A coaching plan is a strategy manager form to train, motivate and improve their employees’ performances. You can collaborate with each member of your team to develop goals for strengthening their skills and work performance
And yet, it doesn’t matter whether you’re the best listener in the world or have personally scaled Mount Everest.
Even the best coaches need to work from a plan.
In what follows, we’ll provide you with 15 templates and samples you can use to craft concrete, actionable coaching plans that help your clients achieve life-changing transformations during their time with you.
Writing a Coaching Plan: 3 Templates
Coaching plans are critical for maintaining and documenting the progress of your coaching sessions (Olubiyi, 2019). These plans provide clarity for both the coach and coachee in several important ways (adapted from Johnson, n.d.).
- They consolidate collected information and establish major areas for development.
- They facilitate the setting of SMART goals with target dates to maintain accountability.
- They create a basis upon which to pivot or adjust existing goals.
- They point the coachee toward relevant resources, such as media, books, or other professionals.
- They establish milestones that, when accomplished, may be highly motivating for the coachee.
By keeping these goals in mind, you can design effective coaching plans that help drive progress in the coaching relationship.
To this end, let’s look at three useful templates to identify growth focus areas in your coaching plans.
In several of these examples, we’ll draw on activities from the comprehensive coaching tool Quenza, which allows coaches to digitize and automate several aspects of coaching practice. This digitization takes the form of web-based activities, such as assessments, reflections, and evaluations, that coaches can design and clients can complete using their iOS or Android devices.
The Best Possible Self
When many clients begin coaching, they report feeling ‘stuck’ but are uncertain about the specific changes they’d like to make in their life.
The Best Possible Self exercise is a simple, 10-minute exercise to help your clients gain clarity about their ideal life and guide the development of a coaching plan.
The exercise begins by inviting your client to set a stopwatch or timer for 10 minutes. The client is then invited to write about what life would look like if they had performed to the best of their abilities and achieved all they wanted in their life. This visualization thereby creates an image upon which to set goals.
Life Domain Satisfaction
Another common situation in coaching relationships is when a client begins by reporting dissatisfaction in one or more life domains.
The Life Domain Satisfaction assessment is a powerful tool to help you and your clients discover the extent to which they are satisfied with various life domains.
The exercise invites your client to reflect on their satisfaction across 16 different domains of life, such as family, education, and standard of living. You and your client can then reflect on the responses to identify strengths and areas for growth.
Basic Needs Satisfaction in General Scale
For an especially high-level assessment of a client’s life satisfaction, you can assess their satisfaction with basic core needs.
The free Basic Needs Satisfaction in General Scale is a science-backed, 21-item scale assessing the degree to which your clients experience the satisfaction of their three core needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness (Ryan & Deci, 2000).
All items are rated on a scale from 1 (not true) to 7 (very true), and example items from the scale include (Gagné, 2003):
- I feel like I am free to decide for myself how to live my life.
- Often, I do not feel very competent.
- People in my life care about me.
The results of this instrument are valuable for facilitating discussion about where and in what contexts clients experience the most (or least) satisfaction and how they might increase life satisfaction across different domains.
3 Samples and Templates for Your Coaching Sessions
Now that you have a few templates to aid you in exploring your clients’ desired future selves and areas for growth, let’s look at three more templates to help you design a motivating coaching plan with these desired futures in mind.
Goal Visualization
Mental imagery of future events can help people “envision possibilities and develop plans for bringing those possibilities about” (Taylor, Pham, Rivkin, & Armor, 1998, p. 429).
Quenza’s Goal Visualization audio exercise is a powerful activity designed to strengthen your client’s motivation in the lead-up to pursuing a goal or starting a plan of action.
This exercise comprises eight minutes of guided imagery that invites the listener to consider a goal they’d like to accomplish within a year.
In the exercise, the listener is encouraged to imagine themselves progressing forward in time and consider what taking steps toward goal achievement might look and feel like at different time points. By doing so, they will energize their conscious and unconscious mind to take gradual steps toward their goal, increasing motivation.
Self-Contract Template
Another way to increase our motivation to make beneficial life changes is by completing a self-contract.
Quenza’s Self-Contract Template is a useful agreement your clients can complete to make a signed commitment toward positive change.
In particular, the contract template invites your client to set a clear goal, pick a deadline by which to complete the goal, and note the specific reasons why it is personally important to achieve the goal. Again, explicitly exploring their reasons for pursuing this goal will help keep them motivated when they come up against challenges.
Goal Planning and Achievement Tracker
Tracking progress toward the accomplishment of big goals is another strategy to keep us motivated as we pursue them.
For a useful tool to help track progress toward goal achievement, take a look at the free Goal Planning and Achievement Tracker worksheet.
