When you start thinking about the concept of your coaching brand, you tend to think it is what happens in the session: the framework, the questions, the sixty minutes of undivided attention. I’ve come to believe it’s almost the opposite. What a client actually remembers, and what they tell other people about you, is what happens in the two weeks between one session and the next. If nothing changes in between, the session was just a good conversation. If something does, that’s your brand in play.
It starts with a word, not a plan
Most coaching conversations end the same way: an insight, an action item, a commitment to behave differently starting tomorrow. But in my experience, almost none of that survives contact with real life between sessions. Not because the insight was wrong, but because it was built on “should.”
“I should be on time.” “I should read two pages tonight.” “I should speak to my team differently.” Say that to yourself twenty times a day (and most of us do, without noticing) and by evening you’re not motivated, you’re exhausted. ‘Should’ isn’t a plan a client carries out on their own, it’s pressure dressed up as intention. And pressure doesn’t survive the time between sessions unsupervised.
I ran an exercise with a group of 29 leaders I was coaching, which I call ‘The should detox’. The instruction was simple: notice how many times a day you use the word “should.” Don’t fix it. Just notice…on your own, away from me, in the ordinary hours where the actual coaching happens.
Within two weeks, that count dropped for most people, from somewhere around 17 to 20 times a day down to two or three. Something else showed up in its place: choice. “I choose to read tonight.” “I choose not to, and I’ll do it tomorrow.”
That shift didn’t happen in a session with me; it happened in traffic, at dinner, at 10pm deciding whether to pick up a book. That’s the between-sessions experience doing the work no framework can do for someone.
The same noticing, turned outward
Once someone starts catching their own “should,” they start catching it pointed at other people, too. “My team should understand the deadline.” “My wife should know I need ten minutes when I get home.” “People should follow the rules.”
Every one of those is an invisible contract, one we’ve written entirely in our own heads, and then hold the other person to as if they’d signed it. When they don’t meet terms they never agreed to, some part of us quietly convicts them: not good enough, not listening, not respectful. And because this plays out in a hundred small interactions a week — with a partner, a driver, a direct report — it’s not something a session can catch in real time. It’s something a client has to catch themselves, on a random Tuesday, days after we last spoke.
That’s the second piece of what makes the days between sessions the actual site of change: the client isn’t applying something I taught them. They’re noticing something for themselves, repeatedly, in moments I’m nowhere near.
Which is why the goal is rarely the point
Now put those two shifts together: should becoming choice, invisible contracts becoming visible. Something interesting happens doesn’t it: outcomes show up that were never the stated goal. One senior leader I worked with told me he’d sent his wife a message of apology for the first time in twenty-five years of marriage. That was never on any coaching plan. We never discussed his marriage or what he owed anyone an apology for. And yet it arrived on its own, days after a session, because something in how he was showing up in his ordinary week had already shifted.
Isn’t this clear evidence that the brand of a coaching practice isn’t the expertise on display in the room? It’s whatever is still active in a client’s head three days later, when they’re nowhere near you and nothing is being measured. If that’s true, then the real question isn’t “what do I say in the session?”, it’s “what survives after I stop talking?”
Choosing partners: Why the container matters as much as the conversation
All of this brings me to my next point: the space between sessions has to be protected, not just filled.
If the actual work is happening in the client’s ordinary week (in traffic, at dinner, at 10pm), then whatever channel carries that work between sessions isn’t a scheduling convenience. It’s part of the experience itself, and it can either protect that work or drown it.
For years, I ran my practice the way most coaches do; notes in one place, scheduling over Calendly, check-ins on WhatsApp, reminders by email. It worked, technically. But it meant that anything I sent a client landed in the same stream as their OTPs, their boss’s emails, their team’s reports. A reflection prompt I’d sent with real intention became one more thing to get through, not a moment to sit with…exactly the kind of noise that kills a “should” before it has a chance to become a “choice.”
That’s the real reason I moved every client onto Simply.Coach from day one, and why I’ve stayed there for four years. When something arrives inside a space reserved only for their coaching, a client treats it differently. They give it the two minutes it needs instead of skimming it between meetings. I set this up explicitly in the first fifteen minutes with every client: this is where we’ll talk, this is where notes live, everything coaching-related happens here, not on WhatsApp, not over email. Some drift back to old habits at first, but most settle in. And once they do, the space itself becomes part of the work, not a tool that helps me coach, but the container that lets the experience I’m trying to create actually hold, days after I’ve stopped talking.
What all of this adds up to
None of this (to recap: the should detox, the invisible contracts, the outcomes nobody planned for, the container aka platform that protects it all) is a technique I deliver in a session. It’s an experience I try to build across the gaps between sessions, where a client is on their own and they only have what’s stayed with them from the sessions. I call the result ease and flow, and I’ve come to think of it as an experience that compounds: from how a leader relates to their own “should,” to how they show up with a partner, a team, eventually a whole organization. A brand built on expertise ends the moment the session does, but a brand built on experience keeps working long after the session’s over.
