The jar is wrapped in a tea towel, and the client sets it on the table before she sits down. Preserved lemons, her mother's recipe.
"For my favourite person to talk to," she says, and laughs.
Lorna thanks her and means it. She coaches from a small room above a tailor's shop in Al Mankhool, and pinned to the wall behind the client's chair is the plan they wrote together in March: ten sessions, to get through a redundancy and choose what came next. The client chose. She started her new job in May, around session seven.
This is session thirteen.
Nobody has mentioned the number. At the end of each hour the client books the next date, Lorna says yes, and the sessions are warm, easy and full of news. Somewhere after the new job, they stopped having a question in them.
Driving home with the jar on the passenger seat, Lorna admits to herself that these are the hours she looks forward to most in her week. She also admits that this isn't entirely about the client.
Lorna, her client and the jar are all composites.
How do you end a coaching relationship well?
Plan the ending from the first session, name it out loud as it gets close, and give the last session a job of its own: looking back at what changed, what the client is taking with them, and how they'll carry on without you. A good ending is part of the coaching. It isn't the admin that happens afterwards.
If you're still deciding where to learn this work from first session to last, you can ask an RS Method Master Practitioner, on a free call on Google Meet, whether our programmes would suit you. By the apply page's account it runs "Approximately 20 to 40 minutes". Book the free call. Or read on.
Why is the ending part of the coaching?
Because the aim of coaching is a client who no longer needs the coach for this, and the ending is where they find out they can manage.
What a client takes from coaching gets used after the last session, on some unremarkable weekday, and the ending is the first time they practise that on purpose. Done well, it lets them hear their own account of what changed, in their own words, and leave holding it. Done badly, or not done at all, the coaching thins out instead. Sessions drift further apart, a cancellation never gets rebooked, and neither side is quite sure whether it's over.
Ending with respect is practical. The client knows the ending is coming, has a say in its shape, and isn't left to work out alone whether the door is still open.
So the ending starts in the agreement. Our coaching agreement template includes an ending clause you can adapt. Then, in the first session, mention the last one. "We've agreed ten sessions. Around session eight, I'll ask how you'd like us to finish." One sentence, and the ending stops being a surprise.
What should happen in the last session?
Here's a shape for the final hour. Adapt the words, and keep the order.
- Reread your first-session notes before the client arrives. Find the sentence they used to say why they came, word for word.
- Open by naming the hour. "This is our last session, and I'd like us to use it to look back as well as forward." Then ask what they'd like from it.
- Ask for the story of the work, in their words. "If you told a friend what happened in these months, what would you say?" Let it run, and don't correct it, even where you remember it differently.
- Read them their first sentence. Ask what they hear in it now. Some clients laugh. Some go quiet. Either is fine.
- Ask what they're taking with them. Not insights, but things they now do: a question they ask themselves, a call they no longer put off. Write their answers down and give them the page.
- Ask what's still open, and who or what will hold it. A friend, a routine, a mentor, another professional. You're not handing over a plan. You're checking that something besides you is there.
- Agree what happens after today. No contact, or one check-in at their request in a few months, or whatever else you both choose. Say it in one sentence, and say what happens to your notes, as your agreement sets out.
- Offer one sentence of your own, then stop. Say what you witnessed, with no forecast and no grade. Finish at the agreed minute.
In our experience, step 8 is the hardest one for the coach.
What do you do when a client wants to keep going forever?
First, find out which kind of staying it is.
Sometimes there's a real new goal. The first one has been met, and something else has come up that the client wants to work on. That deserves a fresh start, not a quiet extension: say that the original work is done, agree the new aim and how many sessions it needs, and update the agreement. A new contract, made out loud, isn't the same thing as drift.
Sometimes there's no goal at all. The client brings news instead of questions. The hour feels lovely, and nobody's working on anything in it. They may say, as Lorna's client might, "I just like talking to you." In our experience this is common, and it's nobody's fault. Coaching can be one of the few hours in a week when someone listens closely, and that's easy to want more of.
