The AI GROW Coach skill for Claude
You put down a problem you have been circling for weeks, and instead of advice you get a conversation: first your goal, then the honest reality, then your own options, and only after that the step you take this week. One question at a time, four phases in fixed order, and at the end an appointment with a date plus a scaling question from 1 to 10 that tests whether you are really going to do it. No phase may be skipped, and the skill refuses advice disguised as a question.
the lines above come from the zip on this page · SKILL.md is 12,830 bytes
Problem in, appointment out
reg. G.001This is the worked example that sits in the SKILL.md itself, shown here in shortened form. Watch what does not happen: not a single tip is given. The user says he does not know where to start, and yet at the end it is he himself who formulates the step.
What the AI GROW Coach is
The AI GROW Coach is a free skill from our own library, which by now counts 100 skills. A skill is an instruction file, SKILL.md, that gives an AI assistant a fixed way of working for one task. Not software you install, not a subscription, not a login: one text file of 2,070 words that tells Claude how a coaching conversation following the GROW model runs, which questions belong in which phase, what it needs to know before it starts, and what it may never do.
You download the zip at the top of this page, put it in your Claude environment, and from that moment Claude coaches according to this structure. What a skill actually is and how that file format works, read in what Claude skills are NL.
The problem the skill solves is very recognisable. You have a problem you have been thinking about for weeks, you put it to an AI, and within two sentences you get five tips. Those tips are not wrong, but they are not yours either, and that is why nothing happens with them. What is missing is not information but order: first get clear on what you actually want, then look honestly at where things stand now, then come up with your own options, and only then decide. That is exactly what this skill fixes.
It keeps the four phases separate, it asks one question at a time, and it forces itself to hold back its own ideas until you have named at least four of your own.
There are two kinds of use built in, and the file explicitly asks at the start which of the two it is. Self coaching, where Claude holds the conversation with you. Or preparation, where you are going to coach somebody else and the skill hands you the questions, the order and the closing block. That makes it useful for entrepreneurs who get stuck themselves, for managers with a progress conversation in the diary, for HR, and for people who do the occasional peer supervision session. It belongs to the skill library NL we make available for free from the AI and automation service, without an account and without a sales email afterwards.
One thing is stated right away in the file, and we take that over literally here: this is not therapy and the skill does not pretend otherwise. At signs of psychological distress, exhaustion that looks like burnout, or thoughts of self harm, the coaching stops and a referral to a doctor or occupational health service follows. That is not a small print line at the end, it is the first action on the list.
Why coaching conversations keep going round in a circle
Anyone holding a conversation that goes nowhere usually looks for the cause in the other person: they do not want to, they cannot, they are not motivated. More often it sits in the structure. There is a separate assessment function built in for existing conversations, and its checkpoints read like a list of what goes wrong in practice.
The conversation starts at the problem. That feels logical and it is the most common mistake. Start at Reality and it turns into a complaining session, because there is nothing yet to measure reality against. That is why the order is deliberate: Goal first, and only then Reality. In one sentence from the file: reality is measured against something.
The session goal and the end goal run into each other. What you want in three years and what you want to have in hand at the end of this half hour are two different things. In the Goal phase they get pulled apart, and the skill asks about both. Without that separation, a twenty minute conversation ends with a life plan and no first step.
The coach fills in the blanks. As soon as somebody says "I have no time", the temptation is to hear "you need to delegate". That is filling in. Hence the summary after every phase, in the other person's own words, with a check question attached: is this right. That keeps the conversation belonging to the person being coached.
Advice gets disguised as a question. Have you ever considered getting a virtual assistant: that is not a question, that is a tip with a question mark. This is stated literally among the things the skill never does, and the assessment function marks every leading question as wrong, because a leading question is disguised advice.
No appointment comes out of it. A conversation that ends with "I will think about it" is a conversation with no result. The Will phase is therefore the only one that is never shortened, not even if you only have ten minutes. Under time pressure the skill cuts into Options, never into Will, because that is where the change happens.
