If I were creating a new group coaching program today, especially for people living in different countries, I'd seriously consider combining recorded lessons with live coaching sessions. It's called hybrid group coaching, and the idea is quite simple. You record the educational parts of your program in advance and use your live meetings for coaching.
Of course, you could end up creating an online course with a few Zoom meetings added. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's not quite the same as group coaching. In a hybrid coaching program, the recorded material helps participants learn, while the live sessions give them an opportunity to work with what they're personally experiencing.
So how would you actually put something like this together? I've prepared an eight-week example you can adapt to your own coaching practice. We'll use confidence coaching as our topic, but the same structure could work for career transitions, relationships, personal development, or other areas within your expertise.
First, What's the Difference Between Teaching and Coaching?
The way I see it, teaching and coaching serve different purposes. When I teach, I'm sharing knowledge or explaining a method. When I coach, I'm working with someone's personal experience. And that difference matters when you're deciding what belongs in a recording and what deserves your time together.
Let's say you're developing a group coaching program about personal boundaries. You could record a 15-minute video explaining what boundaries are, why people struggle to communicate them, and what healthy boundary-setting looks like. You might also include a worksheet with a few practical examples. That's teaching. You're introducing information everyone in the group can benefit from.
Now imagine someone joins your live session and says, "I know I need to set boundaries at work, but every time my manager asks me to do something extra, I immediately say yes." You could explain the theory of boundaries again, but would that really help? The person already understands the concept. I'd be more interested in exploring why they keep saying yes when they actually want to say no. What happens in that moment? What are they worried about? What would they like to do differently?
Two people can understand exactly the same concept and still struggle with it for completely different reasons. One might be afraid of disappointing others, while another might feel their value depends on always being available. That's where coaching becomes valuable. You're working with the person and their particular experience.
Of course, teaching and coaching can overlap. Sometimes you need to explain a concept during a coaching session, and sometimes an educational exercise leads to an important personal insight. But when designing a hybrid program, I'd ask myself: Am I helping participants learn something they need to know, or am I helping them work with something they're personally experiencing? If it's primarily about learning information, I'd consider recording it. If it requires personal exploration and individual attention, I'd make room for it during the live sessions.
Your 8-Week Hybrid Group Coaching Program
Let's imagine you're creating a program called Building Confidence in Everyday Life. I'd start with six to eight participants, eight weeks, and one 90-minute live group coaching session each week. Before every session, participants receive approximately 20 to 30 minutes of recorded educational material.
Why six to eight people? If you're new to group coaching, I think it's a manageable number. You have enough participants for interesting conversations, but you can still give people individual attention.
Week 1: Understanding Confidence
Educational content: Introduce what confidence means, common misconceptions about it, and the relationship between self-doubt and everyday decisions.
Live coaching: Explore situations where participants experience self-doubt and what they'd like to change. Use part of the first meeting to get to know each other and agree on confidentiality and participation.
Between-session practice: Invite participants to notice two or three situations during the week when they feel confident or experience self-doubt. Ask them to briefly reflect on what was happening and how they responded, without trying to change anything yet.
Week 2: Recognizing Personal Patterns
Educational content: Explain how automatic reactions and familiar behavioral patterns develop, using examples such as avoiding difficult conversations or seeking approval.
Live coaching: Work with situations participants bring to the session. Someone might repeatedly avoid expressing their opinion at work. Explore what happens in those moments and what makes speaking up difficult.
Between-session practice: Ask participants to choose one familiar reaction they've recognized and observe when it appears during the week. What usually happens just before it? What do they notice in their thoughts, emotions, or behavior?
Week 3: Working With Self-Criticism
Educational content: Introduce the difference between constructive self-reflection and excessive self-criticism.
Live coaching: Someone might describe spending an entire evening replaying a conversation because they think they said something stupid. Rather than explaining self-criticism again, explore why that conversation matters so much to them.
Between-session practice: Invite participants to notice moments when they become critical of themselves. Instead of immediately trying to replace those thoughts with positive ones, ask them to observe what triggers the criticism and how it affects them.
Week 4: Working With Discomfort
Educational content: Explain why discomfort often appears in unfamiliar situations and introduce practical ways of recognizing and staying present with uncomfortable emotions.
Live coaching: Explore situations participants tend to avoid. I'd focus on helping them understand their experience rather than convincing them to push through discomfort.
Between-session practice: Encourage participants to notice a mild moment of discomfort during the week and spend a little time observing how it feels in their body. They don't need to change or overcome anything. The idea is simply to become more familiar with their experience, at a pace that feels manageable.
Week 5: Communication and Personal Boundaries
Educational content: Introduce the principles of assertive communication and personal boundaries, with examples of how people can express their needs.
Live coaching: Work with real situations involving difficult conversations or personal boundaries. Someone might struggle to tell a family member they're no longer available to help every weekend.
Between-session practice: Invite participants to choose one everyday situation where they'd like to communicate more clearly. They might express a preference, make a request, or say no to something they would normally accept automatically. Afterwards, ask them to reflect on what they experienced.
Week 6: Taking Action
Educational content: Explain how small, realistic actions can help people develop confidence through experience.
