16 Coaching Session Templates and Forms for Coaches

A core task in any coaching practice is guiding clients toward their goals rather than prescribing exact steps for them to follow. Effective coaches combine thoughtful guidance with activities that prompt clients to reflect, set priorities, and take meaningful action.

This article shares practical coaching forms and templates to help you deliver a better client experience. You’ll find tools for intake and intake screening, session planning, agreements and behavior change, health and life coaching, instructional coaching, and evaluation. These resources can be adapted as clients’ needs evolve over time.

2 Intake Forms for Your Coaching Sessions

Building a strong coach–client match is essential. A quality relationship is a key factor in achieving lasting results, and mismatches are a common reason coaching relationships end prematurely (Boyce, Jackson, & Neal, 2010).

Using a structured intake process helps you evaluate fit and set expectations. Start with a screening document that clarifies whether coaching is the right approach for the person and whether they prefer being guided rather than directed. Follow that with a more detailed intake form that captures background, goals, motivation, current challenges, and readiness to change. These documents streamline onboarding and give you useful context for planning the coaching pathway.

Coaching Forms: 2 Templates & Samples

Even experienced coaches benefit from a written session plan. Intentional change theory highlights how engaging a client’s ideal self or personal vision drives sustained change (Boyatzis & Jack, 2018). A session template helps you guide clients from their current reality toward that vision in a structured way.

Use a short visioning exercise—such as a three-month vision board—to help clients describe their best-case scenario across life domains. Then map out session goals, discussion prompts, and measurable actions. Another useful resource is a session-by-session checklist that lists suggested questions, activities, and follow-up items to ensure consistency and progress across the coaching engagement.

Free Positive Psychology Exercises (PDF)

Use short, science-based exercises to support wellbeing, strengths, values, and self-compassion in your coaching sessions.

2 Coaching Application & Agreement Forms

To promote commitment and accountability, provide clients with simple agreements or behavior contracts. A behavior contract clarifies the actions clients intend to take, the supports they’ll use, and how progress will be measured. It also sets expectations about how you will work together and how responsibility for change is shared.

Additionally, a habit-building worksheet can guide clients through the steps of breaking maladaptive habits and creating positive alternatives. Framing habit change as a process—identify triggers, define replacement behaviors, plan reinforcement—helps clients make durable shifts in daily routines.

5 Samples of Life & Health Coaching Forms

Although life coaching and health coaching overlap, they often focus on different goals. Health coaching typically targets specific health behaviors and physiological outcomes, while life coaching addresses broader personal goals determined by the client.

Health-focused coaching can use a multimodal framework such as BASIC-ID (Lazarus, 1981) to explore:

• Behavior: What is the exact behavior to change?
• Affect: What emotions come up around this behavior?
• Sensation: What bodily sensations occur?
• Imagery: What mental images are linked to the behavior?
• Cognition: What thoughts or beliefs maintain the behavior?
• Interpersonal: What social factors influence the behavior?
• Drugs/Biology: What biological or substance-related factors are relevant?

Worksheets that walk clients through BASIC-ID help them identify triggers, maintainers, and realistic replacement strategies. An action-brainstorming worksheet supports identifying small, specific behaviors to increase or reduce and helps you know when to offer reinforcement or adjust strategies.

Self-care is often central to both life and health coaching. Tools that differentiate nurturing from depleting activities, check in on self-care practices across domains, and invite clients to make a concrete self-care promise can strengthen wellbeing and support ongoing progress.

Positive Psychology Practitioner Tools

Practitioner toolkits with validated exercises and assessments can expand your repertoire and accelerate client outcomes when chosen carefully to match client needs.

2 Templates for Instructional Coaching

Instructional coaching—commonly used in educational settings—takes a more directive form than many other coaching styles. Rather than purely eliciting client-generated solutions, instructional coaches provide targeted feedback, model strategies, and offer specific recommendations to improve teaching practice (Knight, 2007).

Because teachers face urgent daily demands (grading, lesson planning, classroom management), securing buy-in for coaching is often the biggest challenge. Exercises that cultivate a growth mindset can help educators become more open to feedback and to trying new approaches.

An instructor feedback form designed for classroom observation frames the conversation around concrete behaviors, student responses, and actionable next steps. The goal is to enhance teaching effectiveness while preserving a collaborative relationship between coach and coachee.

1 Evaluation Form for Coaches

Regular evaluation helps you track learning and adjust your approach. Kirkpatrick’s four-level model is widely used to evaluate training and coaching:

1. Reaction: How did clients respond to the sessions?
2. Learning: What knowledge, attitudes, or skills were acquired?
3. Transfer: Are new behaviors being applied in daily life? What evidence supports this?
4. Results: What long-term outcomes or mindset changes have occurred?

Use short session feedback forms for immediate insights and a more comprehensive evaluation later in the engagement to measure transfer and results. Timing evaluations near the end of a coaching package—or a few months afterward—yields useful data on lasting impact.

Validated Positive Psychology Exercises

Select evidence-based exercises to support flourishing, resilience, and motivation. Choosing scientifically grounded practices helps ensure coaching delivers measurable benefits.

Helpful Resources

Goal setting and mindset work are foundational to effective coaching. The SMART framework (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) remains a practical tool for helping clients create measurable goals. Variants that add review or reflection components can deepen accountability.

Promoting a growth mindset and using structured, research-based tools for assessment and intervention will strengthen your coaching outcomes. Curated collections of validated exercises and templates can help you quickly find activities aligned to client needs and learning objectives.

A Take-Home Message

Be authentic, positive, and client-centered in your practice. Invite clients to describe their aspirations, explore underlying motives for change, and commit to concrete steps. A supportive coaching relationship—built on trust, clear expectations, and regular evaluation—creates the conditions in which clients can thrive.

Use intake forms to clarify fit, templates to organize sessions, agreements to reinforce commitment, and evaluation tools to measure progress. These simple structures free you to focus on the human work of coaching: listening deeply, challenging constructively, and celebrating growth.

References

• Ammentorp, J., Uhrenfeldt, L., Flemming, A., Ehrensvard, M., Carlsen, E. B., & Kofoed, P. E. (2013). Can life coaching improve health outcomes? A systematic review of intervention studies. BMC Health Services Research, 13(428), 1–11.
• Boyatzis, R., & Jack, A. (2018). The neuroscience of coaching. Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, 70(1), 11–27.
• Boyce, L. A., Jackson, R. J., & Neal, L. J. (2010). Building successful leadership coaching relationships: Examining the impact of matching criteria in a leadership coaching program. Journal of Management Development, 29(10), 2–34.
• Knight, J. (2007). Instructional coaching: A partnership approach to improving instruction. Corwin.
• Kirkpatrick, D. L. (1994). Evaluating training programs: The four levels. Berrett-Koehler.
• Lazarus, A. (1981). The practice of multimodal therapy. McGraw Hill.
• Muller, A. A., & Kotte, S. (2020). Of SMART, GROW, and goals gone wild: A systematic literature review on the relevance of goal activities in workplace coaching. International Coaching Psychology Review, 15(2), 69–94.
• Palmer, S. (2012). Multimodal coaching and its application to workplace, life and health coaching. The Danish Journal of Coaching Psychology, 2(1), 91–98.