Life Coach Assessment Forms

Every new client landed is an important milestone in a coaching business. It not only means positive momentum for your coaching process but also offers a fresh opportunity to help someone else work towards their own goals.

Helping your life coaching clients can only be truly effective if you have a streamlined onboarding process which gives you a firm grasp of their coaching needs and allows you to keep on top of all relevant client details. Let us show you how experienced coaches use life coach assessment forms to hit the ground running and deliver the best possible experience!

Life coaching tools like a life coach assessment or intake form can make your coaching practice more efficient and help you better understand your clients.

Note: Don't forget to sign up for Bonsai's 7 day free trial, which has all of your invoice, contract, proposal, questionnaire form template needs covered from tax to time tracking tools!

Why use a life coach assessment form?

Many life coaches (in fact coaches of all kinds) will use an initial in person session in order to get to know their client. These intake sessions are crucial as a fact finding mission for both parties. They provide an opportunity to build trust and learn about their needs so that you can begin to form a coaching strategy.

In order to make these initial in person or "intake" sessions as effective as possible it helps to have a solid base of information already. This is where your life coaching intake form comes in.

Using the correct life coaching tools makes any business more manageable and more effective.

What should an effective coaching business assessment form include?

Before we dive into exactly what your intake form should include, let's look at the two distinct types of information you are looking for from each client:

1. Admin based information
2. Relevant Coaching Information

Admin Information:

Admin information can be considered general background information about your clients used for administrative purposes. Being provided with this beforehand means that there is no need to waste time during you first session collecting information that - whilst important to the smooth running of your business - might not be relevant to the client's coaching needs. This would include fields such as:

• First name
• Last name
• Date of birth
• Gender
• Address and other contact details
• Billing information

Relevant Coaching Information:

Whilst the admin section of your form is likely to be fairly standardized, the coaching information is your opportunity to learn about you client. Your questions should be framed in a succinct manner that allows you to garner useful insights that will ultimately help to shape the coaching strategy you will use.

When thinking specifically about life coaching, here are three general areas you might want to focus your questions on in order to get the responses you need:

On a scale of 1-10 how would you score your level of satisfaction with your life in general?

This can help to give a good general overview of of how the client sees themselves and how much work they need to do. Within this same section you may also want to get more specific. Sub categories such as career, relationships and health can all be added to give you a more defined idea of how to approach coaching that particular client.

Is there a specific incident that lead you to seeking coaching?

Often people find themselves seeking out the help of a life coach because of a specific event or series of events in their lives. Being passed over for a promotion, the death of a loved one or the breakdown of a relationship are just a few examples of things that can act as catalysts for reaching out to a coach. Knowing about these incidents beforehand will give you great insight into how to help.

What goals, general or specific, do you have in mind?

One of the cornerstones of a good coaching relationship with your clients is your ability to give them a clear personal vision. Having goals to work towards is a great way of measuring progress. Using your coaching intake forms to gauge your clients interests can help you provide better coaching services by setting goals that will motivate people.

Do you have any prior experience working with a life coach and why did you feel it did or didn't work for you?

Knowing whether or not you client has used life coaching services in the past can be a great indicator of how to proceed with their coaching journey. Perhaps they found that the methods used by their previous coach did not suit their needs and they are looking for something different from you. Maybe they had a good experience with their coaching sessions and are coming to you in order to set themselves back on that same path. Either way this information will allow you to reach into you own life coaching toolkit and provide them with the best service possible.

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The best solution for creating a coaching intake form

Now that you can see the benefits of using a coaching intake form to streamline your business let's look at the the most functional and efficient way of creating them.

Of course you could simply mock up physical coaching forms and hand them to clients as they come for their first coaching session, but this not only eats up valuable time but leads to an overflow of paper and is not the best way to keep things organized. The bigger you client list grows, the more difficult it becomes to manage!

Keeping your coaching practice streamlined so you can focus on finding and helping more clients is key to seeing your business grow.

With Bonsai you can keep tax information, new proposals, accounting and client outreach all in one place. So if you're already running a life coaching business through Bonsai it's a great idea to send intake forms from the same platform!

Some of the benefits of using Bonsai to create your life coaching intake form include:

• The ability to design and customize your own forms
• Add your own logo and personalize the form to your business
• Track your clients responses and the completion status of each form in real time
• Automatically archive your clients responses and have them at your fingertips whenever you need them

Using Bonsai to create your life coach intake form

Bonsai provides you with the essential resources you need to design you own intake forms. Whether you want to create your own form from scratch or use one of the many coaching templates available they have you covered.

Design your form

Use the intuitive form builder to create your own bespoke intake form and choose from options such as adding your own images and branding, drop down menus, text response or multiple choice questions amongst many others:

And if you would prefer to use a template to get you started check out some of the many coaching templates available to you:

Share your form with clients

You can then choose whether to send your form directly to the client, embed the form on your website or share a public link:

Keep track of engagement and receive responses

Once your clients have completed their forms, keep track of their responses in the "Forms" section of your Bonsai dashboard. You'll be able to check the completion status of all the forms you have sent out and easily bring up client responses when needed:

Closing thoughts

It's no secret that running your business can be challenging, especially as a freelancer. Being able to streamline and automate as many elements as possible means more time for you to pay attention the the thing that makes your life coaching business possible: your clients.

Using your intake forms strategically allows you to walk into that first session already armed with the necessary information to do your best work.

If you feel like you could benefit from anything we've mentioned above then don't forget to sign up for Bonsai's 14 day free trail and start streamlining your coaching process today!