The Real Work Happens Between Sessions

A client of mine, a VP running a 800-person global function, once left a session and told me it was the best hour she'd had in months. She'd named something she'd been avoiding for a year: she was managing her team the way her old boss had managed her, out of fear rather than trust. She could see it. She could feel it shifting.

Three weeks later, in our next session, she brought the same story back. Same meeting, same tone, same fear driving the same decisions. The insight hadn't disappeared. It just hadn't survived contact with her calendar.

"The coach reads the moment. The structure catches what happens after it."

I've watched this pattern for years, long before "programme design" became the language we use for it. A session produces something real — a genuine shift in how someone sees their own behaviour — and then the person walks back into an environment engineered, quietly and completely, to pull them back to where they started.

Insight was never the hard part

Coaches sometimes talk as though the breakthrough is the finish line. It's the easy part. Most people can see their own pattern once someone reflects it back to them clearly enough. What they can't do alone is hold onto that seeing for three weeks, when the old triggers show up in a Tuesday afternoon meeting and the old response is still the fastest one available.

Kegan and Lahey called this an immunity to change: a hidden commitment protecting something the person values, running in parallel to the change they say they want. My VP wasn't failing to manage differently. She was protecting a sense of control that fear had reliably given her for fifteen years. No single session unseats that. It gets worn down, slowly, through what happens between sessions, not during them.

What actually keeps someone moving

The coaching itself hasn't changed in what makes it work: a specific practice, not a vague intention. "Notice when you feel the urge to take over" is not a practice. "Before your Thursday one-to-one with your most anxious report, write down one question you'll ask instead of one instruction you'll give" is a practice. It's small enough to do, specific enough to notice when it's missed, and tied to a moment that will definitely happen that week.

The second thing is a place to report back that isn't just the next session. Three weeks is a long time to hold a commitment alone, especially against a pattern that's been running for fifteen years. A short weekly check, even five minutes, keeps the practice alive instead of shelved until it's convenient to remember it again.

Where the diagnostic side earns its place

Here's where I think coaches sometimes resist something that actually helps. A structured diagnostic, run between sessions, isn't a replacement for what a coach notices in the room. It's a different instrument. It catches what neither the coachee nor I can see from inside a single conversation: whether the behaviour actually showed up with the team, not just whether it felt true while she was sitting across from me.

That's the piece I don't have on my own. I can tell when someone has had a real shift in a session. I'm the wrong measurement tool for whether that shift reached her team three weeks later. This is where TopLeader's diagnostics do work I can't: tracking the pattern across the gap, flagging when the reported practice and the observed behaviour have quietly diverged, and giving both of us something concrete to look at in the next session instead of a memory of how the last one felt.

What this looks like when it works

The clients who don't slide back to baseline aren't the ones who had the most dramatic session. They're the ones whose insight got turned into something small and specific enough to survive a normal Tuesday, and who had somewhere to be accountable to it before three weeks had passed. The coach reads the moment. The structure catches what happens after it. Neither one does the whole job alone.

My VP is eighteen months into her role now. She still catches herself reaching for control instead of trust, more than she'd like. The difference isn't that the old pattern disappeared — it's that she notices it inside the week it happens, instead of noticing it back in my office a month later, wondering where the last three weeks went.

If you coach, I'd ask you the same question I ask myself: what actually happens to your client's biggest insight in the three weeks before you see them again? I don't think most of us know the answer as precisely as we assume we do.

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About the author: Katia Triggiani

Katia Triggiani is an ICF Certified Coach (PCC), EMCC Senior Practitioner, and leadership mentor. With over two decades of corporate experience leading teams through transformation at tech giants like Microsoft, Amazon, and Fujitsu, Katia specializes in helping senior leaders and organizations navigate complexity, change, and transition.

By combining business strategy, neuroscience, and systemic coaching, she helps leaders find clarity, build resilient communication habits, and align career growth with personal wellbeing. A passionate advocate for inclusion, Katia has also founded and led multiple corporate networks dedicated to empowering female talent and fostering collaborative leadership.