How The Session Page Works
After each coaching session, you receive a single page. Almost everything on it is in your own words, written down as you said it. It is not a summary of what we talked about, and it is not a list of things I have assigned you. It is your own words, set down where you can see them.
Here is what each part is for.
Your Stand
This is the future you are committed to bringing into existence, declared once and standing until you change it. It is not a goal, and it is not a description of who you are. It is a way of being you take up, and from which different action becomes available.
That distinction is the whole point. Most attempts at change work on behavior and leave the way of being untouched, which is why they take so much effort and rarely hold. A stand works the other way around. You take a position, your way of being shifts, and action that was not previously available becomes available.
The difference is easier to feel than to define:
I will be more direct with my co-founder.
I am a leader whose position is known before anyone has to ask for it.
The first predicts behavior and leaves you exactly as you are, having to push. The second changes the ground you are standing on, and the behavior follows from it.
Stands other people have taken:
I am the author of this company's direction, not its most senior employee.
I am someone who can be trusted with the truth, because I can be counted on to say it.
I lead from what I care about rather than from what I am protecting.
Yours will not sound like any of these. They are here to show the shape, not to be borrowed.
A stand does not change often. When it does, that is a significant moment in the work, and we mark it.
What you are declaring this cycle
Specific, in your words, with a date on it. This is where the next weeks live. It is smaller than your stand, and it should be recognizable as a move in service of it. If you cannot say how it serves your stand, that is worth bringing to the session.
The request or promise you need to make, and to whom
Most of what people want is on the other side of a conversation they are not having. This line exists because that conversation is easy to leave out of a list of things to do, and it is usually where the movement actually is.
What standing in this requires of you
The practical actions. They come last on purpose. They are what follows from the declaration, not the point of the page.
There will be a handful, not twenty. Fewer things done from a changed way of being will move you further than a long list executed from the same place you started.
What tends to take you out
Knowing yourself well, how are you reliable to sabotage your forward progress?
That question tends to get answered quickly, because most people already know. Every one of us has a pattern that interrupts what we say we want, and the word reliable is the important one. It is not a character flaw and it is not occasional. It is a mechanism, and it runs almost invisibly at the time and is obvious afterwards.
Once you have seen yours and named it, it goes on the page in your words and stays there.
Underneath it are two questions: where this is most likely to show up in the coming weeks, and the earliest sign in your body or your mood. The pattern cannot be interrupted at the moment it runs. It can be interrupted early, and only if you know what early feels like.
Accomplishments
What you did, and what was hard about it. The second half matters. The result that came easily is worth having. The thing that was difficult for you specifically is the evidence that something has actually shifted.
Where to put the page
Somewhere you will see it daily. On a wall, on your desk, open on a second screen. Not to remind you what to do. To keep what you declared in front of you at the moment it is needed, which is rarely when you are sitting down to review it.
When something on the page is not right
Bring it. A declaration can be worded in a way that does not hold. A pattern can be named too loosely to be useful. An action can turn out to be beside the point. Saying so is information about the work, not a failure to do it, and I would rather hear it than have you carry a page that has stopped being true.
What you will probably notice
At some point, a declaration will get real, and the reliable move at that moment is to go quiet. Not to argue with it. To get busy, to postpone, to find the page slightly embarrassing, to leave the email unopened.
This is worth knowing in advance, because it tends to arrive precisely when something is about to move. It is not a sign that you have chosen wrong or that the work is not for you. It is what taking a position feels like before it becomes ordinary.
Notice it, and bring it. That conversation is often the most useful one we have.