“I had to google it,” a client confessed to me on the phone last week. “I mean, I just want to make the most of these sessions, and I always feel like I’m picking the wrong topic.” While reassuring her that no topic could ever be wrong, I realized that offering some guidelines for choosing good coaching topics might be useful for my clients and non-clients alike.
Unlike a prescribed, one-size-fits-all self-help program, Co-Active coaching asks the client to name their topics at the beginning of each session. This can be an uncomfortable moment for clients — I’ve been there with my own coach. However, choosing good coaching topics prompts you, the client, to focus your attention, develop your curiosity, and take responsibility for your growth and change. Sometimes, it may be the first opportunity in a long time that you’ve paused to check in with yourself and take stock.
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Tips for Choosing Coaching Topics
Here are 4 tips for picking great coaching topics, including how to think of coaching topic ideas and what makes a topic coachable:
1) Choose something that resonates with you.
A great coaching topic has three essential qualities:
- It’s authentic
- It’s current
- It’s motivated by a desire for change
It can be anything from dissatisfaction with a personal relationship to a hunger for a promotion at work. The best coaching topics are meaningful and relevant to you. In other words, a topic suggested by your boss or best friend might not resonate with you.
The topic may be something you have been working on your whole life or that just occurred to you in the last five minutes. Keep a running list of potential topics that come to mind in the weeks between coaching sessions.
A Helpful Hint
Something you want, want more of, or do not have, is a potential topic. So is anything that knocks you off balance or disrupts your inner peace. Go with the one that feels most important at the moment — the thing that keeps you up at night or the long-simmering dream.
2) Coaching topics can be specific or vague.
Some of the best coaching sessions happen when clients are unafraid to charge forward in the investigation of a subtle feeling, a calling, an impulse, or an undefined sense. “I feel like I’m ready for a change, but I’m not sure what it is,” one client told me. That’s a potentially great topic.
Specific topics can be equally useful. “I need to find a name for my new company” or “I want to get along better with my mother-in-law.” Don’t be afraid if the topic changes as you get a better sense of the core issue. And don’t hesitate to charge into a session without a clearly defined topic.
Coaching is 80% exploration. What do you notice? What are you learning? How do you make a shift? Sometimes it can feel uncomfortably muddy, but in coaching, this time spent playing in the mud is bookended by strong accountability and action steps. There is always value in exploration, even — perhaps especially — without a perfect roadmap to where you are headed.
3) Consistency of practice is key, not consistency of coaching topics.
At the beginning of each coaching engagement, I spend time with a client outlining outcomes and goals for our time together, as well as core values and their relative expression in a client’s life.
Some clients prefer to keep sessions laser-focused on these goals and values week after week, which can be an excellent way to source coaching topics. For example:
- Are you working towards your goals?
- Where are you getting stuck?
- Which values are being honored and which ones are being stepped on?
But in some cases, topics for coaching sessions come from a specific recent experience. Maybe five minutes before the call, a client has a particularly upsetting conversation with a boss or has struck up a new idea that sizzles with possibility.
Bring these topics to the call if they feel urgent to you in that moment. Show up as your whole self. Draw on your full range of feelings and the disparate parts of your life that make you a dynamic, diverse, and integrated whole. All of it is fair game for coaching topics.
4) We never run out of coaching topics.
Sometimes a client will get on the phone and immediately apologize for their chosen coaching topics: “I know we talk about this every session,” they say, or “I just can’t think of anything to get coached on today.”
There are always areas to explore — no kernel too small to unlock something important, no human so resolved there are nothing but tidy edges and clean-swept corners. As humans, we are constantly changing and evolving.
It Is Not About Coaching Topics; It Is All About You
Coaching holds space for deep, non-judgmental curiosity and self-examination in the service of transformation. Every session and every topic results in some new awareness, some new learning and insight to put into practice, and — as if by magic — whatever coaching topics come forth tends to be exactly what was needed in that given moment. No topic wasted, no moment out of place.
So, find the courage to bring your full self and varied coaching topics to this process (and a coach near you). If you are not currently in coaching, the same principles apply as you bravely charge into a life lived in celebration, exploration, and curiosity.
Looking for more? We invite you to watch the Co-Active Coaching Model in action during a live 15-minute coaching demonstration.