coaching_conversation v1.0.0

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name: coaching_conversation description: Run a one to one coaching conversation for someone who is stuck: contract the session, surface the real blocker with question banks by blocker type, listen and reflect without taking over, and close with actions the person owns. Use when coaching, mentoring in a coaching style, preparing for a one to one, helping someone who is stuck on a goal, or rehearsing a coaching session with scored practice.

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Coaching Conversation

Purpose

Help a person who is stuck think clearly, name the real blocker, and leave with an action they chose themselves.

Coaching here means a structured conversation, not advice, teaching, or therapy. The person does the thinking. Your job is to hold the structure, ask questions that do real work, reflect what you hear, and protect their ownership of the result. If the person leaves with your plan, the session failed even if the plan was good.

The structure in this skill rests on three established sources. The GROW model, developed in the 1980s by Graham Alexander, Alan Fine, and Sir John Whitmore, and spread by Whitmore's Coaching for Performance (1992), gives the session spine: Goal, Reality, Options, Will. The International Coaching Federation (ICF) Core Competencies give the professional frame, in particular Competency 3, Establishes and Maintains Agreements, and Competency 6, Listens Actively. Motivational interviewing, developed by William R. Miller and Stephen Rollnick, gives the listening tools in the OARS set and a warning that runs through the whole skill: the urge to fix the person yourself, the righting reflex, makes them defend staying stuck.

Use this skill for a single one to one session or a short series, with a colleague, a report, a mentee, a client, or a peer. It does not cover therapy, counselling, crisis support, formal performance management, or mentoring where you are expected to teach from your own experience. Section 8 covers what to do when a session turns out to need one of those instead.

Workflow

1. Decide if coaching fits before you book anything

Run four checks.

• Is the problem one the person can act on? Coaching works on goals, choices, habits, and next steps inside the person's control. It does not fix a broken process, a staffing gap, or someone else's behaviour.
• Does the person want the conversation? Coaching imposed on someone who did not ask for it becomes an inspection. If a manager sent them, say so openly and agree what, if anything, gets reported back, before the session.
• Are you the right person? If you set their pay, grade their work, or are part of the problem, your questions will not be heard as neutral. Name the conflict or hand the coaching to someone else.
• Is anything in the story a health, safety, or legal matter? If yes, route it first. Coaching can resume later, alongside proper support, if the person wants it.

2. Contract the session, out loud, in the first five minutes

Contracting is the part most often skipped and the part the ICF treats as a core skill at every session, not only the first one. Cover six points, briefly, in plain words.

• Topic: what the person wants to work on today, chosen by them, not by you.
• Session outcome: what they want to leave with. A decision, a shortlist, a first step, a clearer picture. All are valid outcomes.
• How you will know: one measure in their words. "I will know this helped if I can say the blocker in one sentence."
• Significance: why this topic matters to them now. One question: "What makes this the thing to work on today?"
• Time and shape: how long you have, and that you will keep the agreed topic or renegotiate it openly if it shifts. Drifting onto a new topic without agreeing it is a contract break, even a friendly one.
• Confidentiality and its limits: what stays in the room, who else has a claim on it (a sponsor, an employer), and the narrow cases where you would have to break it, such as a risk of serious harm. Say the limits before they are tested, not after.

Also name what coaching is and is not, in one sentence, the first time you work with someone: "I will ask questions and hold the structure. I will not give you the answer, and this is not therapy."

A worked contract line lives in the practice scenarios. Run your written session plan through the checker before a hard session:

python3 scripts/session_check.py --score plan.txt

The checker flags advice takeover, diagnosis or cure claims, person labels, and vague closing actions, and scores five elements from 0 to 2 each: Contract, Goal, Reality, Options, Commitment.

3. Run the session on the GROW spine

Use GROW as a scaffold, not a script. A 50 minute template is below. Adapt the timings, keep the order, and keep roughly half the session on Goal and Reality. Most weak sessions rush to options.

