Meet Hannah: The Coaching Conversation That Has Been Stuck for Six Weeks
Hannah Kowalski is in your coaching room because, six weeks ago, a client of her firm offered her a job. Director of Strategy at a company she has worked closely with for two years. Better pay. More scope. Less travel. Real career progression.
The offer is still open. Hannah has been "thinking about it" for six weeks.
This is her fourth session with you. The Subject of the coaching relationship, established at the start, was making a career move. You are about to find out whether you set that Subject well.
Hannah is 39, Polish-German heritage, three years at a mid-tier London strategy firm. She is articulate, prepared, the kind of client who arrives with thoughts already half-organized. She will tell you, in the first two minutes, that she wants to use today to "make some progress on the decision." Then she will start describing the offer in a level of detail you have heard at least twice before.
You have fifteen minutes.
What you do in the next ninety seconds decides everything.
The skill being practiced
This is the scenario Half the Session, available free throughout June on RolePlays.ai. Four coaching clients, fifteen minutes each, one skill: contracting.
Contracting is the most under-respected craft in coaching. Beginners experience it as the warm-up before the real work. It is not. It is the work. A clean contract makes everything that follows fall into place. A muddled one means a 45-minute session of pretending to coach while circling material that was never properly framed.
The scenario uses the STOKERS framework - Subject, Time, Objective, Know, Ethics, Role, Start - originally taught by John Anderson and developed in coaching education at Bernhard Kerres & Friends. Six elements, woven not run. Three of them are content beats (what we're working on, what today is for, where we begin). Three are pacing beats (how long we have, the ethical frame, who I am for you today). A skilled coach integrates them. A beginner runs them as a checklist and the client disengages in real time.
Hannah is the client who will hand you the single most common mistake in contracting, in the first two minutes, gift-wrapped.
What Hannah is going to do
Hannah will treat the Subject as already settled. Making a career move - that was the title of the engagement, four sessions ago. So when you check in - and you should, every session, even and especially in session four - she will say something close to, yes, that's still it. I want to make some progress on this offer today.
You can write that down. You can move to Objective. You can ask, what would you like to walk out with today? And she will give you something concrete - maybe a clearer view of the trade-offs, maybe a decision criterion, maybe a question to take into a conversation with her partner.
It will sound like good contracting. It will look like good contracting. The session will produce something Hannah finds useful.
But Hannah might tell you, if you listen carefully, that the Subject is not actually making a career move. It is upstream of that. The Subject is what she needs to develop, clarify, or prepare across the relationship - and an outcome ("making a career move") is the result, not the development. The workable Subject is closer to preparing for and navigating my next career step.
The difference sounds semantic. It is not. If the Subject is "making a career move," then today's session is about progress toward a decision, and every session becomes a referendum. If the Subject is "preparing for and navigating my next career step," then today's session is about what kind of professional Hannah is becoming, and the offer is one specific stage on that arc.
Most beginners take Hannah's framing and run. Some experienced coaches do too. The Subject becomes the headline of the session instead of the title of the work, and the relationship loses its spine.
This is one trap. The scenario has more.
Three other clients
Elena Marchetti is a Senior Product Manager in Munich. Third session with you. The Subject set at the start was becoming more effective as a leader to her team. She will arrive today with a specific incident from this week and a story about a particular team member. You will be tempted to take the incident as the Objective for today. That is sometimes right and sometimes a Subject drift the contract should catch.
Thomas Brandt is an Operations Manager in northern Germany. 47, nineteen years with the company, six years in his current role. Scheduled by HR after his annual review. This is the first session. He is not sure why he is here, and the contracting work is heavier than usual - because the Ethics element of STOKERS, often perfunctory, is the actual thing he needs to hear before he can speak.
Marcus Hartmann is the Head of Sales for the DACH region of a B2B SaaS company in Hamburg. Newly promoted, fourteen months in role, second session with you. The Subject at the start was stepping up into more strategic leadership - which means almost anything until you make him land on what specifically.
Each of the four clients carries a different kind of contracting test. Hannah's is the most universally instructive, which is why I led with her. Marcus is probably the one most coaches will find most familiar. Thomas is the one that catches coaches who have only practiced with self-referred clients.
What contracting actually looks like
If you spend two minutes on STOKERS, you have not contracted. You have ticked boxes. Target: five minutes of the fifteen. Real time, weaving the six elements as a rhythm rather than a list. Real attention to whether Subject and Objective are aligned, whether the Know criterion has teeth, whether the Role you have been invited into is the one that will actually serve this client today.
The signal at the end of contracting is the Start. Where would you like to begin? If Start does not flow naturally from what you have just contracted, the contract is not yet clean. It is the rigor test that tells you whether to move into content or to keep contracting for another minute.
The hardest discipline in contracting is not the questions. It is the willingness to spend ten of your fifteen minutes on a session contract if that is what this client needs, and to trust that the remaining five will be more useful than the thirty you would otherwise have had.
The AI feedback at the end of each session names the moves you made, in order, and identifies the contracting work that was clean and the work that was rushed. Most coaches who try this scenario come out of it with one specific pattern they can address in their next live session.
Try it in June
Half the Session is free throughout June on RolePlays.ai. Four clients, fifteen minutes each. You can do them in any order. Do at least two before you read the feedback comparatively - the pattern across two sessions tells you something a single session cannot.
This is the right scenario for coaches working toward an ICF credential, for coaching schools, and for leaders who lead with a coaching style and want their what are we actually doing today conversation to do the work it is supposed to do.
If your coaching school or leadership program wants this kind of practice integrated into the curriculum - around your competency framework, your school's methodology, your specific contracting style - we'd love to talk.
Hannah will be in the room. She will tell you the Subject is making a career move.
She is wrong. Quietly.
The STOKERS framework: original teaching by John Anderson, adapted and developed by Bernhard Kerres.