Knowing When the Work Is Done

On closing a coaching engagement with intention

A few weeks ago, I wrapped up a six-month coaching engagement with a client. We had been meeting regularly, working through the familiar terrain—leadership challenges, decision-making patterns, relationships with a co-founder at work, the many quiet narratives that shape how we show up.

But as we approached the end, something shifted.

Not in the client, exactly. In me.

I started to feel a different kind of responsibility—not to help him move forward, but to help us finish well.

In executive coaching, we spend a lot of time thinking about beginnings. The chemistry conversation – will we be a good match? The Discovery session – how to be present and intentional together, and what important topics to prioritize. The alignment with a sponsor. We start deliberately, and I bring a clear structure to those conversations.

But endings? They can sneak up on us. We look at the calendar and realize we are getting close to the end of our mutual agreement. A final session gets scheduled. Calendars move on. There’s a polite acknowledgment that “this has been valuable.”

And then it’s over.

That’s not how I like to do things. I’ve learned that how we end a coaching engagement is just as important as how we begin. I reflected on my coaching certification training a bit; in those sessions, the final class included a ritual in which every person in the class had the opportunity to make final reflections on their time in the class and were invited simply to state “I am complete.” This fundamental action held a lot of meaning for me, and I wanted to bring something of that experience into my own coaching practice.

The Completion Session

The purpose of a Completion Session is to create space for four things: a clear look back at where the client started, a grounded reflection on what has changed, mutual acknowledgment of the work done together, and a forward-looking conversation about sustaining growth.

What struck me most was how different the energy felt from a typical session. There was less urgency. Less problem-solving. More presence. More intentionality.

We weren’t trying to get somewhere.

We were trying to understand what had already happened.

Where We Started

We began by revisiting the very first conversation. At the time, the client had been wrestling with some familiar tensions: high self-expectation, lack of clarity on what to focus on for the next 1-2 years, a disconnect between his day-to-day work and where he believed he wanted to develop.

In the Completion Session, I asked him to finish the following prompt:

“I leave this coaching engagement as someone who…”

He paused to think, eyes wandering to the ceiling for a bit.

And then he said, “…as someone excited and clearer about the future.”

Not because his role had changed. Not because the demands had lessened.

But because his relationship to those demands had shifted.

We spent time unpacking what had actually changed. Not in broad terms, but in specifics.

He talked about how he had successfully broken through inertia and resolved some thorny issues with a business partner he had been reluctant to deal with, how he prioritized more clearly, and how he had become more intentional about stepping back periodically to assess whether he was on the right path.

None of these is a dramatic shift on its own. But together, they represent something meaningful: a change in how he operates.

Using Acknowledgements

We also created space for acknowledgment—both ways.

I shared what I had observed in him. His courage in dealing with difficult conversations, his improved ability to focus on what is important, and his openness and sincerity around self-improvement.

Then I invited him to reflect on the coaching itself.

These conversations require directness. But they create a sense of completion that is hard to replicate any other way.

Perhaps the most important part of closing a coaching engagement is creating the conditions for continued growth without the coach.

We focused on what he now knows about himself—and how he can use that awareness going forward.

The goal was not to prepare him for the next six months.

The goal was to help him trust that he can navigate whatever comes next.

So when is coaching complete, not in a contractual sense, but in a deeper one?

Recognizing Completion

Coaching may be nearing completion when the client is generating their own insights, asking their own questions, and adjusting without prompting.

And perhaps most importantly: when they see themselves differently, and act from that understanding.

As we ended, there was no dramatic moment, just a quiet recognition that the work had been done.

That, to me, is what a good ending looks like - intentional. Because coaching is not meant to last forever.

At its best, it creates the conditions for someone to continue growing and holding themselves accountable long after the coaching conversations have stopped.

Coach’s Question

What are some questions you would want someone to ask you at the end of a coaching engagement?