Here’s a novel twist on what you produce as a coach: Session Notes.
Not conversations, not insights, not breakthroughs, not even results in cold, hard numbers.
Session Notes. Your job? It’s to produce notes from your sessions.
Bear with me here. This is not literally true. It’s a place to stand in order to give you power. Let’s explore how.
What goes into Session Notes?
Trick question; there is no standard recipe, no one answer.
They could be half-legible scratch intended for the coach’s eyes only, or some elaborate template to be filled out that gets put into some permanent file and/or disseminated to oversight teams.
Here’s what I think constitute GOOD session notes:
- An account of what’s so
- An account of new accomplishments
- An account of what’s to be done next
- An account of key insights that arose
Make no mistake, this list is made up. But as an inventory of components of the product that you could take on being responsible for, you could do far worse (and most coaches do).
The what’s so make it clear to an observer the situation being worked on.
The new accomplishments lets an observer know what this work was good for.
The what’s to be done next makes the coachee clear how to move forward.
The key insights allow a coachee to regain whatever clarity and wisdom obtained indefinitely.
Session Notes last, and are tangible. Conversations don’t, and aren’t1I know some of you are thinking “What about transcripts and recordings?” Well, do you ever have difficulty getting coachees to fully show up to and participate in the process? Yeah, I thought so. Your median client doesn’t want to sift through a rerun, a verbatim rerun, of a conversation they already had..
Session Notes can be revisited, reviewed, shared. Conversations cannot.
If conversations are your product, you have a persistence problem.
If Session Notes are your product, you are motivated to have your conversations pack in the good stuff that can, in turn, be captured in those notes:
- You have to get clear about what’s so.
- You have to be attentive in calling for, driving, measuring and recording results.
- You have to distinguish clear steps by which to move forward.
- You have to have some insights arise that are worth remembering.
You have to write them with integrity, of course. You have to resist the temptation to do scummy things like turning them into puff pieces just for favorable optics. This can be gamed like anything else, but doing so if the purview of charlatans. A ruse of spinning mediocre coaching and outcomes into sterling write-ups won’t last.
Done with integrity, good Session Notes serve several masters. The coachee, certainly. But also you as coach, to keep yourself honest about truly knowing the person you’re working with. Good Session Notes also allow any observer to get a sense for and appreciate the value you provide and the results that were produced.
Please note that “Observer” is a pretty abstract term, and intentionally so. It could be the client himself, looking back to consider what happened when contemplating whether to continue. It could be the manager of several employees that you’ve been hired to work with, keen to know how it went, or any other interested party who’s footing the bill, wondering if they got their money’s worth. An observer could also be a prospective client who’s checking you out, and doesn’t know you from the thousands of other coaches out there touting the same abstract platitudes about inner peace, power, leadership, or whatever.
Good Session Notes, intimately specific to some audiences and properly anonymized to others, do a lot of heavy lifting. Especially with uninitiated newcomers, who won’t understand the platitudes but will understand a legit glimpse into your work.
So consider that Session Notes are the product you are actually selling. When you relate to them as that and nothing less (and do them with integrity) they compel you to refine your conversations in ways that makes good Session Notes possible. And that, of course, makes your coaching that much more effective AND attractive.
And with CoachAccountable Key Insights, you can surface the most important bits for easy review, allowing your clients to stay present to the things that really matter and revisit the conversations from which they originated.
Notes:
- 1I know some of you are thinking “What about transcripts and recordings?” Well, do you ever have difficulty getting coachees to fully show up to and participate in the process? Yeah, I thought so. Your median client doesn’t want to sift through a rerun, a verbatim rerun, of a conversation they already had.
