Session Notes 101
Capturing Open Questions for Your Next Coaching Session
Most session note templates have a place for decisions and a place for action items. Fewer have a dedicated place for the things that were raised but not resolved — and that gap is where a surprising amount of continuity gets lost between sessions.
What counts as an open question
An open question is something the client raised, that matters to them, that didn't get resolved by the end of the session. It's different from an action item (which has an owner and a next step) and different from a discussion point (which was simply explored). Examples:
- "Not sure if I should take the internal transfer or wait for something external."
- "Still deciding whether to bring my co-founder into this conversation."
- "Haven't figured out if the budget conversation should happen before or after the reorg announcement."
Each of these is genuinely unresolved — not because the client didn't think about it, but because they don't have enough information or clarity yet to decide. That's worth recording as its own category, not folded into general discussion notes.
Why open questions get lost without a dedicated section
If an open question is buried in a paragraph of discussion notes, it competes for attention with everything else in that paragraph when you reread the note before the next session. In practice, it gets missed — you skim the note, catch the general topic, and forget the specific thread that was left hanging. A dedicated "open questions" line, read every time before a session, doesn't have that problem.
How to use them at the start of the next session
The best use of a tracked open question is opening with it directly: "Last time you were weighing the internal transfer against waiting for something external — where's your thinking now?" This does two things: it shows the client you were tracking their situation carefully, and it often surfaces movement (or lack of it) that becomes the actual substance of the session. This works especially well as part of a structured client check-in, where addressing the open question is one of the agenda's fixed steps.
Open questions vs. GROW's "Options" stage
If you coach using the GROW model, open questions often surface right at the Options stage — the client has named a few paths but hasn't landed on one. That's fine; not every session needs to resolve into a Will. The open question simply carries forward what Options left unfinished. See using the GROW model for session notes for how this fits into the fuller structure.
A quick gut check: if the client said "I still need to think about that" at any point in the session, it belongs in your open questions section — not buried three lines into your discussion notes.
Setting this up from the first session
It's easiest to build this habit from a client's very first session rather than retrofitting it later. See setting up a note-taking system for a new coaching client for how to establish the full note structure — including open questions — before the relationship has a backlog of notes that don't include them.
When an open question stays open too long
If the same open question appears in your notes for three or four sessions running, that itself is worth naming to the client directly: "This has come up a few times now without resolving — what's making the decision hard?" Often the delay is itself informative, and the note history is what makes that pattern visible in the first place.
Open questions vs. action items: a quick distinction
It's easy to blur these two categories, especially when a client is close to deciding but not quite there. The test: does the item describe something the client will actively do before next time (action item), or something they're still turning over in their mind with no next step attached yet (open question)? "Will ask two former colleagues what they think about the transfer" is an action item. "Still deciding whether the transfer is worth the visibility trade-off" is an open question. A single topic can produce both at once — that's normal, and worth capturing as two separate lines rather than merging them.
How many open questions is too many
If a client's note consistently accumulates four or five open questions without any resolving, that's worth noticing as a pattern rather than individual instances. It may mean sessions are surfacing more than they're resolving, which isn't necessarily a problem — some clients do genuinely need more time to process before deciding — but it's worth being aware of rather than letting the list grow indefinitely without ever being addressed directly.
Closing an open question out
When an open question does resolve, note that explicitly too: "Resolved: decided to take the internal transfer" rather than just letting it quietly disappear from the notes. This closes the loop in the written record the same way it closed in the actual conversation, and it makes the note history read as a coherent story rather than a list of half-finished threads.
Open questions in consulting contexts
The same idea applies to consulting notes, just phrased differently — an "open item" awaiting a decision from either side (a budget approval still pending, a technical approach still being evaluated). Tracking these with the same discipline as coaching open questions prevents a project from quietly stalling on something nobody has explicitly flagged as blocking progress.
SessionScribe gives open questions their own section automatically, separate from action items and discussion notes, so nothing unresolved gets lost between sessions.