This simple worksheet invites your client to set goals at the start of the week. Once they set their goals, they then note their daily progress toward achieving the goals in a series of cells that correspond to each day of the week.
Life and Health Coaching: Top 3 Templates
Some people seek the support of a coach to guide them in their pursuit of a range of personal or health-related goals.
Goals such as these may center around weight loss, health-related habits, or self-care, just to name a few.
Here are three useful templates for your life coaching practice to support your clients looking to make lifestyle-related changes.
Creating a Positive Body Image
How we feel about our bodies can play a significant role in determining how we feel about ourselves as a whole and the confidence we project into the world.
For your clients looking to change their self-image as it relates to their body, take a look at the Creating a Positive Body Image pathway on Quenya.
This activity pathway spans several days and invites your clients to think about their body in terms of its functionality and what it can do for them. This serves to shift your client’s focus from limitations or dissatisfaction with physical appearance to cultivating a friendlier relationship with their body.
Distinguishing Physical from Emotional Hunger
Enjoying delicious food is one of life’s many pleasures. But our relationship with food can grow complicated when we eat for reasons other than hunger.
If your client is looking to change their relationship with food, consider sending them the Distinguishing Physical from Emotional Hunger reflection exercise on Quenya.
The reflection begins by inviting your client to think about and list self-soothing activities besides eating that they can engage in when experiencing challenging emotions. They are then encouraged to identify where in their body they experience the physical sensation of hunger and learn to distinguish between physical versus emotional hunger cues.
The Fourteen-Day Commitment
The shift toward a healthier lifestyle typically requires that we change our habits. These habits can be small behaviors surrounding how we eat, sleep, and stay active.
This chart is sectioned into columns that probe the duration and type of exercise your client undertakes, the amount of sleep they are getting, and the quality of the food they eat. The thinking is that by actively tracking behaviors for 14 days, your clients can become more aware of the micro-behaviors that contribute to or detract from their goal to lead a healthier lifestyle.
3 Templates for Your Coaching Program & Classes
Many coaches will draw on principles from disciplines like positive psychology to develop psychoeducational content, lessons, or workshops as part of their coaching program.
If this is you, here are three useful templates you can use to deliver life-changing lessons or classes, either in groups or one-on-one.
Getting to Know One Another Exercise
If you’re running an activity or class in a group, you may find it useful to begin your session with an icebreaker activity. For something a little out-of-the-box that warms up people’s active listening skills, take a look at our free Getting to Know One Another Exercise.
To begin, get participants to form a circle and pair people up with someone they do not know very well. Next, each person in the pair describes one of their biggest blunders, while the other person attempts to remember as many details about the story as possible.
After going around the group and having each listener share the story they heard, the exercise repeats but with new pairs and a focus on views about the shared environment (e.g., workplace, team environment, etc.), helping bring the focus to the context of the coaching session.
20 Guidelines for Developing a Growth Mindset
People with a growth mindset are described as:
“individuals who believe their talents can be developed (through hard work, good strategies, and input from others).”
Dweck, 2016
Inherent in the process of being coached is a focus on learning and development. Therefore, a good starting point for any coaching relationship may be to educate your clients about the benefits of a growth mindset.
For a useful pre-packaged lesson on the topic, take a look at the 20 Guidelines for Developing a Growth Mindset lesson on Quenya.
This lesson neatly summarizes the difference between a fixed and growth mindset, includes a brief video lesson on the neurology of the growth mindset, and details 20 actionable guidelines to help your clients move toward a growth mindset.
Pushing the Ball Underwater Metaphor
When we’re experiencing negative emotions and thoughts, our automatic reaction may be to avoid or suppress them. However, the trouble with this approach is that trying to suppress negativity is much like trying to push a ball underwater – it will quickly bob back up again.
For an illustrated lesson and reflection applying this metaphor of the ball underwater, check it out in Quenza’s pre-loaded Expansion Library.
Overall, this metaphor and lesson will help your clients understand how acceptance rather than control might be a better way to deal with negative experiences, helping your clients get in touch with all their thoughts and emotions, not just the positive ones.
The Activity Builder
All the content that coaches prepare in Quenza is designed using the platform’s intuitive drag-and-drop Activity Builder.
The Activity Builder allows coaches to create sequences of coaching questions and multimedia that clients engage with using their Android or iOS device. These sequences can form various lessons, reflections, assessments, or homework activities, and they can include written content, videos, and audio.
For instance, as pictured above, a coach is designing a simple emotional reflection that their client can complete by tracking their mood on a five-point scale.
