How To Develop A Coaching Plan: 12 Examples and Templates (2024)

Successful coaching doesn’t happen by accident, and even the best coaching tools can fail to deliver results without a proper game plan.

Creating a coaching plan is a foolproof way to ensure you deliver the right solutions in the most strategic way for your clients, so you can supercharge their chances of success like a pro.

Before you begin, we recommend working along with Quenza’s tools, for just $1 for the first month. Our 1-month trial of Quenza’s toolkit will give you all you need to plan out your coaching strategy easily and efficiently, so that you can help your clients achieve their goals even more effectively.

What To Include In Your Coaching Plan

Coaching plans are strategies for the work that you’ll do with a client throughout the course of your collaboration. They help you ‘blueprint’ your coaching program or package from start to finish, essentially solidifying the ‘how’ and ‘with what’ of your sessions together.

Having a plan allows you to develop a logical path forward for your client. While it may follow an established coaching framework such as GROW or CLEAR, it will inevitably be a customized roadmap that includes your professional tools and which is aligned with your client’s goals.

Coaching plans help you ‘blueprint’ your coaching program or package from start to finish, essentially solidifying the ‘how’ and ‘with what’ of your sessions with clients.

Coaching plans typically cover the logistics of your coaching relationship, such as:[1]

1. Your processes for onboarding or orienting your client, e.g. your initial conversations and coaching agreement
2. How you will help your client set goals or identify their growth/development opportunities
3. The resources and tools you’ll provide them with, e.g. lessons, coaching exercises, and activities
4. Your approaches for measuring progress, e.g. with assessments, surveys, or milestones
5. How you’ll support them along the way, such as with feedback or discussions, and
6. Your plan for keeping them engaged, motivated, and on track.

Let’s look at a few examples.

Coaching Plans For Employees

As a leader or executive, planning helps you ensure your employees get the most from their team coaching or motivational program.

To illustrate, the career experts at Indeed.com suggest that a step-wise coaching plan for employees should include:[2]

• Establishing their strengths
• Identifying potential development areas
• Giving them a chance to self-assess their performance
• Identifying obstacles that prevent them from improving their performance
• Offering possible solutions to help them overcome their challenges
• Helping them set goals
• Collaborating on an action plan, and
• Organizing regular follow-up sessions.

Coaching Plans For Teachers

Organizing an online course? Here are some good examples of coaching plans for teachers that you might find helpful:

1. This example reading coaching plan starts with an identification of areas for improvement and considers some example strategies and evaluation tools
2. The Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership discusses four stages of Planning, Contracting, Coaching, and Evaluating in this sample coaching plan for teachers, and
3. More practical examples can be found in this Coaching Manual for Schools by TeacherToolkit.

3 Examples and Samples

Given the growth in popularity of online coaching, it’s now easier than ever to find sample activities for your coaching plans. Quenza’s free Expansion Library includes more than a few examples that are easy to customize for personal sessions or group workshops and programs.

Life Domain Satisfaction

Life coaching clients often begin coaching without a clear idea of their obstacles, and life satisfaction assessments are one of the best ways to help them as a coach.

Quenza’s Life Domain Satisfaction exercise invites coachees to explore how they feel about their family relationships, financial circ*mstances, career, and more so that they can identify focus areas and set coaching goals.

Strength Interview

With the Strength Interview Expansion, coaching clients can explore what brings them energy, and what helps them feel and perform at their best.

There are ten questions they can work through as part of goal-setting, intake, or any stage of your coaching plan, and this versatile tool works wonderfully in career, health, life, business coaching, and more contexts.

Sample questions include:

• What activities did you like most when you were a child?
• What are you looking forward to in the future? and
• What brings positive energy into your life?

Brief Needs Check-In

Quenza’s Brief Needs Check-In is a practical way to help clients create a habit of tuning into their emotional needs.

This activity guides clients to develop a habit of exploring their thoughts, feelings, and sensations to identify ways that they can feel fulfilled, satisfied, or happier.

Also available as a guided meditation, the Check-In can easily be adapted for group or individual coaching plans.

How To Develop A Coaching Plan

Every coach’s working style will be unique, meaning that only you know what steps are essential to delivering your very best results for clients.

Once you’ve laid your plan out as key stages, you can then start curating and assembling all the tools, forms, and content you’ll use to bring it to life.

