If your clients eagerly await the notes from their sessions with you, you’ve certainly succeeded in adding another dash of magic and value to the experience of working with you. How do you get us clients to eagerly anticipate notes about our sessions with you? Simple:
- Let us know that we should.
- Deliver accordingly.
Let’s start with #1, “Let us know that we should eagerly anticipate notes about our session”.
If you’ve ever done a wine tasting, you know that a good sommelier can take your experience of the same gulp from “Yep, that’s wine.” to noticing (and thus appreciating!) the subtle notes. Same for food. Remember that scene in Ratatouille when Remy’s trying to get his brother to take a beat and actually notice what he’s tasting?
In both situations, the magic comes from merely being made aware of what to notice in whatever it is that you are experiencing.
So let your clients know what they should be on the look out for in session notes you’ll be giving them. Things like:
- Key insights
- A celebration of the wins
- A clear account of how to move forward
- A thoughtfully written missive that’s all about them
- A resource they’ll be able to come back to again and again
These are all things that us clients are actually excited to read. Use ’em, or come up with some of your own.
Just a quick aside during your first session is all it takes to create this with them. You call really sell them on this as a part of the value you provide in about 30 seconds. Just let them know something like:
Okay, so here’s the deal: after every session we have, you’re going to get notes from me. I’ll email them right to you. They’re gonna contain the key insights, an acknowledgement and celebration of the wins, and a clear account of how to move forward. If you’re stuck, or feeling lost, or could use a pump up, just bring ’em up and review. They’ll keep you moving forward between our sessions, and these are all going to be a souvenir you’ll get to keep long term. Cool? Cool.
Once you’ve teed up that anticipation, there is but to deliver. Take 5 minutes or so to type those up after a session, and be sure to add in some or all of the ingredients you’ve primed us to expect.
When us clients eagerly anticipate notes about your sessions, that’s another part of your coaching we’re excited for. More importantly, it’s one that happens to bring back into clear focus the real substance you’re giving us: the magic that happened during those sessions.
Session Notes are of course a bread-and-butter feature of CA. The system makes it very easy to compose these, share these, and have them in a handy, easy-to-peruse record for both you and your client. With CA, during that pep talk you can show them their Session Notes area (as part of say an orientation screen share) as THE place to find and revisit them all, plus maybe give a nod to the fact that you’ll email them off as they get written (also super easy with CA).
Key Insights make Session Notes even better, by allowing you to mindfully capture what really mattered from a given session (usually it’s 1-3 insightful statements) that are ripe for review and keeping focused on. Let them know this area will always be the place to get the top line insights that have accumulated while working with you, and that they can click on any one of them to jump to the full session notes from which the insight came.
