Preparing for an Executive Coaching Session: How to Pick a Session Topic

One of the most important aspects of a one-on-one executive coaching engagement is that you, the leader, are clear on what the focus of your engagement will be. You and your coach will align on that focus at the start of the engagement. Where are you now, and where are you trying to go? You will design your coaching roadmap together, choose potential coaching session topics, and how you will measure success.

But what happens once you’ve kicked off the engagement? The topics you cover in each coaching session play an important role in helping you progress in your areas of focus. Your executive coach may play a lead role in some sessions. More often, you will decide the topic for individual sessions with your coach. 

You can expect that for most coaching sessions, you’ll join the meeting with your coach and be given the floor: “What do you want to focus on today?” 

3 thoughtful ways to find a topic for your coaching session:

Here are three questions you can ask yourself to help you prepare for an upcoming coaching session.

What’s on my agenda as a busy executive?

Let’s look at the concepts of a “Big Agenda” and a “little agenda” to answer this question.

Your “Big Agenda” is your purpose, mission, or desired outcomes. Making a specific impact in a leadership role may be your Big Agenda. Making big shifts in your leadership style may be another. Your Big Agenda is likely part of your goals for the coaching engagement. Building momentum around your Big Agenda is an example of a topic you may explore in an individual coaching session.

A “little agenda” relates to the day-to-day activities and experiences that support the Big Agenda. Rallying your team to support a mission might be a “little agenda” one week: perhaps you are leading an upcoming team meeting and want to conclude that meeting with everyone’s commitment to the mission. Preparing for that meeting is a great way to spend a coaching session.

Over time, your coaching session topics may move between little agendas and Big Agendas. Leadership roles often require you to zoom in and zoom out to be effective.  

Which thoughts are top of mind for me as a leader this week?

If your agendas aren’t helping you produce a clear coaching topic in a given week, reflect on which thoughts have been ever-present for you.

• What am I mulling over? 
• What do I find myself drawn to? 
• What has been disruptive or distracting? 
• What feels nebulous? 
• What am I curious about? 

The answers to any of these questions are clues to topics that seek your attention. A coaching session can help you gain clarity around the thoughts you find yourself carrying, how they relate to your coaching engagement focus, and what you may want to do with them.

Which emotions are dominating my experience as a leader right now?

Perhaps agendas or thoughts are not the highlights of your experiences in a given week. Perhaps emotions are.

Emotional highs and lows – and even steady states – are cues into areas that can benefit from coaching. Feeling elated by a recent win, for example, is a rich experience to work through in a coaching session. You can gain important insights into what factors lead to positive feelings for you, and brainstorm how to recreate them in the context of your goals. Feeling frustrated by a disagreement, as another example, is also a very helpful experience to bring to a session. You can learn through a coaching conversation what caused the frustration, how it impacts you, and what you may shift in your approach to reduce, redirect, or eliminate the potential for that same frustration in the future.

Our agendas, thoughts, and emotions are all meaningful sources of coaching topics. They are doorways to learning about ourselves and what’s important to us.

Reflecting on these sources prior to a coaching session helps to maximize your time with your coach, as you’ll be able to dive right in when you meet. Reflection between sessions is also a critical part of the overall self-development process.

If you don’t have clarity on a topic before a session, don’t sweat it. Some days it will be easy to identify a clear topic, other days you may have multiple to pick from, and sometimes you’ll face a blank. Go to the session as you are. Your coach will help you navigate what will be most helpful to you at that time, in service of your goals.

Over time, you’ll develop your own rhythm with your coach for session topics.

2 examples of coaching rhythms that shape coaching topics

Here are examples of very different rhythms I have with two current executive coaching clients:

Client 1 – Rhythm of Diligence.

I am working with a hospital director who has been a coaching client for over six months. She diligently completes the written prep work I give her for every session. Not only does it help her deepen her self-awareness and come up with topics for us to cover, it gives me a chance to see where her mind is at before we get together. That visibility helps me ideate on what direction we might go in a coaching session, taking her goals and growth to date into account. That said, I always keep my mind, eyes, and ears wide open going into a session as the best coaching meets the client where they are in that moment.

Client 2 – Rhythm of Presence.

I am working with a Chief of Staff who has been a client on and off for more than 18 months. She deals with lots of logistics in her day job. Our session time is a welcome change of pace for her. In our first three months of working together, she would complete the written session prep. She does not do it anymore. She comes to sessions without a topic. However, it works for us. She is fully present when she gets on a call. In the first few minutes of the call, she shares reflections and insights she has gained since the last session. From her summary, I’m able to extract coaching session topics for the current session that resonate well with her and keep her moving forward.

Take time for reflection, and trust the coaching process.

Coaching can help you better understand why you may be planning, thinking, and feeling the way you are. Coaching can also help you figure out what you want to do with the insights you gain about those “whys” to reach your goals. Preparing for an upcoming coaching session is a worthwhile way to make the most of your overall coaching engagement. Over time, you will find a rhythm with your coach.

Please note: coaching is not therapy, healthcare, rehabilitation, or medical in nature. If you have any health or well-being concerns relating to particular thoughts and/or emotions, please consider consulting a health professional or other support to best meet those health needs.