. More here: https://github.com/coachdotme/digitalcoaching/wiki/Personas

The Assessment phase normally only lasts one or two days. Any longer and the clients tend to wonder, "When does the coaching start?"