INITIAL COACHING SESSIONS

For first-time clients, we offer a free 30-minute consultation to establish your general goals and ambitions, your current status and direction, and the suitability of Energeia Coaching for you and your needs. This will also give you an opportunity to develop an impression of the kind of coach you’ll be working with, and whether their style, approach and attitude is the right fit for you.

Your first coaching session will last for 90 minutes, and you will be asked to complete a small amount of pre-work beforehand – the content of which we will then discuss in session. There will be a brief introduction, during which your coach will affirm to you their professional ethical commitments of confidentiality and care, as well as clarifying any logistical details or other general questions you may have about the coaching process.

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Once we are underway, your first session will be devoted to creating as full a picture as possible about your life, your career, and your place in this world and in this moment, through the medium of open, honest conversation. Your coach will use guiding questions to help you stay open and curious about yourself, but also focused and honed in on what seems to be most important to you. We’ll try and cover as many bases as possible in the time we have, with the aim of broadly identifying where you’re currently at, and where you’d like to be – how your aspirations match your current reality. There is no expectation that you’ll share everything during your first session, but the more forthcoming and vulnerable you can be, the more valuable information you will provide your coach in helping you to best strategize the road ahead. Most importantly, your first session will be an opportunity for you and your coach to develop a sense of trust and rapport – the bedrock foundation upon which we will do our best work together.

After your first session, your coach will synthesize the information you provide about yourself and use it to begin developing the blueprint of your self-programming plan, which will then be passed on to you as a basic plan outline. How comprehensive this initial blueprint is will largely depend on the scope and variety of your goals, and the distance between your current position and the achievement of those goals. Initially, your goals may be more narrowly focused – on particular career ambitions or lifestyle goals for instance. These can be expanded or re-aligned as needed over time. The main idea in beginning your self-programming plan is establishing realistic expectations, practical boundary conditions, and the interdependent connections between various aspects of yourself and your life. You will not receive a foolproof, turnkey self-programming plan after only one coaching session, but the blueprint you receive will give you a good sense of whether such a plan will ultimately be workable for you, and whether it will help you achieve what you want to.

During your second coaching session (also 90 minutes), you and your coach will review the blueprint of your self-programming plan together, and discuss in greater detail how the plan might be further fine-tuned and specified to meet your needs. In particular, we will use this time to establish specific details around structures and triggers in your day-to-day life. This is an opportunity to make your self-programming plan as realistic as possible in the context of your life. Oftentimes during the first coaching session, clients will go through a laundry list of every single thing they’d like to achieve within the foreseeable future. This is a fantastic starting point, and we always encourage our clients to think big. But come the second session, we need to get stuck into the dirty work of translating your lofty ambitions into practical, achievable steps that you can realistically stick to.

A few days after your second session, you will receive the first draft of your full self-programming plan. This document will reflect the conversations you’ve had with your coach until this point, and will cover the key areas that you have identified as most relevant for your performance, optimization, and development. It is a living document, which you will refresh and revise from time to time, both on your own and in consultation with your coach. It is intended to be broad enough to cover your required bases, while being concise enough to be memorable and readily actionable. See the section on self-programming plans for a summary of the typical components of an Energeia Coaching plan.

ONGOING COACHING SESSIONS

From your third session onward, coaching sessions will typically last 60 minutes. Having now worked with your coach to develop the first full draft of your self-programming plan, your subsequent coaching sessions can take many forms. Depending on the general ebb-and-flow of your weeks and your routines, new challenges in your life and career, insights that you’ve learned about yourself while following your self-programming plan, or simply just the mood you’re in on a given day, a session with your coach might play out in some of the following ways:

An opportunity to come up for air and share how things have gone for you since we last spoke, in the areas you deem most worth exploring in our time together. What might seem like an ordinary run-of-the-mill week might have transformative lessons bubbling just under the surface. Together with your coach, you can evaluate your overall progress across the course of a week – cataloguing your triumphs and shining an illuminating light on your failures.

Assessing what is working well, why it is working well, and exploring how the same special sauce might then be expanded in order to serve you in other areas of your life and career. Momentum begets momentum, and when you’re on a roll, your coach will work with you to ensure that you can maximize that purchase on your progress and keep you fired up and hungry for more.

Assessing what’s not working and endeavoring to determine why it’s not working. Perhaps aspects of your plan have proven to be impractical, unworkable, or otherwise beyond your grasp. Sometimes the dials simply need to be tweaked a little to better tune you in. Working alongside your coach, you can revise your self-programming plan to better accommodate your growing understanding of yourself and the realities of who you are, and keep you squarely on the path.

Even a well-formulated self-programming plan that is fastidiously adhered to can be subject to significant revision and refreshment. As our priorities shift over time, milestone events unfold, and we begin to value and aspire toward different things, the narrative of our lives can shift dramatically. Time with your coach can help you rediscover True North and reconnect with your centre of narrative gravity.

Your boss and co-workers are driving you nuts; your anxieties and neuroses are at fever pitch; you have a zillion complaints and pet peeves coalescing together just waiting to be unleashed; and you just out-and-out feel like crap. Beyond mere cathartic release, your desire to vent can be a powerful vehicle for recalibration. Unload on your coach, then reload with your coach. Whether your coach is cheaper than a bartender depends on how much you’re drinking. Either way, we’ll set your world at rights or go down swinging trying to do so.

Zoom Coaching

We conduct the vast majority of our coaching via Zoom (or other video-conferencing platforms depending on client access and preferences). Although there are some marginal additional advantages to be had from in-person coaching for some clients, video-coaching provides all the major benefits of coaching while also offering convenience and comfort. We can provide more flexible and interactive coaching services when both coach and client are unconstrained by physical location and travel demands, and coaching sessions are invariably more productive and fulfilling when clients can work with their coach from a familiar setup and comfortable environment of their own choosing. We encourage clients to commit to ensuring that their coaching sessions take place from a location in which they are guaranteed quiet and privacy, and where they can speak candidly and without interruption.


Our team coaching and development sessions can also be delivered via Zoom. The functionality of video-coaching is particularly well-suited to interactive, group discussion-focused sessions, and the use of breakout rooms and screen sharing means that we can deliver generative activities that foster group learning, involvement and co-operation without the necessity of office space or printed activity packets.


Video-coaching also allows your coach to record sessions, which in turn allows for the recording of more thorough case notes, so that your coach can provide better subsequent support and follow-up for your self-programming journey. All recordings, and their accompanying case notes, are kept strictly confidential – by law and ethical standards of professional practice – and will always be made available to a client upon request. Clients who prefer not to have their sessions recorded can request this of their coach. For Zoom-based sessions, we use two-step authentication to ensure maximum privacy and security.