You’ve met with your client once. Maybe you’ve been in contact with her between that first session and your upcoming second session, because you invited her to check in with you periodically and she has, or maybe because you’ve been doing a bit of email coaching between sessions. Now, you have a second session scheduled. How should you conceptualize this second session?
Are the two of you starting fresh, because it might make sense to articulate her basic issues a second time? Or are the two of you continuing, building upon and learning from that first session, from any interactions you’ve had between sessions, and from the work your client has done or attempted to do between sessions?
Or maybe you’re doing both, starting fresh and continuing?
I think that the answer is indeed “both.”
To turn this “both” into two monologues, which of course a coach would likely never actually deliver, that might sound like this.
Monologue 1
“The last time we met, we got three or four goals articulated. Let me repeat them, to make sure I’ve got them right. You wanted to work on creating a healthier lifestyle. You wanted to do something to help yourself sleep better. You wanted to get out of your current job and find a job that better suits your needs. And you wanted to reconnect with that novel you started writing a couple of years ago. Do I have those about right?”
Monologue 2
“Okay, with regard to your writing goal, we agreed that you’d try to get to your desk five days a week, first thing each morning, and write for thirty minutes. But when you checked in, it was clear that that plan wasn’t working so well. So, we tried the simple change of reducing those thirty minutes to twenty minutes. Did that help? Did that make any difference?”
I think a second session is, first of all, a summarizing and recapitulating of a client’s initial presentation of their challenges and desires. Second, it is looking carefully at how the interval between session one and session two went (which interval may have been a week, two weeks, or a month). Third, it is examining your client’s challenges in light of how that interval went. And, fourth, it is plotting new strategies that take into account what was learned during the interval and what percolates up in the second session.
This isn’t a linear affair, but it does have some natural and logical linear energy to it. To put it in a sentence, it sounds like: “Let’s first remind ourselves about what brought you to coaching, let’s see how this first month went, and let’s see what we’ve learned from this first month that can help us as we move forward.”
Very often step two, checking in on the month, will come before step one, summarizing. This might sound like:
You: “Good to see you!”
Client: “Good to see you, too.”
You: “Catch me up a little. How has the month gone?”
And your client will start where he or she wants to start. Then, at some natural and appropriate point, you might say: “Okay, I think we have a good sense of how the month went with regard to the songwriting. Can we touch base on the other goals you set? I believe they were the following three?” And you might summarize.
The second session is like the first session in that a client’s challenges and goals get named again. It is different from the first session in that time has passed between the two sessions, during which time your client did, or intended to do, certain things. If you hold space for both, you’ll find yourself having rich second sessions.
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