This reflection may then be followed by an open-ended response question that asks the client to note the dominant emotions they have experienced throughout the day or drivers of their present mood. Alternatively, it may be followed by a video lesson or soothing guided audio meditation.
Regardless, the Activity Builder takes the complexity out of the design and digitization process so that the coach can focus on preparing activities that help the client meet their agreed-upon goals.
The Expansion Library
If you’re just starting your coaching practice and are unsure where to begin, Quenza’s Expansion Library is a great place to start.
Quenya includes an extensive library of pre-loaded science-based activities and pathways that are widely used by members of the positive psychology community. This library is continuously growing, with activities and pathways focusing on topics like body image, gratitude, and goal setting.
Likewise, all activities within the library are fully customizable and can be used as templates to design activities that cater to your client’s specific needs, giving you complete flexibility.
Leading security features
As part of the coaching relationship, clients will inevitably share personal data and information with the coach. When this is done digitally, the coach must take steps to ensure this information is kept safe and secure.
Quenya was designed with the latest data protection and security laws at its heart, making it both HIPAA and GDPR compliant. All identifying information and responses in the platform are safely and securely stored using top-level AES 256-bit encryption and personal PIN codes. Yet, all this information remains easily accessible to you and your clients via any device at any time.
Why are coaching plans important?
Coaching plans are important because they help employees gain valuable feedback on how to improve in their roles. This can result in employees earning higher positions within the company and contributing impressive big-picture ideas and strategies that significantly benefit the organization.
Coaching plans also allow you as a manager to provide constructive feedback on an employee’s performance, which helps them better understand which parts of their role they need to improve on. This helps put an end to any negative work habits and encourages employees to correct any errors they make in their roles.
Coaching plans also strengthen your relationship with individual employees and with your entire department. Employees will feel comfortable approaching you with advice or feedback on complex projects or challenges they’re facing in their role.
Providing employees with regular coaching plans and encouragement to meet their career goals may lead them to motivate other team members as well. This makes your work environment more positive, enjoyable, and collaborative for all employees.
How to create a coaching plan
You should evaluate each of your team members’ strengths, interests, and career goals to implement an effective and personalized coaching plan for them. Follow these steps to create a successful coaching plan for your team:
1. Establish the employees’ strengths
When you first build a coaching plan, you should determine what your strengths are as an employee. Listing the responsibilities or duties the employee completes well helps you identify which tasks to assign them and which skills to develop further to enhance their performance even more. You can also mention these strengths to your employee to show them that you’ve noticed their talents and encourage them to continue improving those skills.
2. Locate any areas of improvement
Determining an employee’s strengths helps you more easily spot potential areas to improve. List a few improvements in the employee’s role that you believe they could work on. When discussing these areas with the employee, provide examples to help them better identify and understand these challenges in their performance. Try to keep the conversation positive by expressing your confidence in the employee improving and overcoming these obstacles.
3. Ask the employee to evaluate their performance
Once you’ve expressed your viewpoint of the employee’s performance, ask them to perform a self-evaluation. This helps you understand how your team sees themselves as employees and allows you to learn any strengths or areas of improvement you may not have previously noticed.
4. Determine any obstacles in the way of the employee’s success
Before defining the employee’s goals, you must first determine which obstacles or challenges they’re facing that could be holding them back from performing effectively. Common obstacles that may prevent employees from enhancing their performance could be:
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Lack of time to focus on certain tasks or projects
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Limited training or knowledge of how to use certain workplace tools or complete work duties
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Little to no tools or resources available to educate themselves on certain projects or to finish tasks
5. Provide potential solutions to help the employee overcome the obstacle
After understanding which obstacles are keeping the employee from performing their best, you can work to find solutions to overcome them. Evaluate each specific challenge in the employee’s way and ask how they believe they can overcome it and if they need assistance from you in doing so. Encourage the employee to overcome these obstacles on their own, if possible, while also making it clear that you’re available to provide the support or resources they need.
6. Develop short-term and long-term goals
Once you no longer have obstacles keeping your employee from performing effectively, work together to establish milestones and goals for success. Focus on the areas of improvement both you and the employee mentioned and develop short-term or long-term goals that help them enhance their performance. For example, if an employee is new to an industry and is having trouble understanding and familiarizing themselves with complex terminology, a goal could be to read five industry articles a week.
7. Build an action plan for meeting these milestones
Each goal you develop should have clear action plans to help the employee reach and achieve them. Your action plan should list the steps both the employee and yourself will take to reach their end goal. Each milestone should have a tentative deadline for the employee to hit.
For instance, if an employee’s end goal is to improve their public speaking and presentation skills to eventually present a product demonstration at a conference, determine the steps you and the employee will take to do this. Some steps could be that the employee could present at a few meetings a month and gain feedback from employees or they could receive one-on-one training sessions with you once a week.