In diff form, with the difference the assessment function marks in almost every conversation record: what goes out and what comes back in its place.
Four phases, five closing lines
reg. G.002Every conversation the skill holds has the same structure: four phases in fixed order, followed by a closing block with five fixed parts. The single lines below explain why that phase or that part is there, and where, according to the file, it goes wrong if you skip it.
What is actually in the SKILL.md
A skill is only as good as its instructions, so we simply describe them here. The file opens with frontmatter stating when Claude should pick up the skill. Not only with the obvious terms such as coach me, GROW model, prepare a coaching conversation or coaching questions, but also with complaints: I have been going round in the same circle for months, I keep putting it off, I know what I want but I cannot get moving, my team is not taking action, I give advice far too quickly, every conversation ends with no appointment, I have a hundred ideas and zero steps. Say something like that to Claude while the skill is loaded and it gets picked up automatically.
The same frontmatter also lists the cases where the skill should specifically not start, and below that sits the licence: MIT, version 1.0.0.
Next comes the core: seven fixed actions. First it decides whether coaching is appropriate here at all, and at signals of distress it refers onward. It asks one question at a time, with no stacks of questions. It runs through the four phases in fixed order and states out loud which phase it is in, so the other person can see the structure. It summarises after every phase in the other person's own words, with a check question on whether it is right. In the Options phase it lets at least four of the other person's own options come first before offering anything itself. It closes with a next step that is achievable today or this week, with a date and a moment to look back. And it asks the scaling question about willingness.
Before the conversation starts, the skill runs through a mandatory input checklist of six points: who is being coached, the topic in one sentence the way the other person would say it themselves, the time available, the context (work, career, team, business, personal or study), what has already been tried and why it did not work, and how much freedom the other person actually has. That last point is sharper than it sounds: can the other person decide for themselves, or is there a boss, client or family situation in the way. If something non essential is missing, the skill simply carries on and makes its assumption visible in the summary.
A separate chapter is about language. The you form, never a formal address. No dashes in running text. Short sentences alternate with long ones. Concrete over abstract, a number over an adjective. And explicitly: no coaching jargon without explanation, because words such as reframing, mirroring and congruent mean nothing to most entrepreneurs. That is exactly why a conversation with this skill does not sound like a coaching course.
A second mode is built in too. Give it a conversation record, a list of coaching questions or a transcript, and the skill assesses it on five points: the phase balance (how much of the conversation went to G, R, O and W, and which phase got flattened), the question quality (each question marked as open, closed or leading), the moments the coach filled in instead of asking, the concreteness of the appointment (action, date, owner), and finally a rewritten version with ten to fifteen replacement questions in GROW order. Want to learn how to set up an instruction file like this yourself? The method is laid out step by step in writing SKILL.md NL.
Below an 8, the step goes down
reg. G.003The last question of every conversation is a number, and that number is not a politeness question. It comes from the solution focused therapy of Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg and is used here within the Will phase. The line sits at 8. According to the file, whatever falls below that does not mean more motivation is needed, but that the step is too big. The number 6 below is the number from the example in the skill.
The theory the skill rests on
The GROW model emerged in the 1980s in Britain, in the circle of coaches around Graham Alexander, Alan Fine and Sir John Whitmore. Whitmore described it for a wide audience in Coaching for Performance from 1992, which has been revised in many editions since. The file is more honest on this point than most articles about GROW, and we take that honesty over here: Alexander and Fine are generally named as co-developers, but there is no single original publication that records the model first. Anyone who writes that the model was invented in year X by person Y is inventing a precision that does not exist.
The underlying idea comes from Timothy Gallwey. The Inner Game of Tennis from 1974 set out the formula that carries Whitmore's view of coaching: performance is potential minus internal interference. Coaching therefore focuses on removing the interference, not on adding knowledge. That explains why this skill tells so little and asks so much: nothing gets added that is not already there.
