I coach eight clients this week. Eight sessions, eight completely different worlds. By Thursday afternoon I'm supposed to walk into a conversation about executive succession with a COO who's been avoiding a direct conversation with her board, and I need to be fully present for her. Not carrying Tuesday's client. Not distracted by my calendar. Not fumbling through the first five minutes trying to remember where we left off.
I used to spend an hour in prep to get there. Sometimes more, if I'm honest. Now I spend twelve minutes, and I show up sharper than I did when I was spending the hour. The difference isn't discipline or some new orientation toward preparation. It's that I finally figured out how to prepare for a coaching session in a way that actually does what prep is supposed to do: make me ready.
Here's what I've figured out, what I actually do before every session, and the exact prompt I use to make it work.
Rereading your notes isn't prep
For years my prep process was: open the client folder, reread the notes from last session, skim anything before that if I had time, then walk into the room hoping the important stuff would surface.
Sometimes it worked. When I had a full hour and only two sessions that day, I could marinate in the notes long enough to form a real picture. But most weeks aren't like that. Most weeks have a packed Thursday where I'm seeing three clients between noon and five, and my "prep" is seven minutes of scanning while eating lunch. On those days I'd sit down across from someone and feel that half-second of blankness. You know the one. Your client says something that connects to a thread from three sessions ago, and you can feel the shape of it but you can't quite reach it. So you nod. You ask a decent question. But you're not as sharp as you could be.
The problem with rereading notes is that it's exposure, not synthesis. You're running your eyes over information without anyone (including you) doing the work of pulling out what actually matters for this session. It's like studying for an exam by rereading the textbook instead of working the practice problems. It feels like preparation. It mostly isn't.
What actually works: the prep brief
About a year ago I started building something I call a prep brief. It's a short document, usually around 200 words, that tells me exactly what matters for this client in this session. Not a session plan. Not an agenda. Not a list of topics to cover.
A prep brief is a sharpening tool. It takes the full mass of everything I know about a client and compresses it into the stuff that's alive right now. When I read it, I should feel like I just had a five-minute conversation with a very thoughtful colleague who knows this client almost as well as I do and is saying, "Here's what I'd be paying attention to today."
A good prep brief has four things in it:
Recent themes. Not a full history. The two or three threads that have been running through our last few sessions. Where the energy is. What keeps coming back.
Open loops. Things the client said they'd do. Things I said I'd follow up on. Unfinished business that might need space today, or might not, but I should know it's there.
One question I want to sit with. Not necessarily a question I'll ask out loud. More like a lens. Something I noticed last time that I want to hold lightly and see if it shows up again. This is the part that surprises me most often. Margaret surfaces things I half-noticed but didn't fully register.
Tone notes. A line about where this client seemed to be emotionally last time. Were they energized? Flat? Guarded? This matters more than most coaches admit, because it calibrates how I show up in the first two minutes.
The thing that makes this fast
If you read the piece I wrote about building client context files, this is where that investment pays off. Each of my clients has a running context file that I update after every session. It's not fancy. It's a document that holds session notes, key themes, background information, and the small observations that don't fit neatly into a summary but matter enormously.
If you don't have context files, you can still do prep briefs. You'll just be copying and pasting raw notes into your prompt, which is slower and messier. The context file is what turns a twenty-minute process into a twelve-minute one.
The actual prompt
Here's what I feed Margaret before each session. This is the real thing, copied from my setup:
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Prompt:
You are helping me prepare for a coaching session. I'm an executive coach and this client's context file is below. Review the full context and produce a prep brief of approximately 200 words with these sections: RECENT THEMES: The 2-3 most active threads from our recent sessions. Not a summary of everything — just what feels alive and unresolved. OPEN LOOPS: Anything the client committed to doing, anything I noted to follow up on, any unfinished conversations that may need space. A QUESTION TO SIT WITH: Based on patterns you notice across sessions, suggest one question I might hold in mind during this session. Not a question to ask mechanically — a question that reflects something I might be noticing beneath the surface. Frame it the way a thoughtful coaching supervisor would. TONE: A brief note on where this client seemed to be emotionally in our last session, based on the language and observations in my notes. Do not invent information. Only work from what's in the context file. If something is unclear, say so. Keep the language direct and concise — this is a working document, not a report. [PASTE CONTEXT FILE HERE]
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That's it. Nothing clever. The quality of what you get back depends almost entirely on the quality of your context file going in. Garbage in, generic out.
