Coaching Briefs

You want to be coaching. Not doing admin.

Practical AI workflows, templates, and honest tool reviews that handle the overhead, so your hours go to the work that matters. Written by someone who does this work.

What this is

I'm an executive coach. Nine years in. I didn't set out to become "the AI person" in my coaching circle. I was just drowning in notes and proposals and Sunday-afternoon admin, and I started experimenting out of pure survival.

Somewhere along the way, I got eight hours a week back. Colleagues started asking how. So I started writing it down. This is that.

All articles

I used to lose my Sundays to session notes. Here's what I do now.

It's a Sunday in March and I'm at my desk with a cup of green tea that stopped being warm about an hour ago. I have five sessions' worth of notes to write. My shorthand from Tue...

9 min read

The coaching contract template I've used for nine years (and what I've changed)

There's a paragraph in the middle of my coaching contract that lived there for almost four years before I actually read it carefully. I'd copied the bones of my original agreeme...

12 min read

The intake form questions I actually care about (and the ones I stopped asking)

The worst first session I ever ran wasn't because the client was difficult. She was smart, articulate, genuinely motivated. The problem was me. I walked in knowing her name, her...

12 min read

I've tried most of the coaching software out there. Here's what I actually use.

Last November I was onboarding a new client, a VP of product who'd been referred by someone I'd worked with two years ago. Good energy on the chemistry call. She signed the prop...

13 min read

The document that changed how my coaching engagements start

Six weeks into a promising engagement last year, my client texted me a photo of his resignation letter at 10:47 PM on a Sunday. Not a draft. The final version, already in an env...

12 min read

How I get coaching clients (and what I stopped doing)

Last March I had one of those weeks. Two clients wrapped their engagements within days of each other, a third paused to deal with a family situation, and suddenly my calendar ha...

12 min read

The feedback form coaches send but never really use

A client wrote this on her end-of-engagement form last March: "I think you pushed me harder than I wanted to be pushed, and I'm grateful for it." I read it standing at my kitche...

10 min read

Scheduling software for coaches: the honest comparison nobody writes

I used free Calendly for three years. It worked fine. My clients booked, I showed up, nobody complained. Then one morning a client, a COO I'd been working with for about four mo...

9 min read

Do you actually need a CRM? (Honest answer: probably not the one you're thinking of)

I was at a coaching conference in Denver last fall, standing at one of those too-tall cocktail tables during a networking break, when a colleague I respect said something that s...

9 min read

How I prepare for a coaching session in 12 minutes (and why I used to spend an hour)

I coach eight clients this week. Eight sessions, eight completely different worlds. By Thursday afternoon I'm supposed to walk into a conversation about executive succession wit...

10 min read

The apps coaches actually use (and the ones they try once and abandon)

I have downloaded, seriously tested, and eventually abandoned more coaching apps than I care to admit. Not because they were bad, some of them were genuinely well-designed, but ...

9 min read