Whether you just landed your first life coaching client, or the clients are slowly starting to pile up, you need an effective way to discover and understand their life goals and expectations.
Some might argue: "Isn't that what the first session is for?", but remember your client is paying for each session, and if they have to sit there and talk about themselves without getting any useful information back, they might feel like their money was wasted.
A great way to get around this is by incorporating a life coach intake questionnaire to your client onboarding process. This form will allow you to collect information beforehand and start working on a tailored strategy for a smooth coaching journey. To help you create the perfect life coach intake form, we'll go over some of the right life coaching questions to ask.
But first, let's quickly understand how this form will highly benefit the client intake process of your life coaching business.
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Before starting the coaching process with new clients, a professional life coach must learn all about the client. This includes who they are, what they need, where they want to go, and what things are important to them. Implementing a client intake form and engaging in coaching conversations is a great tool to gather all this important information (and maintain a good record of it).
This questionnaire will cover some of the most basic details such as the client's name, address and contact details, but it will also dive deep into their personal goals. This gives life coaches tons of excellent tools to develop a transformational process that is tailored to each client.
Aside from getting to know your client's life story, an intake questionnaire will make the coaching process a lot more organized. It will allow you to provide useful material even from the first coaching session because you won't spend most of the time getting to know your client (you'll get a head start).
You will also have structured follow-up questions ready, leading to a better client experience.
The questions you include in your life coach questionnaire might vary depending on the type of coaching program you are offering and may be tailored to your client's needs.
Regardless of the life coaching questions you choose to include in your life coach intake form, you must make sure you cover these 4 essential aspects:
Your client's basic information, their personal background, their professional and personal goals, as well as their preferences when it comes to coaching methods.
Let's explore each of these areas and go over some of the coaching intake questions you could ask your clients to uncover as much valuable insight as possible.
For starters, no life coaching intake questionnaire is complete without covering the basic client's personal information such as name, occupation and contact information. Make sure you include the following questions.
Feel free to add any other basic questions you consider appropriate. Don't consider these questions an item to check before you get into the 'good' questions. Even this basic info is helpful to build an appropriate coaching strategy so gather as much as you can in this section.
The most important information you want to get from your clients is their future goals. You must include powerful questions that can help you fully understand your client's career goals and personal issues they wish to solve.
These answers will be the foundation to create a customized program for every new client. Here are some specific life coaching questions to dig deeper and uncover your client's goals.
These questions can be modified, but they should assist you and your client in understanding what they want from coaching so that you can create a strategy for getting them there.
If you don't know what their objectives are, you can't assist them in achieving them. Stay on the look out for common themes or answers that keep coming up to get a better understanding of your client's mindset.
Note: Take a look at the best client management software for coaches. We'll review the different softwares you could use to organize your clients and better manage your business. Read our list today to see which program is best for your company.
In order to understand the environment in which your clients are acting, you must inquire about their past. Learning about what they have done is almost as significant as learning what they want to achieve in the future.
Who your client is will heavily be influenced by their past experiences. These life coaching questions will help you get a better insight on your client's current situation.
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As a life coach, your biggest challenge is to provide a program that your clients find useful and they feel their investment is paying off. For this reason, you must understand what coaching approach is best for your prospective clients.
You want to know whether they respond better to a democratic method, where they have more freedom and accountability, or if they prefer an authoritarian approach where you as their coach take the lead deciding what should be done and when.
To help you discover this, include the following evaluation questions.
All these valuable insights will help you support your client in their development journey in a way that is effective specifically for them.
Always remind your clients that it's ok if they can't answer all of the coaching questions, after all, you will have more than enough time to discover everything together.
Once you've figured out the intake questionnaire structure that works best for your business, use Bonsai's fully-customizable client forms to create a digital document that you can easily send to all of your coaching clients.
This is the best way to maintain your records organized and easily accessible, while at the same time, adding professionalism to your coaching process.
As you get more clients, keeping track of their information can easily become a headache, but with our digital life coach intake form, you can ensure everything stays in one place.
The flexible form fields allow you to choose between multiple-choice or free-form answers to make it your own and adapt to your business needs. But that's not all!
Bonsai offers you a wide range of administrative tools especially designed for freelancers and small business owners.
From free templates for proposals, contracts and invoices to a complete accounting and tax software, we have everything your coaching business needs. You can even apply for a fuss-free business checking account and manage your finances like a true professional.
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