The kind thing is to say what you see, gently, and without making it a rejection. For Lorna it could sound like this: "You came to work out what came after the redundancy, and you did. Lately our sessions have felt more like catching up than coaching. I've enjoyed them, and I think we've reached a good place to finish. How would you feel about planning our last session together?"
Then let the client answer, without rushing to soften it. Someone who wants company more than coaching deserves to hear that coaching isn't company, and to be pointed toward the people and places that are.
Occasionally the reluctance to stop is about more than an ending. If a client seems to be leaning on the sessions to get through weeks of low mood, or the thought of finishing brings distress that doesn't ease, that may be work for a doctor or a mental health professional, who is trained for it. Our guide to when to refer a coaching client to therapy covers how to raise it with care. Sometimes coaching can carry on alongside that support, and sometimes it's better paused.
When it's the client who ends things early, with little warning, the same respect runs the other way. Offer a closing conversation once, accept the answer, and don't argue for the sessions you'd planned. If the early ending came after a run of stalls and cancellations, our guide to client resistance in coaching may help you read it first.
What about the coach who can't let go?
Lorna once taught at a primary school in Dubai. Every year, on the last afternoon of the summer term, the children went home and she put the chairs up on the desks alone. She learned to be busy on that afternoon, so she wouldn't have to feel the room empty.
The busyness became a habit, and the habit followed her into coaching. A last session is the chairs going up. So, without ever deciding to, she has stopped having last sessions. She says yes to the next date. She adds "you can always message me". She lets an ending blur into a standing appointment, because a blur never asks her to stand in an empty room.
In our experience, a coach who can't let go rarely looks like one. It looks like generosity: an extra session thrown in, a door left open, a client who's done well invited to keep going. Clients can feel it, though. A coach who needs to be needed can teach a client, without meaning to, that they still need coaching.
In a case like Lorna's, what needs removing is the hollow those July afternoons left lodged under her ribs, the sense that when people leave, she stops counting. Without it, the chairs can go up on the desks, so a last session can simply be the last one, with her fully present for it. Whether her next last session goes that way isn't anyone's to promise her.
At RSCI the sequence only runs one way: the practitioner is transformed before the practitioner is trained. Whatever a trainee brings into training gets worked on in them before any client sees it.
A free call on Google Meet with an RS Method Master Coach exists for one question: whether RSCI suits you as the place to learn this work, endings included. Put the call in your diary.
Could RSCI be where you learn the whole arc of coaching?
Three things help a coach end the work well, and RSCI builds each of them in.
- Your own material looked at first. Before you're trusted with a client's last session, what you carry into the room is met in you, under supervision.
- Supervised practice across the whole arc. Supervised practice runs through both programmes, so the way you close a session, and a run of sessions, is seen by a supervisor as well as felt by you.
- An ICF route with nothing hidden. In RS Method Coach the ICF education is Level 1, the route toward the ACC. In RS Method Complete it's Level 2, toward the ACC or, later, the PCC. Our training page's FAQ takes on "Does completing the training automatically make me ACC or PCC?" directly.
RS Method Coach, with ICF education included, is AED 18,000. RS Method Complete, with ICF education included, is AED 35,000. The ICF-accredited education inside our programmes is designed, delivered and certified by the Institute of Coaching and Mentoring (IICM), an ICF-accredited organisation. The ACC and PCC credentials are awarded only by the ICF.
A last session is held to our razor like any other. To witness. To hold. To walk them home.
Mais Mohammed, on camera: "The best decision I took for myself in my entire life."
Our life coach training page lists what each programme contains, and its FAQ covers what happens after you become certified.
Robert Simic, training the next generation.
P.S. If there's a standing appointment in your diary that stopped having a question in it a while ago, it may be time for one kind conversation. To see how our two programmes are put together, start with the life coach training page.