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A GUIDE FOR FIRST-TIMERS

So You're Thinking About Getting a Coach

What nobody tells you before you hire one, and the honest questions worth asking before you spend a penny.

Hiring a coach for the first time can feel strangely daunting. You're essentially trusting a stranger with something that matters: your career, your leadership, your sense of direction, your confidence. And unlike a haircut or a gym membership, the results aren't immediately visible. So how do you know you're making a good decision?

This guide won't tell you who to hire. It'll help you ask the right questions, of potential coaches and of yourself, so you go in clear-eyed and get the most out of the experience.

Are you actually looking for a coach?

The word "coaching" gets used loosely. Before you start searching, it's worth being honest about what kind of support you're actually after, because coaching is a specific thing and it might not be what you need.

Therapy addresses psychological wellbeing, past experiences, and mental health. A therapist helps you understand and process what has happened to you. Regulated and clinical in nature.

Mentoring is where a more experienced person in your field shares their knowledge and path. Mentors draw on what worked for them. The relationship is advisory and often informal.

Advising is when an expert tells you what to do. You pay for their conclusions. This is the consultant model: they assess your situation and hand you recommendations.

Coaching is different. A coach helps you think. They're not there to give you answers; they're there to ask better questions. The insight has to come from you. The coach creates the conditions for it.

A good coach knows the difference between these things and will be explicit about what they offer. Ask a prospective coach: "Where does coaching end and advising begin for you?" How they answer tells you a lot.

Ask yourself: do I want someone to tell me what to do, or do I want someone to help me figure out what I actually think?

It's also worth considering what kind of experience you're hoping for. Some people want concrete, measurable outcomes: a promotion secured, a decision made, a skill built. Others want a regular space to process, think out loud, and reconnect with their own instincts. Neither is wrong, but they call for different things from a coach. Being clear on which you're after will help you find the right match.

If you genuinely need domain expertise or industry knowledge passed on to you, a mentor might serve you better. If something deeper is going on, anxiety, burnout, grief, therapy is the right door. Coaching works best when you have capacity, are broadly functional, and are trying to grow or navigate a significant transition.

How clear are your outcomes, really?

One of the biggest reasons coaching doesn't deliver isn't the coach. It's that the client hasn't done the thinking about what they actually want from it.

"I want to feel more confident" is a starting point, not an outcome. "I want to be able to chair a difficult board meeting without second-guessing myself for a week afterwards" gives you something to work with.

Before you hire anyone, spend time with these questions:

• What would be different in my life or work if coaching went well?
• What have I already tried? What has and hasn't worked?
• Is this something I can genuinely influence, or am I hoping coaching will fix something external?
• Am I ready to be honest, including about my own role in the situation?
• Do I want specific, trackable measures of success, or do I want a thinking space where progress is felt rather than counted?

It's also worth being realistic about timelines. Significant change rarely happens in three sessions. If you're hoping for a transformation on a short budget, have that conversation openly with a potential coach before you commit. A good one will be straight with you about what's achievable.

A question worth sitting with: How much do you actually want the change you say you want? Coaching can be uncomfortable. It will ask things of you between sessions, not just during them. The coaches who get the best results work with people who are genuinely open to being different, not just hoping to feel better. If you're not quite there yet, that's worth knowing before you start.

What to look for when hiring a coach

There's no regulatory body that stops someone calling themselves a coach tomorrow. That means the responsibility for quality-checking sits entirely with you. Here's what's worth investigating.

Reviews and real evidence. How many people have they worked with? What do those people say? Look for specificity in testimonials. Vague praise tells you less than context: someone describing a six-month leadership transition they navigated with a coach's help is far more useful than a one-liner about how great the sessions felt. Volume matters too: someone with three glowing reviews is a different proposition to someone with forty.

Relevant experience. Coaches don't need to have done your job, and in fact some of the best haven't. But have they worked with people in comparable situations? Not just the same industry, but the same kind of moment: a first management role, a co-founder breakup, a return from a career gap, a redundancy. The closer the situational match, the more likely they've seen the specific shape of what you're dealing with.