What this looks like with a real client
I have a client, a VP of Product at a mid-size tech company, who's been working through a transition from being the person with the best ideas in the room to being the person who builds the conditions for other people to have the best ideas. It's the classic shift, and she's smart enough to understand it intellectually but keeps catching herself jumping in during her team's discussions.
Last month I ran her context file through Margaret before our Thursday session. Most of the brief was what I expected: the theme of holding back, the team dynamics, a commitment she'd made to try a different approach in her product review meetings.
But the question Margaret suggested caught me off guard. It was something like: "What does she risk losing about her own identity if she's no longer the person with the sharpest insight in the room?"
I'd been so focused on the behavioral shift (stop jumping in, let the team lead) that I'd been skating past the identity piece. She wasn't just changing a habit. She was grieving a version of herself that had worked brilliantly for fifteen years. That question changed the whole session. Not because I asked it directly, but because I walked in holding it, and it gave me a completely different posture. When she started talking about how frustrating it was to watch her team take longer to reach conclusions she could see immediately, I heard something underneath the frustration that I might have missed otherwise.
That's what a good prep brief does. It doesn't tell you what to do in the session. It helps you arrive with the right things already close to the surface.
The twelve-minute workflow
Here's how this actually goes on a real morning:
Open the client's context file. Spend two minutes skimming it myself, just to reacquaint. Not deep reading. Just enough to have the shape of it in my head.
Paste it into Margaret with the prep prompt. This takes about thirty seconds.
Read what comes back. Usually takes two minutes. Sometimes I adjust, asking Margaret to dig into a specific theme or reconsider a question. One more minute.
Then I spend the remaining time, usually six or seven minutes, just sitting with the brief. This is the part that matters most and the part that's hardest to explain. I'm not memorizing it. I'm letting it settle. Sometimes I jot a note on a card I'll glance at before the session. Sometimes I don't.
Total: about twelve minutes. And I walk in knowing what this client is working on, what happened last time, what I noticed that I wanted to revisit, and what question is sitting quietly in the back of my mind.
When you only have five minutes
Some days the twelve-minute version isn't happening. You're running between sessions, or your morning got eaten by something unexpected. The five-minute version: paste the context file, read the brief, pick the one question that feels most alive, and walk in with that.
It's not as good. But it's so much better than walking in cold, or skimming notes on your phone while you wait for the session to start. Five minutes of focused prep with a good brief beats thirty minutes of unfocused rereading.
"Shouldn't prep be more intuitive than this?"
I hear this from experienced coaches, and I get it. There's a version of this concern that's legitimate: if you're so dependent on a document that you can't show up without it, something's off. Coaching is a relational, intuitive practice. The best moments in session come from presence, not preparation.
But here's what I've learned. Intuition works better when it's not also doing memory work. When I'm sitting across from a client and trying to remember what they said three sessions ago about their CFO, that's not intuition. That's recall, and I'm average at it on a good day and terrible at it on a packed Thursday. The prep brief handles the recall so my intuition can do what it's actually good at: noticing what's happening right now, in this room, with this person.
I lost a client early in my career because I was so locked into my structured process that I missed what was actually going on with the person in front of me. That taught me something I carry into every session: the process serves the person. The prep brief is process. It's good process, I think, but it's still just scaffolding. The moment the session starts, I put it down and pay attention.
What I'm still working on
The prep brief is the most reliable part of my AI workflow. It works almost every time, for almost every client. The thing I haven't solved yet is the handoff between sessions. How to capture what happened in session quickly enough that it's still fresh, and in a form that makes the next prep brief better. I've got a version of that working, but it's clunky. Still iterating.
The other thing I notice is that the briefs are only as good as my notes. When I write lazy session notes (and I do, sometimes, at the end of a long day), the next prep brief is flat. It reflects back my own vagueness. Which is annoying, but also a useful form of accountability. Margaret doesn't let me get away with sloppy inputs.
If you try this before your next session, the thing I'd pay attention to is whether the brief surfaces something you'd forgotten mattered. That's the signal that it's working. Not that it tells you something new, exactly, but that it puts something back in front of you that had drifted out of focus. That's the difference between showing up and showing up ready.