Ember Console with the same template for every session type: prompts that fit an intake and a follow-up

A coach running an intake on Monday and a follow-up on Thursday does not need two templates. One set of boxes does both, as long as no prompt names the session.

Ember Console, the session-report builder I build for coaches, is in closed beta.

Ask each box for the goals and the progress against them. In a first session the client gives you both, and by the sixth the goals are already sitting in your last report.

How do you write a box prompt that fits any session?

Write every prompt about the client, and let none of them name the session.

1. Name the reader: the client, every session.
2. Ask where the client stands, in their words.
3. Ask for the goals, stated or carried from last time.
4. Ask what each of you does before next time.

Paperbell’s sample-session guide holds that every coaching session, sample or otherwise, moves through the same five stages.

Those four lines are four boxes. Each box of your template has a prompt and an eval housed inside Ember, which is the box system, and the letterhead and the section list are in life coaching templates in Ember Console.

What changes between an intake and a follow-up?

The prompt stays the same, and what moves is where the answer comes from.

Nancy Zentis of the Institute of Organization Development splits the follow-up into six kinds of discussion, among them a progress review, lack of progress, and lost focus. Her 2018 piece gives all six the same first instruction: “Review the notes from the last coaching session and identify what was discussed.”

So in a review session the goals box reads your last report, not the client’s opening answer, and the prompt never changed.

Where one session needs something the prompts never asked for, edit the report in the Ember dashboard. The landing page describes what that does to your next report: “Refine the report directly in Ember’s editor, and your next report will be created with those past edits and preferences already in mind.”

What is not stated yet?

Three questions about the template have no answer I can publish yet.

1. Whether a coach can keep several templates at once.
2. How the letterhead is set, and at what level.
3. Whether language preference belongs to the template, the client or the report.

The first one decides whether any of this is necessary. Until that question has an answer, write for a single template in Ember Console, and make its prompts fit every session you run.

Write each prompt so it would still make sense if the next session were the first, or the twelfth.

Questions people ask next?

What are the different types of coaching sessions?

Coaches commonly run intake, follow-up, review and closing sessions. The Institute of Organization Development treats the follow-up alone as six different discussions rather than one, which is why a template built around session names runs out of names.

Do you need a different template for a first session?

Not for the structure. FileRequestPro’s intake guide publishes 45 questions across four coaching specialties, and those are questions you ask a new client, not sections you report back to them. The report’s own sections stay where they are.

Can one coach keep several templates?

Not stated. Whether a coach can keep a client template and a sponsor template in Ember Console has no published answer, and it is the first of the three questions above. Write a single template whose prompts fit every session you run, and the question can wait.