Your Intake Form Is Doing the Work of Three Sessions

I spent six years asking new clients what they wanted to work on. It is a reasonable question and it produces almost no usable information, because the answer is always the presenting problem — the one that is socially acceptable to say out loud to a stranger you are paying.

The questions that work are oblique and specific. What did you say no to in the last month, and what did it cost you? Who would be most surprised if this worked? What would have to stop for this to start?

Each of those does something a session would otherwise have to do. The first surfaces the actual constraint, which is almost never the one named. The second maps the relationships the change has to survive. The third is the one people answer badly, and the badness is the diagnostic.

Why write it down rather than ask it

Because writing is slower, and the slowness is the point. A client answering in a form has time to be honest with themselves in a way they will not be in the first fifteen minutes of a first session, when they are still deciding whether they like you.

It also gives you something to hold them to. "In February you wrote that you would know this had worked if you stopped checking email at midnight" is a far more useful sentence in session nine than any note you took at the time.

Keep it short enough to finish

Eleven questions is my number. Past about fifteen, completion rates fall off a cliff and the last answers get worse, which means you have traded the most revealing material for the most administrative.

And leave the administrative facts to a separate form. Nobody has ever had an insight while typing their billing address.