When you are struggling to decide
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
Next time you feel pulled to say yes or no on your own to a request that sits in a grey zone, ask yourself: have I actually gathered the information I need, or am I just managing my own discomfort?
The situation
You support Jamie, a 34-year-old man with an acquired brain injury who has been with your organisation for about two years. He is enthusiastic, social, and has been building his independence steadily. Today he tells you he wants to go rock climbing at an indoor climbing gym — something his mates do on weekends and something he's been thinking about for months.
You know Jamie has some balance and coordination challenges and can fatigue quickly. You also know he has made real gains lately, and that his support plan identifies community participation and physical activity as goals. The climbing gym has harnesses and instructors, and it isn't an obviously unreasonable idea — but you genuinely don't know whether the risks are manageable for Jamie specifically, and you haven't dealt with a request quite like this before.
You're not his guardian. Jamie has full decision-making capacity. But you feel the weight of it — if something goes wrong, you'll wonder whether you should have done more. And if you shut it down without good reason, you'll have undermined exactly the independence he's been working toward.
Your next scheduled check-in with your supervisor is in three days. Jamie is sitting across from you now, looking genuinely hopeful.
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.
- The urge to protect — and how it can shade into deciding for someone rather than with them
- Uncertainty as discomfort — and the temptation to resolve it with a quick answer instead of a good process
- The fear of something going wrong on your watch — and how that fear can sit alongside genuine care for Jamie
- The relief of deferring upward — and how that can sometimes be the right move, or sometimes just avoid the work
Policies this draws on
- NDIS Practice Standards and Quality Indicators
- UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD)
- Your organisation's risk management framework
- Your organisation's incident and near-miss reporting procedure
- 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
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