Live coaching: Help participants identify situations they'd like to approach differently, explore what might hold them back, and decide on a manageable next step.
Between-session practice: Ask participants to take one small action connected to the goal they explored during coaching. It doesn't have to be dramatic. Afterwards, they can reflect on what happened, how they felt, and whether they'd like to approach anything differently next time.
Week 7: Working With Setbacks
Educational content: Explain why personal change doesn't always follow a straight line and how people can reflect on setbacks without treating them as personal failures.
Live coaching: Explore what happened when participants tried something different. What did they experience? What surprised them? What would they like to do next?
Between-session practice: Invite participants to revisit a recent situation that didn't go as expected. Ask them to consider what they learned from it, whether their expectations were realistic, and what they might want to try differently, without turning the experience into another reason to criticize themselves.
Week 8: Integration and Next Steps
Educational content: Provide a review of the main concepts and a reflection worksheet.
Live coaching: Reflect on individual progress, remaining challenges, and possible next steps. Give participants an opportunity to recognize changes they may not have noticed during the program.
Between-session practice: Invite participants to create a simple personal plan for the coming month. What would they like to continue practicing? What situations deserve more attention? And what could help them maintain the changes they've started making?
How I'd Organize a 90-Minute Live Session
I wouldn't complicate this too much. You want enough structure to keep things organized, but also enough flexibility to work with whatever comes up. You could spend the first 10 minutes checking in, another 10 minutes answering questions about the recorded material, approximately 45 minutes on live coaching, 15 minutes on group reflection, and the final 10 minutes on personal insights and next steps.
You don't have to follow that schedule minute by minute. Sometimes a coaching conversation needs more time, and you might shorten another part of the session. And you don't necessarily need to coach every participant individually during every meeting. People can learn a lot from listening to someone else's coaching conversation, especially when they recognize something from their own lives. Still, I'd make sure everyone has a fair opportunity to receive individual coaching throughout the program and understands the group's confidentiality agreements.
What If Your Participants Live in Different Time Zones?
This is one of my favorite things about the hybrid format, especially if you're planning to work internationally. Let's say you're based in Europe and have participants from the United States, Australia, and Asia. Finding a weekly Zoom time that works for everyone can be quite a challenge.
With a hybrid program, someone in Australia can watch your lesson on Monday afternoon, while someone in California might prefer Sunday evening. Nobody has to wake up at three in the morning just to listen to you explain a concept. But you'll still need to organize the live coaching sessions. You could offer two different meeting times, divide participants into smaller groups based on their locations, or rotate your schedule so the same people aren't always attending at inconvenient hours.
Keep in mind that offering two live sessions means more working hours for you. That's something to consider when setting your price. And personally, I wouldn't automatically record live coaching conversations for people who couldn't attend. Participants sometimes share quite personal experiences, and their privacy matters. If you decide to record any part of a live session, make sure everyone involved understands and agrees to it.
I'd also make the live meeting schedule clear before anyone enrolls. Hybrid coaching gives you more flexibility, but it doesn't mean participants can attend whenever they want.
Your Own Hybrid Group Coaching Planning Template
Before recording anything, I'd get clear on a few basic things. Who is this program for? What do participants want to work on? And which parts actually need live coaching? Here are the questions I'd use to organize the program.
1. Your Program
- Who is your program for, and what specific challenge will it address?
- What would participants like to achieve?
- How many weeks will it last, and how many participants will you accept?
2. Your Educational Content
- What concepts or methods do participants need to understand?
- Which explanations, demonstrations, or exercises could you record in advance?
- What could participants practice or reflect on between sessions?
3. Your Live Coaching
- What personal challenges are participants likely to bring?
- How will you organize individual coaching opportunities?
- How will you accommodate participants from different time zones?
Once you've answered those questions, you can plan the individual weeks. I like to keep this part simple. For each week, decide what participants need to learn, what you'll focus on during coaching, and what they can explore or practice before the next meeting.
You can copy this little template into a document and repeat it for each week.
Week 1: Your Topic
Educational content:
Live coaching focus:
Between-session practice:
Week 2: Your Topic
Educational content:
Live coaching focus:
Between-session practice:
Continue with the same structure through Week 8, or adjust the number of weeks to suit your program.
Should You Record Everything Before Launching?
I wouldn't, especially if this is your first hybrid group coaching program. I'd prepare the overall structure and record the educational material for the first week or two before the program begins. Once you start working with real participants, you might discover that some concepts need less explanation than you expected, while others deserve more attention.
Of course, you still need to know where you're taking the group. I wouldn't suggest improvising everything from week to week. But I also wouldn't spend months recording an entire video library before finding out what participants actually need.
After you've delivered the program once or twice, you'll have a much better idea of what works. You can then record a more complete version of the educational material and reuse it with future groups.
And if I were building a hybrid program, there's one question I'd keep coming back to: What do I really need to be there for? If I can explain something in a 15-minute video, I'd rather record it and let people watch it whenever they want. Then we can use our time together for what I enjoy most about coaching: working with real people and whatever they're actually going through.
This article is adapted from the TT Coaching - Become a Certified Holistic Life Coach training program, where we also explore how to design and facilitate group coaching programs.