When you’re new to coaching and haven’t worked with clients yet, it can feel too early to think about your own framework.

You know what you want to help people with, but you haven’t yet seen your approach at work with clients.

I wouldn’t ask you to define your Authority Framework® at this point. You need real client experience to understand the impact of your work. But you can start gathering the thinking and evidence that will help you shape it later.

Here’s where I’d begin.

1. Look at what you’re already bringing to the work

Your coaching qualification is one part of your experience. What did you learn in your previous career? What have you lived through? What do people naturally come to you for? How do you tend to make sense of a problem?

In the Self phase of Framework Thinking®, I ask you to explore these influences. You can do that before you’ve worked with a single client. It helps you recognise what you bring to coaching beyond the method you were trained in.

2. Get your proposed process out of your head

Take a large piece of paper and sketch the journey you think you’ll take a client through. Where will you begin? What needs to happen before they can move forward? Which parts feel essential?

Treat this as a working map, not a finished method. It will help you explain your work simply and stop you giving a new client everything you know at once. As you coach, you’ll learn which steps matter most and where your original map needs to change.

3. Get into a room with people

When you’re starting out, conversations will teach you more than spending all your time trying to be visible on social media. Choose a place where people can get to know you: an in-person networking group, an online community or a room where your future clients already gather.

Then run a live workshop on something you care about teaching. Listen closely. What questions do people ask? What makes them lean in? What do they understand straight away, and what needs a better explanation?

You don’t need a polished framework to have a useful conversation. Those conversations are part of how you uncover your distinct view.

4. Gather evidence from your first client onwards

Make a habit of recording what happens in your coaching. Notice the moments when a client sees something differently, makes a decision or takes an action they had been avoiding. Ask for testimonials, with permission to share them, and keep your own notes on what helped create that shift.

Over time, this gives you something more valuable than a framework you invented in isolation: evidence of how your thinking works in practice.

That’s also why I’d be careful about asking AI to create your signature method for you. It can arrange familiar ideas into a neat diagram or acronym. It cannot observe your client breakthroughs or decide which beliefs and choices are truly yours. Begin with your own notes, conversations and experience.

5. Understand your natural authority style

There’s another piece you can explore before you have clients: how you naturally think, communicate and share what you know.

Are you an Owl, Squirrel, Dolphin or Hummingbird by nature? Understanding your style gives you a starting point for expressing your ideas in a way that feels like you. It can also help you notice when you’re slipping into the Chameleon phase, adapting yourself to what everyone else seems to be doing and losing sight of your own strengths.

The Chameleon phase isn’t a flaw, and you don’t need to force your way out of it by choosing a personality to perform. You need to pay attention to the way you already think and work. That awareness can help you find your direction sooner.

Take the Natural Authority Style quiz⁠ to uncover whether you’re an Owl, Squirrel, Dolphin or Hummingbird. If your result is Chameleon, read more about what that result means⁠ and look at the style emerging beneath it.

Start with the belief behind your business

Before you worry about naming a framework, ask yourself: What do I believe my clients need to understand to make progress? What frustrated you enough to start this business? What did you see that you wanted to approach differently?

That’s the beginning of your Premise. You may refine it through client work, but you can start putting words to it now.

You don’t need to wait until you’re “established” to practise Framework Thinking®. Explore your Self and your Premise. Sketch your process, meet people, do the work and pay attention to what happens. Your Authority Framework® will have far stronger foundations because you did.

If you have a copy of Framework Thinking®, start with the Self and Premise sections. They’ll help you put your own thinking on the page while you build the client experience that will shape what comes next.