Starting a Session, Rapport and Goal Setting with Carlos Lopez-Real

In this session we will focus on the first part of a coaching session, including considerations for preparation even before you get in the room with your client. We will explore ways of using those precious first minutes of a session to set you and your client up for working effectively together, enabling them to make the changes that they want.

We’ll look at ways of welcoming and checking in with your client, finding out what’s ‘on the table’, what agenda / issues they’re bringing. And then how to move from this to enabling them to formulate a useful goal for the session, that you have a shared understanding of, and a commitment to working towards. We’ll explore the key ways that you’ll build and maintain rapport, as this crucially underpins this first part of the session, as well as the coaching as a whole. And we’ll workshop some specific goals together, looking at what makes for the most useful kinds of goal, and how to deal with goals that are (initially, at least) less than useful.

This session will suit both newer coaches as well as those with many years of coaching experience. We’ll experience the main ideas in a simple accessible way, but you can also go very deep with these. Year after year, I find myself deepening my thinking around these issues and exploring more nuances. It will be wonderful to share our varied practice and to learn from each other’s experience.

Carlos’ qualifications reflect the wide range of his career. He has an MA in Psychology and Philosophy, a PGDip in Jazz & Studio Music, and a Level 7 Diploma in Coaching & Mentoring, where he’s a Senior Practitioner with the EMCC. He’s also found time to run his own music business, performing, recording, and touring internationally, as well as leading and running a variety of training courses in each of these fields, and he’s a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts.