Coaching Intake Form: What to Ask (+ Free Template)

Most coaches err on the long side. Twenty questions feel thorough, but they cost your client half an hour before they have gotten any value from you, and most answers never get used. The form below asks nine questions. Every one of them maps to something you will actually do with it.

What an intake form needs to cover

Four things, in this order:

1. Logistics you need once. Contact details, time zone, how they found you. Boring, necessary, and exactly why it belongs in a form instead of eating session time.
2. The reason they came. What prompted them to book now, not someday. The word “now” matters: the trigger tells you more than the topic. “I want better work-life balance” is a topic. “My partner said something last week that stuck” is a starting point.
3. A first picture of the goal. Where do they want to be in six months, and how would they know they got there? You will refine this together, but their raw, unpolished version is worth capturing before you shape it.
4. How they want to be coached. Past experience with coaching, what helped, what did not, and anything they want you to know about how they respond to challenge. One honest answer here can save you a month of calibration.

Notice what is not on the list: medical history, long personality inventories, ten-year visions. If you genuinely use those, add them. If they are there because a template once included them, cut them.

The template

Copy this into your form tool, or send it automatically (more on that below).

NEW CLIENT INTAKE -- [Your practice name]

ABOUT YOU
1. Full name:
2. Email and phone:
3. Time zone and preferred session times:

WHY NOW
4. What prompted you to reach out at this moment?
5. What have you already tried on your own?

THE GOAL
6. If our work together succeeds, what is different six months from now?
7. How will you know it worked? What would you see, hear or feel?

WORKING TOGETHER
8. Have you worked with a coach before? What helped, what did not?
9. Anything else you want me to know before we start?

Nine questions, five minutes to fill in, and every answer feeds directly into your first session and your client’s coaching plan.

What to do with the answers

The form is only half the system. The other half is where the answers live. If they arrive by email and stay there, you will reread them once and lose them.

The answers should sit on the client’s profile, next to your session notes, so that question 6 (the six-month picture) becomes the client’s first goal, and question 4 (the trigger) is one scroll away when you prepare session three and want to check whether the original reason still holds.

That is how it works in Coach Recap: you send the intake form from the client’s profile with one click, responses land on that same profile, and the goals you distill from them link to every session you run afterwards. No copying answers out of your inbox. And intake is just one use: the form builder is fully flexible, so the same flow works for post-session feedback, progress check-ins, or any form you design yourself.

Three mistakes to avoid

• Sending it too late. The form should go out the moment someone books, while motivation is at its peak. Make sending it part of creating every new client. In Coach Recap it is one button on the client’s profile.
• Asking for the deep stuff in writing. Questions that deserve a conversation (“what are you afraid of?”) get shallow answers in a form and rich answers in a session. Keep the form practical; save depth for the room.
• Never looking at it again. Put a two-minute reread of the intake answers into your prep for sessions one, five and ten. The gap between what they wrote then and what they say now is often the most useful thing in the file.

Make it effortless

You can run this template through any form tool and a folder of PDFs. Or you can send it with one click from the client’s profile in Coach Recap, with the answers stored right there and the goal already linked to your sessions. Coach Recap is free for your first 3 clients, every feature included, no credit card.

Related reading: how to write coaching session notes and the coaching plan template that turns intake answers into a plan your client follows.