How to Find Coaching Practice Partners
Every route coaches use to find practice partners, honestly compared: cohorts, Facebook groups, paid matching services, and practice-partner platforms.
Ask a group of coaches in training what the hardest part of the journey is and you'll hear the same answer far more often than you'd expect. Not the learning. Not the exams. Finding people to practise with.
One coach described the search as feeling like shouting into the void. Someone expresses interest, you message them, and you never hear back. Someone books a session and doesn't show up. The search itself becomes a job.
Here are the routes coaches actually use, with the honest trade-offs of each.
Your training cohort
The default starting point. Your programme probably paired you up, and your cohort WhatsApp group is full of people who need hours too.
It works, at first. Two problems emerge. First, you all learned the same method from the same teachers, so sessions start to feel like rehearsals with someone who already knows the script. Coaches tell us practice with classmates doesn't feel like a real client relationship, because everyone recognises what everyone else is doing. Second, cohorts dissolve. People graduate, drift, get busy. The hour requirement outlives the group that was supposed to help you meet it.
Facebook groups and forums
Free and busy, but built for none of this. You post publicly that you're looking for practice partners, which means advertising your trainee status under your real name to thousands of strangers. Then the logistics are all yours: swapping emails, comparing timezones by hand, sending Zoom links, hoping.
The recurring complaint is reliability. People comment enthusiastically and then vanish when you message them. There's no commitment, no shared context, and nothing that makes a stranger accountable to a session they agreed to in a comment thread.
Paid matching services
Services exist that will match you with reciprocal peer coaches in organised rounds, and they've been running for years. The trade-offs are cost per round, fixed start dates rather than practising on demand, and doing everything else (scheduling, calls, records) in your own tools.
Some coaches reason that paying gives people skin in the game, and there's something to that. But a fee is a blunt instrument for commitment, and it adds cost to a stage of the coaching journey that has already cost thousands.
Advertising free sessions to the public
Coaching strangers who respond to a "free coaching" offer gets you session experience, but it's one-directional. You give coaching and get none, nobody trained is watching your craft, and if you're on the ICF path, one-way unpaid sessions count against a pro bono allowance that runs out at 25 hours. It also means marketing yourself before you feel ready, which is exactly the thing many coaches in training dread.
A practice-partner platform
This is the gap Robin was built for. Robin is a free directory of coaches from different programmes and countries who all want the same thing you do. You browse profiles (sorted by timezone overlap), message people, schedule sessions, and run the video call, all inside Robin. No personal details change hands unless you choose to share them. Sessions land in your logbook so your hours are recorded as you go.
Because everyone on Robin is there to practise, the awkward part disappears. You're not pitching strangers or hoping a comment thread turns into a session. You're browsing people who are looking for you too.
Join Robin free and find your first practice partner.