What do you do when your clients stop showing up?
What a Coaching Scenario is
Not quiz style. This is judgement practice — you're put inside a real situation from human-services work and asked what you would actually do. It draws on the knowledge you use on the job, not the kind you can look up.
Every choice changes what happens next, and every choice gets a coaching beat straight after it: what drew you toward that option, and how it played out. What's held back is the verdict on your path, so you stay with what you'd genuinely do rather than working out what you're supposed to say.
- 4 decisions
- Each one shaped by the one before it. No two paths through are the same.
- Coaching as you go
- A beat after every decision, naming the pull behind your choice and where it led.
- A full debrief
- Your whole path replayed at the end, with the reasoning behind each decision you made.
- Evidence you can keep
- A completed scenario is recorded in your PracticeLab and appears in your downloadable ProofKit.
Scenarios are made to be talked about. Most people finish one still turning it over, which makes them a ready-made prompt for supervision, a team meeting or a conversation with a colleague — everyone walks the same situation, and comparing where you each landed is often where the real learning happens.
This one ends with
When a family keeps missing appointments, the barrier is usually practical — before you plan your response, find out exactly what's getting in the way.
The situation
You are a support worker at a community health and social services organisation working with families experiencing complex needs. Your caseload includes families navigating poverty, unstable housing, health conditions, and involvement with multiple agencies — schools, health services, child protection, and community support programmes.
One of your families — Liz, her partner Timothy, and their three children — have missed the last four appointments at your office. Each time, Liz texts ahead to apologise: the car broke down again, childcare fell through, Timothy had a shift he couldn't swap. The family is clearly engaged in words but disengaging in practice, and your case notes show this pattern is getting worse, not better.
Your supervisor mentions it in passing during a corridor chat: "That family's not coming in — what are you going to do about it?" You know from your intake assessment that Liz is motivated and that things at home are fragile — not in crisis, but not stable either. If they disengage fully, the early intervention work you've built together over three months is at risk.
You have about thirty minutes before your next client. You sit down to think through what your next move should be.
What you're practising
Before you start, notice
Real-world decisions in scenarios like this are shaped as much by feeling as by reasoning. People often notice one of these pulls — naming what you feel before you decide is half the skill.
- Frustration with missed appointments — and the urge to treat it as a compliance problem rather than a barrier problem
- The pull to offer a home visit as the obvious fix without thinking through the risks first
- Anxiety about closing a case or being seen as not doing enough
- The discomfort of raising financial hardship with a family when you're not sure what you can actually offer
Policies this draws on
- Your organisation's access and equity policy
- Your organisation's home visit and lone worker safety policy
- Your organisation's financial assistance or brokerage guidelines
- Disability Discrimination Act 1992 (AU) / Human Rights Act 1993 (NZ) — access obligations
- Your own organisation's policies take precedence — check them where they apply.
Heads up — coaching scenarios work differently. You'll make a sequence of decisions as the situation unfolds, and after each one you'll get a coaching beat: what drew you toward that choice, and how it played out. The one thing held back is the verdict on the path you took — that lands in the debrief at the end, with your whole walk replayed alongside it.
New to Good Practice Hub? Coaching Scenarios come with PracticeLab Pro, or browse the practice library to see what else is there.
More Coaching Scenarios
See the whole library
Coaching ScenarioI know exactly how this feels
You are a client services worker at a community support organisation. You have your own lived experience of mental health challenges — something you navigated without much support in your mid-twenties, and which shaped your decision to work in this field. Your organisation knows this broadly, but you don't often bring it into your work.
Client Services · ~10 minutes
Coaching ScenarioWhen it feels like you're making a fuss
You've just walked out of a session with Garry, a client you've been supporting for about seven months. You know him well. He's had a genuinely hard few weeks — housing instability, a relationship breakdown, some worrying signs around his drinking. Today, though, something shifted.
Client Services · ~12 minutes
Coaching ScenarioWhen you face an interaction with an angry client
It's a busy Tuesday morning at the clinic. The waiting room is full, the phone keeps ringing, and you've just called the next patient to the desk. His name is Darryl — a man in his late forties who looks tired and tense before he's even reached the counter.
Administration · ~10 minutes