Three people asked Paloma the same question on the way out, and she gave all three of them the same answer.
The workshop had gone well. Fourteen people on folding chairs in a design studio in Al Wasl that a friend lends her once a month, and two hours on a single question: what are you still carrying that nobody asked you to? People wrote, talked in pairs and laughed in places she hadn't planned for.
Then the chairs scraped back. A woman who'd sat by the window waited until the others were at the door. "Do you do this one to one?" Paloma said she was still building that side of things, and started peeling the paper sheets off the wall. A man asked if there was a longer version. She said maybe next year, and capped the markers one by one. A younger woman asked for her number, "for later". Paloma said she'd put something on Instagram.
In the car afterwards, she counted. Three people had asked to keep going, and she'd given each a polite reason to stop.
Paloma is a composite.
Why run a life coaching workshop at all?
Because a life coaching workshop, a short structured session of about two hours in which a group tries coaching on a question of their own, does two jobs for a coach at once. It's an audition, since the room feels how you listen, and it's a front door, since some people will want more.
In our experience, people don't decide to work with a coach because of the slides. They decide because of how it felt to sit in the room: whether they were noticed, whether they were hurried, and whether anything was asked of them that they weren't ready to give.
So the design question is never only "what will I teach?" It's also "what will it be like to be in here with me?" Workshops are one of several early routes to clients, and our guide to your first coaching clients sets out the others.
If leading rooms like this is part of the practice you're imagining, Sara, our veteran RS Method Master Coach, keeps free Zoom calls of twenty to forty minutes for people deciding where to train, and she'll tell you whether RSCI suits the work you want to do. Your call with Sara starts here. Or read on.
How do you design a two-hour coaching workshop?
Start with one question, not a syllabus. A good one is about the present, can be answered privately, and is wide enough for an engineer and a new mother to find themselves in it.
Then build four stretches around it.
An idea, about twenty minutes. One idea, said simply, with one story from your own life. Choose a story you've finished being upset about. If telling it still shakes you, the room will spend the next hour looking after you.
Private writing, about thirty minutes. Everyone writes, alone, in answer to two or three questions about their own week. Nobody reads anyone else's page. It's tempting to cut this part, because the room goes silent. Let it.
Pairs, about thirty minutes. People talk with one other person about what they noticed while writing, not about what happened to them years ago. Give them the questions on a slip of paper, a time limit and a line that keeps them in charge: "You choose how much of your page to share."
The whole room, then the ending, about forty minutes. Put a few questions to everyone, and let people answer in their notebooks or aloud. Leave real gaps between questions. Close with a round in which each person says one thing they're taking with them.
That last stretch is where the audition happens: in how you meet the person who speaks, and how much room you leave for the ones who don't.
What can safely happen in a room of strangers, and what can't?
Robert has led live events for over twenty years, on five continents, in rooms of two and rooms of two thousand. In his rooms, nobody has to tell the group their story for the work to happen, and anyone who comes forward does so by choice. A coaching workshop is a different kind of room, but the principle carries across.
Paloma found that out forty minutes in, with an exercise she loved from her own training: in pairs, tell your partner about the first time you felt you weren't enough. In one pair, a man went quiet and spent the next ten minutes on his phone. In another, a woman told a stranger something she'd never told her own sister, then sat beside that stranger for the rest of the workshop.
In her training group, that exercise had been safe: the group had months together and a supervisor in the room. A borrowed studio with fourteen strangers has neither.
In our experience, these are safe with strangers:
- writing that nobody else reads;
- talk in pairs about the present, where the speaker decides how deep to go;
- questions to the whole room that people can answer silently, in their own notebooks;
- a clear way to pass on any exercise, said out loud every time.
These aren't:
- asking anyone to share painful history, with the group or with a partner they met an hour ago;
- calling someone to the front who hasn't offered;
- opening anything you won't have time to close before people leave.
If someone's distress seems bigger than a workshop can hold, pause the exercise, speak with them privately, and suggest a doctor or a qualified mental health professional. When tears come, the steps in our guide on what to do when a client cries in a session work in a group too.
Why did Paloma send three interested people home?
Start with what she could have said. A workshop leads to longer work without a hard sell when the next step is named once, plainly, while everyone's still seated. Not at the door, where only the boldest ask, and never as a pitch, a discount or a countdown. Something like: "If you'd like to keep going with what came up today, I coach people one to one over a few months. Put your name on the sheet by the door and I'll suggest a first conversation. If not, your page is yours, and it's enough." Then leave the sheet out and say no more about it.
Within two days, send everyone the workshop questions, and send the people on the sheet a note offering a time to talk. That talk isn't a pitch either. Our guide to the coaching discovery call shows how to run it.
To see why nothing like it got said, go back to a fair. Paloma's grandmother lived in a village near Córdoba that held one every year, and one year, still in primary school, Paloma ran a lemonade stall there. She'd painted a price on a square of cardboard. Her grandmother stopped, turned the cardboard face down and said, quite kindly, "If it's good, people will offer." Paloma poured for free all evening, and her grandmother told everyone who passed what a generous girl she was.
That square of cardboard never got turned back up. "If it's good, people will offer" is printed on one side of it, and the warmth of being called generous holds it face down. At the studio door, three people reached for a purse, each in their own words, and Paloma turned the sign over again: maybe next year.
In our training, a coach spends time with her own version of that fair, under supervision, until an old evening no longer decides what she says at a new door.
A workshop shows people who you are before it shows them anything you know, and our training is arranged around that: the practitioner is transformed before the practitioner is trained.
Sara can't tell you what your own fair was. What she can do, on a free call, is help you decide whether to train with RSCI at all, and if so, on which programme. Set up a call with Sara.
How can you test a workshop plan before anyone walks in?
Give every exercise a depth score. You'll need an hour and the plan in front of you.
- Write out every exercise in the words you'll say to the room. The actual instruction, not "pairs exercise".
- Score each one from 0 to 3. A 0 asks for nothing but listening. A 1 asks for an opinion. A 2 asks for something about this week. A 3 asks for something from the past, or something that hurts.
- Rewrite or cut every 3. With strangers, keep to 0, 1 and 2, and let each person choose their own depth inside an exercise.
- Add the way out to every instruction. "If you'd rather keep this to yourself, write it instead." Say it every time.
- Look at the clock. Nothing scored 2 after the first ninety minutes. Whatever you open, leave time to close.
- Write your next-step sentence word for word. Give it a place in the plan, before the closing round.
- Read the whole plan aloud to someone who'll tell you the truth. Ask which exercise they'd quietly skip. That's the one to look at again.
What should the training behind your workshops give you?
Three things, and here's how ours answers each.
- Practice with people, not only with material. Our life coach training page opens with two short sentences: "Learn the RS Method. Train with real humans."
- A plan for the moment the plan stops working. The same page names the capacity it trains as the ability to "sit in front of a client and know what to do when the conversation goes somewhere no script prepared you for."
- ICF education inside the training, described exactly. Both programmes carry it: Level 1 in RS Method Coach, Level 2 in RS Method Complete. 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.
Take away the slides and the timings, and what a room remembers of a coach is this. To witness. To hold. To walk them home.
In Mais Mohammed's own voice, on video: "The best decision I took for myself in my entire life." The decision she names was hers to make, and nothing here makes it anyone else's.
Our life coach training page ends on one question, how deeply you want to train, and sets out the two programmes that answer it.
Robert Simic, training the next generation.
P.S. If three people have ever asked you to keep going and heard "maybe next year", our life coach training page shows, step by step, how the training moves from an online curriculum to coaching real people.