Their methodology, matched to your outcomes. Every skilled coach has a point of view on how change happens. Ask them: what's your approach, and how does it connect to the kind of outcome I'm looking for? What do sessions actually look like? Are they structured or open-ended? Do they assign work between sessions? Methodology isn't just a quality signal; it's a matching question. A great coach with the wrong approach for your goals will still feel like a poor fit.

Credentials and training. Where did they train, and for how long? Recognised programmes, ICF-accredited ones for example, require genuine hours and supervised practice. A weekend certificate is a very different thing to a year-long qualification. Ask directly: what's your training background, and how do you keep developing your practice?

How they receive feedback. This one's underrated. At some point in the coaching relationship, you will need to tell your coach that something isn't working. How does a prospective coach respond when you raise a challenge or push back on something they've said? Do they get defensive, or do they get curious? Their response in that moment is a preview of the whole relationship.

On fees, structure, and what you're actually buying

Most people's first instinct is to ask: how much per session? That question, while reasonable, can lead you astray if you're looking for something more than a one-off conversation.

Many coaches who do deep, sustained work don't charge by the session at all. They offer programmes: a fixed number of sessions over a defined period, often with access between sessions for shorter check-ins or messages. This matters because genuine change usually requires continuity. A coaching relationship built session by session, with no commitment on either side, tends to stay shallow.

If you want holistic support, not just a thinking partner for isolated problems, ask coaches whether they offer programmes rather than ad-hoc sessions.

When you do get to the fee question, think about it in terms of the whole engagement, not the hourly rate. What would a meaningful outcome be worth to you? Be honest about your budget, and be honest with yourself about whether a price that feels "safe" is actually going to buy you the kind of support that moves the needle.

Common fears about hiring a coach

Almost everyone approaching coaching for the first time has some version of these worries. They're worth naming directly.

"It won't work." This is the most common one, and it's legitimate. Coaching isn't magic. But "it won't work" is vague. What specifically do you fear won't change? Getting clear on that actually helps you evaluate whether coaching is the right tool. If your fear is really "I won't change even if I want to," that's worth exploring. It might be the most important thing to bring into the first session.

"It's too much money and will feel like a waste." This fear is often about uncertainty: you can't guarantee the ROI. What helps is setting measurable outcomes before you start, so you're not evaluating the experience purely on feeling. It's also worth asking yourself what the cost of staying where you are actually is. The discomfort you're trying to work through has its own price tag, even if it doesn't arrive as an invoice.

"It's too overwhelming to even start." Finding and vetting a coach while also figuring out what you want from it can feel like a lot when you're already stretched. Start smaller: book one chemistry call. You don't have to have everything figured out before you have a first conversation. Most coaches expect you to arrive still working out what you need. A chemistry call is usually a free 20 to 30 minute conversation where you get a feel for each other: how they work, whether the dynamic feels right, and whether they've worked with people in situations like yours. Come with two or three questions and pay attention to how it feels to be listened to.

"I don't have the time." Coaching does require time, not just for sessions but for the thinking and trying that happens between them. If your schedule genuinely has no space right now, that's worth taking seriously. But it's also worth asking whether "I don't have time" is real or whether it's a way of staying safe. Change takes energy, and it's natural to find reasons to postpone it.

"What if I make the wrong decision?" You might hire the wrong coach. It happens. But the risk is lower than it feels. Most coaches offer a chemistry call before any commitment, and even a not-quite-right fit can be useful if you're honest about what's not working. The decision to hire a coach at all is usually the harder, more important one.

Overall...

The best coaching relationships are built on honesty, and that starts before you've even hired anyone.

Be honest about what you want. Be honest about what you can afford. Be honest about how ready you actually are to sit with discomfort, be challenged, and do something differently on the other side.

A good coach will meet that honesty with their own. And that, more than credentials or chemistry or cost, is what makes the work actually work.

 

If you’re ready to explore working with a coach or a therapist, I’ve opened up a limited number of intro calls staring this month.

 

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