8. Schedule dates and times to regularly follow up on their progress
When actionable steps are in place, you and the employee should schedule ongoing one-on-one sessions to check on their progress, determine if any new obstacles are in their way, and provide valuable feedback. These meetings can help motivate employees to continue working toward their goals and allow you to provide positive encouragement if they feel discouraged.
General client Information
The first section of a coaching plan should include general information about the client that is relevant to the coaching relationship.
General information includes:
- Client’s Name
- Contact Details
Coaching Relationship Details
The second section of a coaching plan gives details of how the coaching relationship will run. The coaching relationship details are discussed and agreed upon in the consultation before the initial coaching session. This information is also included in a contractual coaching agreement between the coach and the client.
The details include:
- Total Number of Sessions – Will it be 4, 12, or 24 sessions?
- Frequency of Sessions – How often will the coach and client meet? Once a week? Once every other week?
- Session Day/Time – For convenience, most coaches meet with their coachees on the same day and time every session. Will the two of you meet every Monday at 2:00 PM?
- Communication Methods – How will you meet? Will you meet in person, over the telephone, video chat?
Coaching Session Details
The details of the coaching session are discussed in the first coaching session. The details are constantly revisited throughout the coaching relationship to ensure the client is on track.
The coaching session details include:
- Client goals and expectations – What are all the goals the client wants to achieve in coaching? What are the client’s expectations of coaching?
If the client has many areas to work on, the coach will need to work with the client to determine where to start. An excellent tool to use is the Coaching Satisfaction Rating Table or the Wheel of Life.
- Method for measuring progress – How will the coach and client know that the client is progressing towards the goal? How will the progress be measured?
- Special client concerns – Do the client have any concerns about coaching? If so, what are they, and how will they be addressed?
- Tasks/ pre-session planning for the coach and client – With everything discussed and documented, is there anything the coach or client needs to do before the sessions? Are there any tools or exercises the coach will need for the next session?
Coaching Action Plan
Once the coach has the general details for the coaching relationship, it is time to discuss and document a one-on-one coaching plan. This is also called an individualized coaching plan or a coaching action plan.
- Vision/Goal
A coaching plan should always start with the vision and the goal of the client. In the first coaching session, the coach should help the client identify the ideal outcome.
The vision/goal section of the coaching plan includes:
- Overall Goal – What does the client want to accomplish or need help with overall?
The coach can do a vision exercise with the client. This helps with clarity.
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- Where is the client on a scale of 0-10 about the goal?
- What needs to change or happen to get to a 10?
- When will the client get there?
- Who or what will help the client get there? What strengths and resources does the client have that will help?
- What are the possible obstacles that may hinder the client from achieving the goal?
- How will the client overcome the obstacles?
- Action Plan
Every session, the coach should review the client’s action steps from one session to the next. The action plan is discussed and documented in every coaching session.
Things to discuss and document include:
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- Tasks or action steps the client will take this week
- Target completion date for each task
- Possible obstacles that might get in the way of completing the task or step
- How to overcome obstacles that may get in the way
- Who or what will help the client move forward
- The client’s commitment level to the task or action for the week
Who is This Coaching Guide Designed For?
This change management coaching guide is designed to be used by and for:
- Change Management Coaching Practitioners
2. Career Coaches
3. Executive Coaches
4. Performance Coaches
5. Human Resources Managers
6. Business Leaders
7. Program Leads
8. HR Leaders
9. Change Manager as Coach Trainers
10. Project Managers - Team Coaches
12. Skills Coaches
13. Sports Coaches
14. Personal Development Coaches
15. Life Coaches - Employee Relations Managers
17. Change Management Practitioners
18. And anyone interested in coaching roles, techniques, and qualifications.
It can be used by coaching consultants, team coaches, and those who are doing business coaching to support a project or ongoing leadership development. It is designed to be applied to all coaching types including coaching for change management, for employees, student coaching, executives and leadership coaching, and more.
We also reference AGS coaching plan templates, tools, employee coaching templates, sample coaching plans for employees, and more that you can use for effective coaching for change management, training, and mentoring.
A Take-Home Message
Even the best coaches need a plan and guidance. Thankfully, with the many resources available through PositivePsychology.com and online coaching communities, there is little reason to run your practice in a bubble.
Likewise, if you’re busy or unsure how to get started with your practice, there is no shortage of pre-prepared templates, activities, and coaching plans you can adapt to your practice and coaching style.
We hope you’ve found some templates presented here valuable. And if you’ve tried any for yourself, let us know about your experience using them in the comments. We’d love to hear from you.