The scaling question comes from solution focused therapy. Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg are the founders of that approach, and the 1 to 10 scale is a fixed part of it. Here it sits within the Will phase, not as a loose trick.
The file names three alternatives alongside GROW. T GROW puts Topic at the front and is handy when you do not yet know what the conversation is about. OSKAR, developed by Mark McKergow and Paul Z. Jackson and described in The Solutions Focus from 2002, stands for Outcome, Scaling, Know how, Affirm and Action, Review, and is stronger when somebody already has momentum and you want to speed it up. CLEAR by Peter Hawkins stands for Contract, Listen, Explore, Action, Review and is stronger in longer processes with several sessions, because there you need to contract explicitly about roles and confidentiality. So the file does not choose blindly for GROW: it names when another model fits better.
And then the most important line from the chapter of bans, because it works against the product itself: the skill may not claim that the GROW model has scientifically proven effect. It is a conversation structure, not a treatment. Anyone who makes more of it is selling thin air. That is also why this page is a good deal longer than a download button. Even without installing the skill, you can improve your own conversations with these principles: start at the goal, keep Reality factual, let the other person name their own options first, and never close without an appointment with a date. Want to apply that way of thinking more broadly to asking questions instead of filling in answers, there is a separate Socratic Method Coach skill NL.
What the skill refuses
reg. G.004The SKILL.md contains a list of eight things the skill never does, and for a coaching skill that list matters at least as much as what it does do. A conversation about somebody's work or life can do damage if the person guiding it does not know their role. Those rules play out like this: every rule is a request you could make, with the response the skill gives according to its own instructions.
Installing in Claude Code, Claude.ai or Codex
The zip contains one folder, ai-grow-coach, with the SKILL.md inside. Installing is a matter of putting the file in the right place, and that place differs per environment. SKILL.md has been an open standard since December 2025, so the same skill also works in Codex, Cursor and Gemini CLI. So you are not downloading a Claude file but a working instruction that any modern AI assistant can read.
- Unzip it into
~/.claude/skills/(or.claude/skills/in your project). - Claude then picks the skill up by itself as soon as you start on coaching, goals or feeling stuck.
- You can also call it directly, with
/ai-grow-coach.
- Go to Customize and then Skills.
- Upload the zip there as a skill.
- Or paste the contents of SKILL.md into the project instructions of a Project.
- Open
AGENTS.mdin your repo. - Paste the contents of SKILL.md into it, or put SKILL.md next to it as a separate file and point to it from
AGENTS.md. - Codex reads that along at every session.
After that, using it is simple: start with your topic in one sentence and say how much time you have. The skill asks itself about what is missing, and sticks to the time you name by shortening Options and leaving Will intact. If you get stuck anywhere while installing, the full step by step plan per environment is in installing Claude skills NL, and the wider explanation of working with AI is in the knowledge base.
When to use it and when not
This skill is at its strongest with a clear topic and somebody being coached who wants something themselves. That can be a choice between two directions, a goal that just will not come closer, or a progress conversation you want to prepare.
There are also explicit rules for the cases that differ from that. If the user comes in with a cloud of topics, the skill switches to T GROW and first chooses the topic together, because otherwise you are coaching the wrong problem. If there is already momentum and the question is about speeding up or keeping going, OSKAR is stronger and the conversation starts with the desired outcome and a scaling question straight away. If it is about a process with several sessions or about team coaching, CLEAR fits better, because there you need to contract about roles and confidentiality.
And if you only have ten minutes, the skill shortens Options to three of the person's own ideas and leaves Will fully intact. A half conversation that is finished is better than a whole conversation with no appointment.