• Minutes 0 to 5, Contract. Section 2 above.
• Minutes 5 to 15, Goal. What the person wants, in their words, and what good looks like in concrete detail. Test ownership: if the goal contains "should" and someone else's name, it is not their goal yet.
• Minutes 15 to 30, Reality. What is happening now, what they have already tried, and one concrete recent example walked through step by step. Separate facts from the story about the facts. This is the uncomfortable part and the part that makes options real, so do not skip it to be kind.
• Minutes 30 to 42, Options. Generate before judging. Ask "What else could you do?" at least twice after the first answer. Include one option that costs nothing and one they have already ruled out, and ask what made them rule it out.
• Minutes 42 to 50, Will, also called Way Forward. Section 7 below.

Order matters for a plain reason. Goal before Reality stops the person shrinking their aim to fit this week's constraints. Reality before Options stops you both solving a problem nobody has actually looked at. Options before Will stops the session landing on the first idea, which is usually the one that already failed.

You may loop back. New information in Options often changes Reality, and a flat Reality section often means the Goal was wrong. Loop back openly: "That changes what we said the goal was. Do you want to restate it?"

4. Listen with OARS, and keep your hands off the wheel

Borrow the four core skills of motivational interviewing. Together they are called OARS.

• Open questions: questions that cannot be answered yes or no. "What is the hardest part of this?" opens thinking. "Is the deadline the problem?" closes it.
• Affirmations: name a real strength or effort you have actually seen. "You kept that project moving through two staff changes" is an affirmation. General praise is not, and flattery breaks trust fast.
• Reflective listening: say back what you heard, slightly sharpened, and let them correct it. Simple reflection repeats their words. Complex reflection offers the meaning under them: "You are not short of ideas. You are short of a way to choose between them." A good reflection gets a "yes, exactly" or a useful correction. Both move the session.
• Summaries: at each turn between GROW stages, offer a short summary of what has been said and check it. "So far: the goal is X, you have tried Y, and the thing that keeps stopping it is Z. What did I miss?" Summaries are where the person often hears their own blocker for the first time.

Working ratios to aim for, as practice targets rather than research findings: reflect more often than you question, ask one question at a time, and let silence run. A pause after a hard question is the person thinking. Filling it with a second question steals the first one's answer.

The failure mode to watch in yourself is the righting reflex: jumping in with a fix, a story from your own life, or a suggestion dressed as a question. When you feel it, convert the fix into a question or hold it until Section 6.

5. Surface the real blocker with the right question bank

The stated problem is rarely the blocker. "I need more time" can mean an unclear goal, a full calendar, a fear of being judged on the result, or a second commitment that pays better.

Listen for the blocker type, then work from that bank in references/question-banks.md. The banks cover seven types:

• Unclear goal: the aim is borrowed, vague, or keeps moving.
• Reality fog: a strong story with no dated example under it.
• No options, or one option repeated: the person sees no routes, or keeps re-running a failed one.
• Low confidence: the plan is clear and agreed, and belief in carrying it out is not.
• Competing commitment and ambivalence: part of the person gains from staying as things are.
• Overload and capacity: the goal is wanted and clear, and the week has no room for it.
• Missing skill, information, or permission: the gap needs teaching, a fact, or someone else's decision, not more coaching.

Each bank has a test question that tells you whether you have found the blocker or a polite surface answer. Use the test before moving on.

Two tools that cut across banks:

• Scaling rulers, from motivational interviewing. Ask importance and confidence separately, each 0 to 10: "How important is this change to you, 0 to 10?" and "How confident are you that you could do this first step, 0 to 10?" Then ask why the number is that number and not zero, or not lower. That follow-up draws out the person's own reasons and past proof. Never ask why the number is not higher. That question invites them to argue for staying stuck.
• Exception questions, from solution-focused work by Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg. "Tell me about a recent time this problem could have happened and did not. What was different that day?" Exceptions are evidence the person already owns a piece of the solution.

6. Handle advice honestly

Coaching does not ban your knowledge. It bans smuggling it in.

• Default: do not advise. Ask, reflect, summarise.
• If you hold a fact the person plainly needs, ask permission and label it: "I know how that approval process works. Do you want the fact, or do you want to keep thinking first?" Give the fact plainly, then hand the thinking back: "Given that, what options do you see now?"
• If the person asks you to mentor or teach instead, agree the switch out loud and note that the session changed mode. Do not drift between coach and expert without naming it. The person cannot tell which rules apply, and neither can you.
• Never dress advice as a question. "Have you thought about just talking to her?" is advice with a question mark, and the person hears it as your instruction plus their blame if it fails.

