I don't follow a script in sessions. Anyone who's been coaching for more than two years probably stopped using a rigid protocol around then, because the clients stopped fitting it. But I do have structure. It's loose, it bends, and some sessions barely resemble it. But when I'm nine years in and having a hard Thursday with a client who's been in crisis mode for six weeks, the structure is the thing that keeps me from just sitting with them in the chaos instead of doing my job.
That's the part they don't tell you in coach training. The structure isn't for your client. It's for you. A session with good bones means you can follow a client into a digression, stay with them when they cry, let the silence run longer than is comfortable, and still find your way back to something useful. Without it, you're not present. You're adrift and hoping nobody notices.
I used GROW early on. Most of us did. It was fine. It gave me a container when I didn't have one of my own yet. But by year three I'd mostly abandoned it, or more accurately, I'd absorbed whatever was useful and discarded the scaffolding. What I have now isn't a model. It doesn't have a name. It's just the shape that nine years of real sessions has worn into me.
Why "no structure" is still a structure (just a worse one)
Here's the thing coaches don't always want to admit: if you walk into a session with no structure, you still have a structure. It's just an unconscious one, and it tends to be driven by wherever your anxiety pulls you.
For some coaches, that means defaulting to advice-giving when the client sounds stuck. For others, it means long comfortable silences that feel deep but aren't going anywhere. For me, in my early years, it meant following the client's energy wherever it went and calling it "client-led." Sometimes that was exactly right. Sometimes it was me avoiding the hard question because I hadn't built enough structure in my own head to hold a direction.
Structure isn't the same as being formulaic. A jazz musician knows the chord changes. Knowing them is what lets you improvise freely. The coaches I've seen who feel most constrained by structure are usually the ones who haven't internalized it yet. When you have to think about the framework, the framework gets in the way. When you've been using the same shape long enough that it's invisible, you can go wherever the session needs to go and still know, quietly, what you're doing.
Clients never know there's a structure. Not a single one has said "I notice you're moving into the closing phase." What they notice is that sessions feel purposeful, that things don't just trail off, that they leave with something. That's the structure doing its job invisibly.
How I open
The first five minutes of a session do more work than most coaches realize. You're not just catching up. You're calibrating. You're reading the room, getting a sense of where your client actually is today versus where they were two weeks ago, and you're setting the container for the next 50 minutes.
My opening question is always some version of the same thing: "What do you most need from this hour?"
I've tried other openings. I've tried "What's on your mind?" (too loose, clients often lead with something that's actually not the thing). I've tried "How are you?" (worse, you end up in small talk). I've tried "What would make this session a success?" (not bad, but a bit managerial, clients sometimes hear it as "what are your goals for today" which puts them in delivery mode instead of exploration mode).
"What do you most need from this hour?" does something different. It's a needs question, not a goals question. It invites a different kind of honesty. And it opens almost every session in a way that tells me immediately whether my client came in prepared for deep work or whether they walked in distracted and we're going to need a few minutes before we get anywhere real.
I never rush this answer. Whatever they say, I sit with it for a moment. Sometimes the first answer isn't the real answer. If someone says "I just want to think through a decision," there's usually something underneath that, and if I ask one more question before we move on, we find it.
Staying curious when you think you know
The middle of a session is where structure becomes a liability if you're not careful. You've listened to your client for fifteen minutes. You have a hypothesis. Maybe a strong one. And the structure is whispering: "now would be a good time to test it."
Resist that.
The structure should hold open a question, not push you toward an answer. What I try to do in the middle section of a session is stay in what I'd call a posture of active not-knowing. I have the hypothesis. I'm not pretending I don't. But I'm also aware that my hypothesis is built from pattern recognition, and my clients are not patterns. They're specific people in specific situations that I will never fully understand from outside.
There's a technique I've developed for this, though "technique" makes it sound more deliberate than it is. When I notice I'm ready to make a move, I ask myself: "What question would I ask if I didn't already think I knew the answer?" It usually changes the question I actually ask. Sometimes by a lot.
The middle of a session should feel, to the client, like being genuinely explored. Not interrogated, not guided toward a predetermined destination, but genuinely explored. When it works, clients often say something like "I've never thought about it that way" or "I'm not sure where that came from but it feels important." That's the structure doing its job. Creating enough shape to hold a real conversation without dictating where it goes.
How I close
Two questions. Same ones every session.
First: "What are you taking away from today?"
I ask this and then I stop talking. Whatever they say, I let it land. Sometimes they summarize what we covered. Sometimes they say something I didn't expect, something that happened in the session that I didn't mark as significant but clearly was for them. Either way, it tells me something. And it gives the client a moment to consolidate, to hear themselves say what mattered.
Second: "What's one thing you'll do differently before we next meet?"
Not "what's your action plan." Not "what are your next steps." One thing. One concrete thing. Small enough to be real, specific enough to be trackable.
I got into the habit of asking it this way after watching too many sessions close with a list of intentions that evaporated before Thursday. One thing is completable. One thing can be reported back on at the next session. One thing means the client walks out with a commitment instead of a to-do list.
Between those two questions, the session has shape. The opening created a container. The middle held it. The close completes it. The client doesn't experience this as a template. They experience it as a conversation that went somewhere and ended well.
Where AI actually fits in here
AI doesn't belong in the session itself. I want to be clear about that. Margaret doesn't sit in the room with me, there's no transcript running, no real-time prompting. The conversation is between me and the client, and that's where it stays.
Where AI earns its keep is in the ten minutes before and the three minutes after.
Before a session, I send Margaret a quick brief: client context, what came up last time, anything I flagged in my notes to revisit, and the question "what's the one thread worth pulling on today?" Margaret doesn't know my client. But this exercise forces me to surface the context I have, and Margaret's response usually helps me think about how to frame my opening question. Not what to ask, exactly, but where to be curious.
The prep isn't about having a plan. It's about clearing out the noise so I'm actually present when I walk in.
After a session, I have about three minutes before the next one or before I lose the thread entirely. I've learned to use that window. I give Margaret a quick voice memo or a few typed sentences: what surfaced, what I noticed, what question I didn't ask that I wish I had. Margaret turns it into a short note I can actually use at next session.
Without this, I'm relying on the notes I scribbled mid-session, which are half-legible and missing half the texture. With it, I have something that actually captures what happened instead of just what was said.
What new coaches get wrong about structure
They follow it. Faithfully. Visibly. And clients feel it.
I've supervised a few coaches early in their careers, and there's a tell: when a client says something unexpected, the coach gets a micro-flicker of anxiety because it doesn't fit the framework, and then they redirect. They may not notice they're doing it. The client usually does.
Structure is for internalization, not adherence. The goal is to use a framework long enough that it becomes invisible, not to use it as a checklist. If you're thinking about what phase of the session you're in, you're not listening to your client. That's the point at which the structure is doing harm.
The client I lost in year three, I was following a process. I had an assessment. I had goals. I had a structured agenda. I was so focused on executing the framework that I missed the person. They fired me politely and I spent a long time afterward asking what I'd been doing all those sessions if not coaching.
Structure is a trellis. You build it, you train the plant, and eventually you forget it's there because the plant is growing on its own. If you can still see the trellis, you're not done yet.
The sessions I'm most proud of from this year, I couldn't have told you afterward what the structure was. I just knew we'd gone somewhere real and come back with something true. That's what the bones are for.