Onboarding a person

Coaching with a forest starts the same way every time: four steps that turn "help me grow" into a route.

1. Assess the current state. Walk the relevant forest together and place the person honestly on each skill — yes/no, or beginner / confident / expert, using the behavioural tells from chapter 5. An accurate baseline is the whole point of the exercise, so resist both directions of drift: inflation (which plants frustration a few months out) and modesty (which hides readiness you could be building on). If they can't place themselves on a skill, ask what happened last time they did that work — the story usually answers.

2. Clarify the goal. "Get better" isn't a goal the map can route to. A target rank, a role they're moving into, or a named set of skills — anything concrete enough to point at on the forest. The goal conversation is often the most valuable part of onboarding; many people have never been asked to make their ambition specific before.

3. Find the gap. With both endpoints on the map, the route draws itself: the skills between current state and goal, expanded with their roots and prerequisites, in dependency order. This is where the forest quietly does what a coach otherwise does by intuition — it turns distance into sequence.

4. Set priorities. Nobody walks the whole route at once. Three to five skills at a time; clear roots before entering a tree; and balance what the goal demands against what keeps this particular person engaged — a route made only of duty gets abandoned at the first hard month.

One session is usually enough for all four steps, and the artifact it produces — a marked map with a route on it — carries every session after.