How to Apply Goal Setting Theory to Building a Coaching Practice

The goal almost every new coach sets first

You finish your training, you feel ready, and someone asks what your goal is for the first quarter. Almost every coach in that position says some version of the same thing: get five clients. Sometimes it is three, sometimes it is ten, but the shape is identical. A count, a deadline, and a quiet anxiety in the background because you have no idea whether five is low or heroic given what you are actually doing to find clients.

The SMART framework is a useful tool. The problem here is sequencing. George T. Doran proposed the criteria in a 1981 paper in Management Review, writing for organizations that already had performance baselines and repeatable processes. When you are building a coaching practice from scratch, you have neither. You are still searching for a repeatable process, not managing one you already own.

Why common early goals miss the deeper question

A lot of coaches start by building a website, setting up scheduling software, posting on social media, or mapping out a content calendar. None of that is wrong. All of it becomes useful eventually. The problem is sequencing. Those tasks feel productive because they are concrete and completable, but they skip the slower, harder thinking that actually determines whether your practice grows.

The deeper question is not what to build. It is who you serve, what problem you understand better than most, and which channels actually connect you to those people. Most coaches skip that question entirely. They set SMART goals around deliverables, launch a website by a certain date, schedule ten blog posts, get a CRM running, and then wonder why none of it is producing clients. The goals were measurable. The strategy underneath them had never been tested.

The thing that will most reliably move your practice forward is identifying the revenue-generating actions that connect you directly to people who are ready to hire a coach. Asking someone with an existing audience if you can run a workshop for their community is more likely to produce a client than a month of social media posts. That kind of action does not feel as tidy as launching a website, but it is where the real learning happens.

What SMART goals actually require

When you set a goal of five clients in ninety days, the M and the A in SMART are guesses. You have no conversion rate from your outreach, no data on which audiences respond, and no established channel to put a number against. A number attached to an unproven channel is not a measurable goal in any meaningful sense. Apply the tool before its preconditions exist, and the tool will not work. That is a sequencing problem, not a problem with you.

Start with a large aspirational goal instead

Before experiments, you need a direction. An aspirational goal describes who you serve and what you are building over years. Are you a coach for high-achieving professionals navigating career transitions? For parents managing stress alongside their adolescents? The aspiration orients every experiment you run afterward and keeps you from chasing any channel that might theoretically work. Think of it as the compass bearing, not the destination marker.

A useful aspirational goal is large enough that you cannot achieve it in a quarter and specific enough that you could explain it to a stranger in one sentence. It describes the people you are drawn to serve, the problem you understand deeply, and the kind of coaching practice you want to build. Once that is clear, you are ready to run experiments.

If-then experiments: the right tool for the first phase

Peter Gollwitzer introduced the concept of implementation intentions, self-regulatory if-then plans that specify the when, where, and how of goal-directed behavior. The concept was introduced in 1999, and the plans work by predetermining a specific response to a particular future event, which makes follow-through far more likely than setting a goal intention alone.

What we find useful in coaching is to turn that structure into an experimental question at the start of a practice: if I do X, will Y happen? A standard implementation intention assumes you already know what works and need a trigger to perform it. An experimental if-then is a hypothesis about whether a channel connects you to the people you want to serve. Run the experiment and you have a real answer. Run it two or three more times, and you have a pattern worth building on.

A well-formed experiment poses a concrete question: "If I give a 90-minute workshop for the audience I serve, will at least one person want to continue the conversation about coaching?" That question is a test of a channel, and you can answer it with a single attempt.

One if-then that held up under repetition

I started my coaching practice as a high school Latin teacher who could not cold-pitch the parents of students. The conflict of interest was obvious, and it would have been inappropriate. So the usual prospecting advice did not apply. The workable move was a pitch to the head of school, Frank, on a workshop for parents about stress, grades, academic performance, homework, and motivation. Twenty-five parents showed up. I brought a three-page 'What Coaching Is' handout and had a 10-session curriculum ready if anyone asked what working together would look like.

The next day, a parent emailed and signed up for a 15-hour package, choosing it over a 10-hour option. That single result revealed something repeatable about a channel. The question had been: if I give this workshop to this audience, will anyone want to continue? The answer, in concrete terms, was yes.

I repeated the workshop at other schools. The pattern held often enough to become reliable: one workshop, one client. At that point, the if-then had become a strategy worth systematizing.

From experiment to system to SMART goal

Once a channel has proven itself, the sequencing shifts. You have a conversion rate, even a rough one. You know roughly how many workshops produce how many clients. A grounded goal now reads: give four workshops in the next quarter, each to at least 20 parents, with the goal of adding two clients. That goal is drawn from real data. The M and the A have something to stand on.

This is the sequence that works: set an aspirational goal that defines who you serve, run if-then experiments to find a repeatable channel, systematize the channel that holds, and then attach SMART numbers to the system. Skipping straight to SMART at the beginning does not save time. It mostly generates anxiety about a number you invented without evidence.

Hubabble structures goal-setting for a new coaching practice around this sequence, so you can track which experiments are generating sessions and clients before committing to any channel as your primary strategy.

Your next two weeks

Instead of writing a client-count goal this week, try writing one if-then experiment. Frame it as a question: if I do X, will Y happen? Make X something you can actually run in the next two weeks, something specific enough that you will know whether the result held. One workshop, one conversation with a referral partner, one piece of content aimed directly at your audience.

• What channel do you most want to test?

• How will you know if it worked?

• What would three repeats tell you?