How to Set Clear Goals With Clients

Goal-setting sounds simple. You ask a client what she wants to achieve, she tells you, and you write it down. Done. But anyone who has coached for any length of time knows that goal-setting is actually one of the more complex and nuanced skills in coaching. The goals clients bring to sessions are often vague, contradictory, or not actually what they want. Learning to work with those goals, to surface them, question them, and turn them into something genuinely motivating and achievable, is what separates good coaching from great coaching.

The problem with the goals clients bring

When a client first states a goal, it's almost never the real goal. It's usually a surface description of what she thinks she should want, or thinks is realistic, or has been told by others to aim for. A client says she wants a promotion, and what she actually wants is to feel respected and valued at work. A client says she wants to lose weight, and what she actually wants is to feel comfortable in her own body. A client says she wants to start a business, and what she actually wants is the freedom and creative expression she associates with being her own boss.

If you take the stated goal at face value, you end up optimising for the wrong thing. You help your client get promoted, and she still feels undervalued. You help her lose the weight, and she still doesn't like her body. The root want, the underlying need the stated goal was supposed to serve, goes unmet.

Starting with the "why"

The most important question in goal-setting is always why. Why do you want this? What will it give you that you don't already have? What would be different in your life if you achieved it? What would it mean about you as a person? These aren't philosophical questions. They're practical ones, and they help you find out whether the goal is worth pursuing, whether it's actually your client's goal or someone else's version of success, and what obstacles might be sitting just under the surface.

The answers to the why question define success more clearly than the goal itself. If your client knows what she really wants is to feel respected, and that a promotion is just one route to that, she has more options. She can still pursue the promotion. But she can also address the respect issue directly, in her current role, through conversations or changes that might get her to the same outcome faster and at less cost.

Making goals specific and embodied

Vague goals produce vague results. "I want to be happier" isn't a coaching goal. "I want to feel genuinely excited about my work again" is. The specificity matters because the brain responds to concrete, embodied targets differently than it does to abstract ideals. When a goal is specific and embodied, when your client can picture what it would feel like, what her days would look like, what would actually be different, she has something real to move toward, something her nervous system can recognize and track.

Work with your client to make her goals as specific as possible. What does success actually look like, in concrete terms? What will she be doing differently? How will she know when she's achieved it? What will she notice about herself and her life? Questions like these turn vague aspirations into targets she can actually act on.

Checking for alignment with values

A goal can be achievable and still be wrong for your client. That happens when the goal doesn't line up with her deeper values, when pursuing it means acting in ways that don't match who she really is or wants to become. A woman might want to close a major business deal, but if closing it means operating in ways that violate her integrity, the achievement won't bring satisfaction, no matter how impressive it looks from the outside.

Always check whether the goal lines up with her values. What values are at stake in pursuing this? Does reaching this goal require compromising any of her core values? If it does, you either need to find a different route to the underlying outcome or take a closer look at the belief driving the goal. Goals that require value compromises rarely produce lasting satisfaction, even when they're achieved.

From goals to commitments

Finally, help your client translate goals into specific, time-bound commitments. Goals without commitments are just wishes. A commitment is something your client will actually do: a specific action, by a specific deadline, that moves her toward her goal. The key word is specific. Not "I'll work on this project sometime this week," but "I'll spend two hours on Saturday morning finishing the first draft of the proposal." That specificity is what makes the commitment real, and what makes accountability possible.

At Coachivas, our coaches are trained in this values-driven approach to goal-setting, because the goals women bring are often more complex than they first appear, and because the deepest satisfaction rarely comes from achieving just any goal. It comes from achieving the right ones, the goals that actually matter to who you are and who you're becoming.