This is not a small problem. A coaching goal that doesn’t reflect the real thing you’re working toward is worse than no goal at all. It sends the coaching in a direction that produces motion without progress. You can spend twelve sessions on the stated goal and finish feeling like something was missed — because something was.
Setting a good coaching goal is a skill. Most clients aren’t taught it, because most writing about coaching goals is aimed at coaches, not at the people sitting across from them. This piece is aimed at the client.
What a coaching goal is actually for
A coaching goal is not a target. It’s a direction.
This is the first thing that trips people up. We’re accustomed, from performance management and project planning, to goals that have a clear finish line — something that is either achieved or not achieved at the end of a defined period. SMART goals. OKRs. KPIs. The goal as destination.
Coaching goals don’t quite work like this, and trying to force them into that shape causes problems. A coaching goal is more like a heading on a compass than an address in a GPS. It tells the work where to go. It shapes the questions your coach asks, the sessions you prioritize, the actions you commit to. But it isn’t a target you’re aiming to hit by the end of session twelve.
The most common goal-setting mistakes
Setting the goal you think you should have. You’re paying for coaching, so you feel like you should want something ambitious and transformative. “I want to be a better leader.” “I want to show up more authentically.” These often come from a real place, but they’re frequently the socially acceptable version of something more specific and more uncomfortable. A coach will work with them — but the early sessions will often be about finding the real goal underneath.
Setting a goal about someone else. “I want my team to be more engaged.” “I want my partner to understand me better.” These aren’t coaching goals — they’re wishes about other people’s behaviour, and coaching can’t deliver them. What coaching can work with is your relationship to those situations: how you’re contributing to the dynamic, what you could do differently, what you actually need. The goal has to be about you.
Setting a problem as a goal. “I want to stop procrastinating.” “I want to be less anxious about presentations.” These describe what you want to move away from, not toward. They’re useful starting points — but they need to be developed into something more forward-facing. What would you be doing, how would you be showing up, if the procrastination weren’t there? That’s where the goal is.
Setting a goal that’s really a symptom. You want to improve your sleep. You want to exercise more consistently. You want to be more organized. These are real things, but they’re often downstream of something else — a lifestyle that isn’t working, a level of stress that isn’t sustainable, a mismatch between how you’re spending your time and what you actually value. A coaching engagement that stays at the symptom level will produce modest and temporary results.
Setting too many goals. Three is usually the maximum. One is often the right number. Coaching works best when it has focus. A client who arrives with seven goals usually has one goal that’s trying to disguise itself as seven.
What makes a coaching goal actually work
It reflects something you genuinely want. Not what you think you should want. Not what your manager wants for you, or what would look good on your performance review. Something you actually care about changing, developing, or figuring out. The coaching conversation has a different quality when the goal is real — and both the client and the coach can usually tell the difference.
It involves you, not other people. You are the client. Your growth, your clarity, your choices — those are the territory. Goals that depend on other people changing are fragile and frustrating. Goals about your own relationship to a situation, even a difficult one involving other people, are workable.
It’s honest about the gap. A good coaching goal names where you are and gestures toward where you want to be. The gap between those two things is where the coaching happens. If the gap is too small, the coaching won’t feel worth it. If the gap is so large it’s paralyzing, the coaching will struggle to find its footing. The sweet spot is ambitious enough to matter, realistic enough to move.
It’s allowed to evolve. The goal you set at the start of a coaching engagement is the best information you have at the time. It is not a contract. As the coaching develops, you may discover that the stated goal was pointing at something else entirely — or that what you said you wanted requires something you hadn’t anticipated. A good coaching relationship accommodates this. The goal is held lightly enough to be revised when the work reveals it needs to be.
A practical process for setting your goal
Before your first session — or at the start of a new coaching engagement — it’s worth doing some thinking on your own. Not to arrive with a polished goal statement, but to come with enough raw material that the conversation can go somewhere quickly.
What’s actually bothering you? Not what you want to achieve — what’s the thing that keeps coming up? The frustration, the stuckness, the recurring sense that something isn’t working? That’s often where the real goal lives.
What would be different if this were resolved? If the thing you named above were genuinely better — not fixed, not perfect, but better — what would your days look like? What would you be doing that you aren’t doing now? This moves you from problem to direction.
What have you already tried? If you’ve been working on this on your own and it hasn’t shifted, what have you tried? Why do you think it hasn’t worked? This tells you something about what kind of coaching might actually help.
What are you afraid the coaching will require? This one is uncomfortable and worth doing. Most people have some sense of what’s actually in the way — and some reluctance to look at it directly. Naming that reluctance, even privately, is useful information for your coach.
Bring all of this to the first session, loosely. Let the coach help you shape it. The goal-setting conversation is itself a coaching conversation — it’s not an intake form.
On SMART goals and coaching
You may have encountered SMART goals — Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound — in a work context. They’re a useful framework for certain kinds of goals, particularly operational ones with clear success criteria.
In coaching, SMART goals are sometimes useful and sometimes a distraction. The “measurable” criterion is where they most often go sideways. Many of the most important things coaching works on — clarity, confidence, the quality of your relationships, your sense of purpose — are genuinely difficult to measure in any precise way. Forcing a measurable proxy (“I’ll have sent five job applications by March”) can create a coaching goal that’s measurable without being meaningful.
The goal underneath the goal
Almost every coaching engagement has a stated goal and an underlying one. The stated goal is what brings you to coaching. The underlying goal is what the coaching actually ends up serving.
A client who says they want to improve their public speaking often discovers they want to feel less dependent on other people’s approval. A client who says they want to figure out their next career move often discovers they want permission to want something different than what they’ve been pursuing.
The coaching process is, in part, a process of discovering the goal underneath the goal. The stated goal is not a mistake or a misdirection — it’s a starting point. But the best coaching follows the thread from the surface goal to the real one, and that’s where the most lasting work happens.
You don’t have to know the underlying goal before you start. That’s partly what the coaching is for.
- A coaching goal is a direction, not a destination. It should be specific enough to guide the work, open enough to let the work find what’s real.
- The most common mistakes: setting the goal you think you should have, making it about someone else, framing a problem instead of a direction, staying at the symptom instead of the source.
- A good goal reflects something you genuinely want, involves you rather than other people, names an honest gap, and is allowed to evolve as the coaching develops.
- SMART goals are useful where the success criteria are clear. They don’t substitute for figuring out what you actually want.
- Almost every coaching engagement has a stated goal and an underlying one. The work of coaching is, in part, finding the second one.
- You don’t need a polished goal before session one. Come with raw material. Let the coach help you shape it.