Essentially, developing a coaching plan is about:

• Establishing your timeline – how many sessions will your work together involve? Over how long?
• Planning out your approach – Where on this timeline should your key stages take place, ideally? and
• Putting it all together.

At the end of this, you should have a coaching action plan that takes you from the start to the end of your client journey.

Building Your Action Plan: 5 Tips

Quenza’s tools not only help you build your coaching strategy, but they’re also specially designed to help you put it into practice.

Whether you’d like to develop your very first action plan as an e-coach or digitalize your signature approach, Quenza makes it easy for you to:

• Map out a Pathway of steps, with your choice of activities, forms, or tools for each
• Establish a timeline by setting intervals between each step, and
• Deliver your content to clients securely, so that everything goes according to (the) plan!

If you know what your key steps are and are keen to follow along with your $1 trial, the following tips can help you put it all together:

1. Browse your Expansion library for adaptable coach tools that might suit your client and plan.
2. Digitalize hard-copy exercises and forms from your arsenal using Quenza’s Activity builder
3. Take some inspiration from Quenza’s ready-made Expansion Pathways to decide on intervals, timing, and stages for your plan
4. Feature your logo on your activities using Quenza White Label
5. Design your own assessments and worksheets from scratch using the Wheel of Life tool.

The Best Way To Create A Coaching Plan

There are a plethora of ways to go about planning your coaching approach, from pen and paper outlines to spreadsheets and calendars.

For the best possible results, however, an all-in-one software solution is generally best – one that’s designed not just to help you plan, but which will also augment the impact of your professional skills.

With Quenza, you have a purpose-built toolkit that helps you do precisely that.

9 Templates and Tools Included in Quenza

As you organize your plan using Quenza’s Pathways, we recommend checking out the following tools and templates:

1. Self Contract – You can’t always be around to motivate your clients, but with this clever activity, you can empower them to drive themselves. This tool includes a framework for a self-contract that encourages them to implement a positive change by a certain date, sparking greater accountability in those you coach.
2. A Strengths Versus Weaknesses Approach – Another great exercise for clients who are lacking motivation, this Expansion walks them through what it feels like to take a strengths focus rather than operating from their weaknesses.
3. Implementation Intentions – This ‘If-Then’ planning exercise encourages coachees to overcome obstacles with a contingency plan so that they can bridge the ‘gap’ between intention and action in pursuit of their goals.
4. Consulting the Future Self When Making Choices – Many coachees struggle with decision-making when a conflict arises between their short- and long-term goals. This exercise helps them reduce decision-related regret by shifting their focus to the future, so they can consider all the potential outcomes of a decision they’re currently facing.
5. Urge Surfing – In a similar way to the previous Expansion, Urge Surfing helps clients overcome the temptation to give in to cravings in the present moment. This exercise can acquaint coachees with their urges and teach them to ride them out until they diminish naturally.

If it’s coaching forms you’re looking for, Quenza’s Expansion library is also where you’ll find a helpful:

1. Pre-Coaching Questionnaire
2. Effectiveness of Session Evaluation
3. Coach Evaluation Form, and
4. Session Notes for Clients, among others.

Creating a Coaching Plan with Quenza: An Example

Ready to try creating your coaching plan?

Quenza’s Creating a Positive Body Image Expansion Pathway is a great example of how a completed coaching plan might look and feel, complete with Activities for each step and daily intervals between them:

Use this Expansion Pathway as a guide for how to organize your content and space it out, or adapt it to create a custom plan of your own.

Once you’re ready to curate your own plan, why not try:

• Starting with intake or informed consent forms
• Introducing your coaching process with a personalized video in your first Activity
• Using assessments like the Wheel of Life to get to know your client
• Creating a journal or planner by replicating steps
• Collecting feedback from your clients with a Session Rating Scale, or
• Building motivational incentives into your plan?

Final Thoughts

There are myriad reasons to plan out your approach before diving straight in, and Quenza’s tools make your strategizing easy, efficient, and stress-free.

Using this resource to help you, you can craft truly engaging, personalized solutions in a step-by-step way to deliver the best possible results for your clients. If you’ve got your own tips or suggestions for creating a coaching plan, do join in the conversation below with a comment.

We hope this guide helped you create your coaching plan. Don’t forget to begin your 30-day trial of Quenza to start designing your own coaching solutions for just $1.

Quenza’s tools are professionally developed to help you deliver unique solutions your way, and will help you enhance your positive impact for even better client results.

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