Coaching Intake Form: 27 Questions That Predict Whether a Client Will Stick

Most coaching intake forms are address books with extra steps. Name, email, timezone, how did you hear about us, what are your goals. All of it useful for admin, none of it useful for the decision you are actually making: is this person going to show up, do the work, and still be here in three months?

That matters more than it sounds. A client who quietly disengages in week three has already cost you the discovery call, the onboarding hour, the scheduling overhead, and the emotional bandwidth you did not spend on someone else. Intake is the cheapest place to catch that, because it happens before any of that cost is sunk.

What follows is a set of 27 questions organised around the three things intake can actually predict, plus guidance on reading the answers. Take what fits your practice. A 27-question form is on the long side for a first touch, and the section on form length below explains when to split it.

What an Intake Form Is Actually For

Three jobs, in order of how much money they save you:

• Fit — is what this person needs the thing you do? Misfit is the most common cause of early termination, and it is almost always visible at intake.
• Readiness — is this person in a position to act? Someone in acute crisis, mid-divorce, or three weeks from a house move is not lacking motivation. They are lacking capacity.
• Baseline — where are they starting? Without this you cannot demonstrate progress later, and demonstrable progress is what renews contracts.

Notice what is missing: selling. Intake is not where you convince someone. If your form reads like a sales page, you will collect answers shaped to please you, which are worse than no answers at all.

Section 1: Fit and Expectations (7 questions)

1. In one sentence, what would have to change for you to consider this year a success? The one-sentence constraint is the point. People who cannot compress it usually have not decided what they want.
2. Have you worked with a coach before? If so, what ended it? The second half matters far more than the first. "We finished the engagement" and "I stopped replying" are different clients.
3. What do you expect me to do that you cannot do alone? Surfaces people looking for an accountability partner, a strategist, or a therapist — three very different engagements.
4. What would make you feel this was a waste of money? The single most useful question on the form. It tells you the failure condition in their words, before you have agreed to anything.
5. Is anyone else involved in this decision? A spouse, a manager, an employer paying the invoice. Unseen stakeholders end engagements without warning.
6. How did you find me, and what made you reach out now? "Now" is the operative word. A trigger event predicts follow-through better than any stated goal.
7. What are you hoping we do not spend time on? Boundaries offered voluntarily are more honest than boundaries you have to discover.

Section 2: Readiness and Capacity (8 questions)

1. Realistically, how many hours per week can you give this outside our sessions? Ask for a number. Vague commitment is uncommitted.
2. What is already in your calendar for the next 90 days that will compete with this?
3. On a scale of 1 to 10, how much control do you feel over your schedule? Low scores predict rescheduling, which predicts attrition.
4. What time of day do you think most clearly? Practical for booking, and it signals self-knowledge.
5. Have you tried to make this change before? What happened? Past attempts are the best available data on how this one will go.
6. What usually stops you? Ask it plainly. Most people know, and most have never been asked.
7. Is anything happening right now that would make this a hard three months? Gives permission to disclose without requiring detail.
8. Are you currently working with a therapist or other practitioner? Not gatekeeping — coordination, and a scope boundary you will want documented.

Section 3: Baseline and Measurement (7 questions)

This is the section most forms skip, and the one that makes renewal conversations easy six months later.

1. Where are you today on the thing you want to change, 1 to 10?
2. Where would a 7 look like, concretely? Force specifics. "Less stressed" is not measurable; "I stop checking email after 7pm" is.
3. How would someone close to you know this was working? External evidence resists the distortion of a good mood on review day.
4. How is your sleep, typically? Sleep moves nearly everything else, and it is the change clients most often fail to connect to their outcomes. Our piece on the bidirectional relationship between sleep and mood covers why.
5. How would you describe your energy across a normal week?
6. What does a genuinely good day look like, start to finish? The richest answer on the form. It gives you their actual values rather than their stated goals.
7. What is one thing you want to keep exactly as it is? Protects against the coach-driven overhaul that clients resent.

Section 4: Logistics and Consent (5 questions)

1. Preferred contact method and response-time expectation between sessions. Set this before you need it.
2. Are you comfortable with me keeping written notes on our sessions?
3. Is there anything you would prefer I never write down? Rarely asked, disproportionately trust-building.
4. Cancellation and rescheduling terms — confirm you have read them.
5. Anything I have not asked that I should have? Always last. A meaningful proportion of the most important information arrives here.

How to Read the Answers

Three patterns are worth learning to spot:

• Goal-capacity mismatch. Ambitious answers in Section 1, thin answers in Section 2. This client is not lying; they are optimistic. Renegotiate scope in session one rather than watching them fail at month two.
• Externalised agency. When "what usually stops you" is answered entirely in terms of other people, expect the engagement to stall the first time a task requires them to act unilaterally.
• Uniform vagueness. Short, hedged answers throughout usually mean low investment or low trust. Neither is fatal, but both change how you run the first session.

None of these are grounds to decline someone. They are grounds to start the engagement differently — which is exactly what a good intake form buys you.

On Form Length

Twenty-seven questions is too many for a cold enquiry and about right for a confirmed client. If your intake doubles as a lead form, split it: five questions before the discovery call (1, 3, 4, 8, 14), the rest after they have signed. Completion rate on a long form from a stranger is poor, and a half-finished form tells you less than a short complete one.

The Part Intake Cannot Do

Everything above is a snapshot of one day — usually an unrepresentative one, because people fill in intake forms when they are motivated. It tells you where someone started. It tells you nothing about week three, when the novelty has worn off and the honest answer to "how is it going" has quietly become "I have not thought about it since we spoke."

That gap between sessions is where engagements are actually won or lost, and it is invisible to almost every tool coaches use. A structured weekly check-in closes it: two minutes from the client, a readable trend for you, and the difference between discovering a problem in the session and discovering it eleven days earlier.

That is the part Interlude is built for — lightweight client check-ins between sessions, so you walk into every call already knowing how the week actually went.