Coaching Tools
Tools & Resources for Coaching
Practical guides for getting more from the process — whether you’re preparing to start, already working with a coach, or trying to make the work between sessions actually count.
Good coaching is a collaboration. What happens in the session matters — but so does what you bring to it, what you do between sessions, and how clearly you can articulate what you’re actually working on. The clients who get the most from coaching aren’t necessarily the ones with the most pressing problems or the most motivation. They’re the ones who know how to use the process.
These resources are designed to help with exactly that — whether you’re preparing to hire a coach, currently in a coaching engagement, or trying to understand what makes the difference between coaching that changes something and coaching that doesn’t.
Coaching is a skill on both sides
Most people assume that coaching effectiveness depends almost entirely on the coach. The coach’s training, their questions, their ability to hold the space. And the coach matters enormously — finding the right one is the most important decision in the process.
But the client brings skill to the process too, and that skill is learnable. Knowing how to set a goal that’s actually useful — specific enough to work toward, meaningful enough to sustain effort. Knowing what to do between sessions so that insights don’t evaporate. Knowing how to use discomfort rather than avoid it. Knowing when you’re in the right coaching relationship and when something isn’t working.
None of this is complicated. But it isn’t instinctive either, particularly if you haven’t worked with a coach before. These guides make it explicit.
The work between sessions is where most of the actual change happens. The session creates the insight and the intention. What you do with it between sessions determines whether anything is different three months from now.
What you’ll find here
Goal-setting done properly. Not the vague aspirational goals that sound good in a first session and fade by the third. Coaching goals that are honest about what you actually want, specific enough to guide real work, and grounded in why it matters to you right now. The difference between a well-formed coaching goal and a poorly formed one is often the difference between an engagement that moves somewhere and one that circles.
Between-session work. Coaching homework has a reputation for being either too light (a vague intention to “notice” something) or too heavy (an assignment that feels like extra work on top of an already full life). The right between-session work is specific, meaningful, and directly connected to what emerged in the session. Understanding what that looks like helps you advocate for it — and use it when you get it.
Making sense of the process. What a first session actually looks like, how coaching engagements typically unfold, what to do if something isn’t working, when to raise concerns with your coach and how. The practical mechanics that nobody explains because everyone assumes you already know.
These resources work before, during, and after
You don’t need to be in a coaching engagement to use these guides. Several of them — the values clarification process, the reflection and journaling primer — are designed to be genuinely useful as standalone tools, whether or not coaching is part of your picture right now.
Reading about goal-setting before you start helps you arrive at the first session with more clarity. Understanding between-session work in advance means you’re ready to use it when it’s assigned. And if you’ve finished a coaching engagement and want to maintain what you built — the frameworks here apply to self-directed work too.
COACHING TOOLS
Explore the Articles
Practical guides for using the coaching process well — before, during, and between sessions.
Your Core Values: A Complete Guide to What They Are, How to Find Them, and Why They Change Everything
Most people, if asked to name their core values, will pause for a moment and then produce a short list of words that sound right. Honesty. Family. Growth. Integrity. The words aren't wrong, exactly. But they often haven't been truly examined — they've been selected, the way you might choose something from a menu you've seen before without really reading it. This matters because values that haven't been examined...
Awareness, Reflection, and Journaling: A Beginner’s Guide
There is a particular kind of thinking that most people almost never do. Not the planning kind — most of us do plenty of that. Not the problem-solving kind, or the worrying kind, or the replaying-conversations kind. Those happen automatically, often whether we want them to or not. The kind of thinking that rarely happens on its own is the kind where you step back from your own experience and actually look at it....
Coaching Homework: Why the Work Between Sessions Matters
A coaching engagement that is vivid inside sessions and dormant between them will produce some real moments and limited lasting change.
Here’s what between-session work actually involves — and why each type matters.
How to Set a Coaching Goal That Actually Works
A coaching goal that doesn’t reflect the real thing you’re working toward is worse than no goal at all.
Here’s how to set one that actually works — and what the goal underneath the goal usually turns out to be.
Where to go next
If you’re using these tools to prepare for coaching and haven’t yet found a coach, the Finding a Coach section is the practical next step — how to evaluate coaches, what questions to ask, and how to navigate the search in an unregulated market.
If you want to understand more about what coaching actually is before you commit to the process, Coaching Basics covers the foundations — what research says about effectiveness, how sessions work, and how to know whether you’re ready.