There are also situations where you are better off leaving it, and the file is short and clear about that. With psychological complaints, trauma, grief or addiction you need a therapist, doctor or occupational health service, not a coaching model. With a purely factual question, a technical instruction or a request for a ready made answer, coaching is simply slowing things down: then you want an answer, not four phases. And with somebody who only calls out solutions, the skill deliberately extends the Reality phase and consistently asks further for facts and figures, which is good for the outcome but rarely pleasant halfway through.
One more honest limit: the skill does not change your situation, it changes your conversation about it. If the diary is full because there is not enough revenue to hire somebody, no coaching question is going to fix that. What it does do is stop you running the same round for the fifth time with nothing recorded. If it is about the beliefs underneath, the Growth Mindset Coach fits better; if the goal itself is still too vague, the SMART Goals Coach sharpens that first.
Run it yourself, or have it run
reg. G.005This skill is the free do it yourself version of work we also deliver as a service. It stays complete and without any catches, but understand well what a skill is: it teaches your AI how to do something, while every new session starts empty. A skill is not the engine and not the memory. You prompt, you supply your situation and your previous appointments again every time, you check. Anyone who wants that differently has two next steps: hand over the engine, or sort out the memory.
where you are now The skill: you are the engine You run the AI GROW Coach yourself in Claude, Codex or Cursor. It costs nothing, it works today, and you keep it entirely in your own hands: no trial period, no locked off parts. The limit is your own time: the conversation only happens when you start it, and you have to bring last week's appointment back in yourself.
have it prepared The AI employee: it is ready without you prompting You do not outsource the coaching itself, because that conversation is yours to hold. The work around it, though, you can: preparing a progress conversation, the write up afterwards, the open appointments nobody keeps track of and the review moment that keeps sliding every month. That is what an AI employee sets up daily, with human final review as a fixed part: output stays a draft until a person approves it. We deliver this through Mansotti, the company TheSEO trades as, which today builds three employees: the Quote employee, the Sales employee and the Reporting employee. A coaching employee is not among them yet, so this becomes a role built to measure, and we only set that up once the process is repeatable and checkable.
everything from one source Jarvis: all your AIs work from the same company knowledge The skill teaches the AI, the brain is where the memory lives. If you want all your AIs to work from the same company knowledge, that is Jarvis, the organisation brain. It connects ChatGPT, Claude, Codex and your people to the same projects, core knowledge and decisions, so your next AI session does not start over. For a coaching skill that is the difference between four separate conversations and a process: last month's goal, Thursday's appointment and the number you gave then are all still there. What that delivers in practice, from the plans to your first week, is at Jarvis itself.
What Jarvis actually delivers
reg. G.006Step 3 deserves more than a paragraph, because this is the difference between a clever chat and a system you can build on. Jarvis is the organisation brain: it remembers what your AIs need to know, divides the work and keeps track of what happened. In coaching this stands out extra, because a conversation with no memory of the previous conversation is not a process. You notice it first at the start of a new session.
We have been running on this system ourselves for months. Every agent session, every task and every decision is logged in it and can be read back. A new session therefore does not start blank: it first fetches the recorded decisions, the running projects and the latest changes, and carries on where the previous one stopped. So we are not describing a promise but the way we work every day.
See all four plans at jarvis/prijzen NL. Through the waitlist NL you only pass on your preferred plan, without obligation. That does not create an account, an order or a duty to pay yet. We discuss business bespoke work first.
The skills around it
reg. G.007GROW structures the conversation, but not every problem starts with a conversation. These skills from the same library each take on a different piece: the direction underneath, the questioning technique inside it, and the self image around it.
For when the goal is sharp
the directionGROW starts at Goal. If that goal itself does not rest on anything yet, start here.
Ikigai CoachLooks for the direction underneath the goal: what you can do, what you want and what somebody pays for.SKILL SMART Goals CoachTurns a vague intention into a goal an outsider can check.SKILL Maslow Pyramid CoachLooks at which need sits underneath the problem before you start on goals.SKILLOther conversations, other models
the questioning techniqueCoaching is one conversation form. These skills do related work with a different mechanism.