7. Close with actions the person owns

The last section decides whether the session changed anything. Close in this order.

1. Summary, in their words as much as you can. Offer it and let them correct it.
2. First step, chosen by them. One step, small enough to do, concrete enough to check. "Send the draft" is a step. "Work on the draft" is not.
3. A date. By when, on which day. No date means no step.
4. Confidence check. Run the confidence ruler on the step itself. If it lands at 5 or below, the step is too big, the date is wrong, or a blocker is still unnamed. Shrink the step or go back to Section 5. Do not cheerlead a low number upward.
5. Support and obstacles. "What could get in the way, and what will you do when it does? What support do you want, and from whom?"
6. Check-in they choose. Accountability works when the person picks it: a note to you, a line in your next session, a word with a peer. Imposed reporting turns coaching into monitoring, and the person starts performing instead of thinking.
7. Close the contract. Restate what was agreed, confirm confidentiality holds for it, and thank them for the work. Add nothing new after the close.

Write the closing summary down, in the shape the checker scores, and send it to the person the same day when the setting allows it. Keep your own notes short, factual, and dated, and store them where your confidentiality agreement says they live.

8. Hold the boundaries

• Coaching is not therapy. If the person describes symptoms that are hurting their daily life, long-running distress, trauma, or a health problem, stop coaching that topic, say plainly that it sits outside coaching, and help them find proper support if they want help finding it. A pause is a good outcome here, not a failed session. The practice scenarios include a worked version of this moment.
• Risk of harm comes before confidentiality. If someone describes a plan to harm themselves or another person, follow your local safeguarding route and tell the person what you are doing and why. You named this limit in the contract for exactly this moment.
• Dual roles need naming. If you are also their manager, say which hat you are wearing for this conversation, agree what from it can and cannot appear in a performance process, and keep that agreement. If you cannot keep it, do not coach them.
• Sponsor triangle: when an employer or sponsor pays, agree in advance what the sponsor receives. Attendance and broad progress themes are common. Session content belongs to the person being coached, and sharing it without their permission ends coaching as a safe space for everyone who hears about it.
• Do not coach someone through wrongdoing. Helping a person plan deception, evasion, or harm is not a coaching goal, whatever frame it arrives in.

9. Rehearse before a hard session

Run one practice round from references/practice-scenarios.md. Write the plan, score it with the checker, compare it with the model answer, and rewrite the weakest element once. Four scenarios cover a manager who will not delegate, a stalled career change with a hidden competing commitment, a founder with no room in the week, and a request that turns out not to be coaching at all.

Output Contract

For a prepared session, produce:

• A contract script for the first five minutes, covering topic, session outcome, how you will know, significance, time, and confidentiality with its limits.
• The GROW plan for the session, with the goal in the person's likely words, two reality tests, and the blocker bank you expect to use, plus a fallback bank.
• A written session plan that has been run through scripts/session_check.py --score, with the score noted.

For a finished session, produce:

• A closing summary: the goal as restated, the blocker as the person named it, the first step they chose, its date, their confidence score and what supports it, and the check-in they chose.
• Your private note: short, factual, dated, with no labels about the person's character and nothing you would not want them to read.
• Any mode switch, boundary call, or referral you made, recorded plainly with the reason.

For a practice session, produce the scored plan, the rewrite, and the new score.

Operating Rules

• The person owns the goal, the options, and the action. If any of the three came from you, the session drifted into advice. Name it and hand it back.
• One question at a time, then silence. Stacked questions get the easiest answer and lose the rest.
• Reflect more than you advise, and summarise at every stage change.
• Ask why a scaling number is not lower, never why it is not higher.
• Never skip contracting to save time. Five minutes of contract saves the last ten minutes of confusion about what the session was for.
• Keep roughly half the session on Goal and Reality. Options built on a foggy reality fail in the real week.
• A confidence score of 5 or below on a closing step means shrink the step or find the missing blocker. It never means encourage harder.
• Confidentiality is the default, its limits are stated up front, and sponsor reporting never includes session content without the person's permission.
• Coaching stops where therapy, crisis support, discipline, or wrongdoing begins. Stopping well is part of the skill, not a failure of it.
• Keep notes short, factual, and dated. No character labels, no motive guesses, nothing you could not defend if the person read the note.