Socratic Method CoachPresses on your assumptions rather than on your goal: sharper, also more uncomfortable.SKILL NL Johari WindowFor the blind spot: what others see and you do not, with feedback questions you can ask.SKILL STAR Method CoachStructures looking back at a concrete situation, handy at the review moment.SKILL NLWhen the brake sits elsewhere
the undercurrentSometimes the problem is not the structure, but what sits underneath it.
Growth Mindset CoachFor the belief that it is not going to work out anyway, which shoots down every option in advance.SKILL PERMA Model CoachLooks at wellbeing instead of performance, when that is actually what the conversation is about.SKILL Stoic CoachSeparates what you can influence from what you have to carry, when the situation itself is fixed.SKILL NLThe fundamentals
understand firstNew to skills? These three explain the file format, from understanding to writing your own.
What Claude skills areThe file format, the open standard and what a skill can and cannot do.DOC NL Installing Claude skillsThe full step by step plan per environment, from Claude Code to Gemini CLI.DOC NL Writing SKILL.mdBuilding a skill yourself, following the same method as this library.DOC NL The whole skill libraryAll 100 free skills in one list, sorted by subject.HUB NLFrequently asked questions
What does the AI GROW Coach skill cost?
Nothing. The skill is free, the file itself names the MIT licence and you do not have to create an account or leave an email address. You download a 5.6 KB zip containing one folder and a single file, SKILL.md, and that is the complete skill. There is no paid version and no sales email follows.
Does this skill work in Codex, Cursor or Gemini CLI?
Yes. SKILL.md has been an open standard since December 2025, so the same file works in Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI and other tools that follow the standard. In Codex you unzip it into .agents/skills/ in your project, or into ~/.agents/skills/ for all your projects; Codex has supported SKILL.md directly since the open standard of December 2025. Pasting the contents of SKILL.md into your AGENTS.md still works too. The instructions are plain readable text, so any AI assistant that accepts instruction files can handle it.
Can I use this to coach myself, or does a second person need to be involved?
Either works. The first question of the skill is who is being coached: you yourself, or somebody you are going to coach. In the first case Claude holds the conversation with you. In the second case you get the questions, the order and the closing block to use in your own conversation. The content of the phases stays the same, only the role shifts.
Why does the skill ask only one question at a time?
Because that is stated in the instructions as a fixed action: one question per turn, no stacks of questions and no three questions in one sentence. Given three questions at once, you answer the easiest one and leave the other two. The conversation takes a little longer as a result, but nothing is left unanswered on the floor.
Does the skill also give advice, or only questions?
Questions, unless you ask for it. In the Options phase you first have to name at least four options yourself. After that Claude may add to them, but only with your permission and marked as its idea. Advice disguised as a question, the familiar have you ever considered, is named in the file among the things the skill never does.
What exactly is that scaling question from 1 to 10?
The last question of every conversation: how likely is it that you really take this step. If a number comes in below 8, the skill does not ask for more willpower but for what would make the step smaller. The scaling question comes from the solution focused therapy of Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg and is used here within the Will phase.
When should I specifically not use this skill?
With psychological complaints, trauma, grief, addiction or situations that call for a therapist, doctor or occupational health service. That is stated at the top of the file and the skill then stops coaching. Also not for a purely factual question or a technical instruction: coaching there is simply slowing things down, and you are better off just asking for an answer.
First the conversation, then the diary
A well structured conversation delivers an appointment, but that appointment has to land somewhere. If yours is about too few enquiries, as in the example from the skill, the real work does not sit in the diary but in being found by the people looking for you. The free SEO scan shows in a few seconds where your site stands. Want your team to learn to work with this kind of skill, we do that in the AI training NL. And want to talk further about what AI can do for your business, from separate skills to full automation, we simply do that in a conversation.
