A between-session check-in works when it has one job. Most carry four. One message tries to recap the session, chase what was agreed, offer some warmth, and confirm the next date. It arrives as a blur. Sort the four apart and each one gets short, obvious, and easy to send on a full day.
The gap is where a coaching engagement is quietly decided. An hour of clear thinking has to survive two weeks of other people’s deadlines, and a message is the one thing you can put into those two weeks.
- The recap you send the same afternoon earns its place. It’s also the one most coaches skip.
- Where the mail lands matters as much as what it says. A coaching email in a client’s work mailbox sits on a system their employer runs, whatever your agreement says about confidentiality.
- Half of what passes between sessions is inbound. Knowing what each kind of client message needs back is most of the craft here.
- A check-in is a report, mechanically. That’s why it works, and why it only works when the client agreed to make one.
This piece is about the messages inside a running engagement. The one that starts it carries the confidentiality paragraph, and that’s the welcome email that builds trust. Shaping a commitment so it survives fourteen days is its own job, and so is writing the accountability message a client who did nothing can still answer. Both are worked through in keeping a client accountable between sessions, and this piece hands them over. If your client has stopped answering altogether, that has its own timetable and its own message: when a client goes quiet.
Four messages that all get called a check-in
Say what the message is for before you write a word of it. There are four. They have different timings, and combining any two of them damages both.
The recap. Sent within a few hours of the session, by you, carrying what the two of you agreed. It’s the only one of the four that goes out every time, and it’s the subject of the next section.
The thing you said you would send. A book, a name, an article, a worksheet. Keep the coaching content out of it. Send it inside a day, with two lines, and let it be small.
The accountability check-in. Sent partway through the gap, about the thing the client committed to. It has the most written about it and the most ways to get it wrong, and it belongs to the chapter that owns it.
The one with nothing owed either way. No task, no question, no date to confirm. A long gap with no contact in it feels different from the inside than it does from your calendar, and that’s what this message is for. What it’s made of is covered in a welcome that makes a client feel held.
Two other messages get called check-ins. A session reminder is administration. It confirms a time and asks nothing. Add “and how did you get on with the thing?” and a message they could have glanced at becomes one they have to think about. A reschedule is its own conversation with its own difficulty, covered in rescheduling a client without the guilt.
Now the part that matters. Combining the recap with the accountability check-in is the single most common failure in between-session mail. Both feel like the same warm impulse on the same day. What the client receives is a summary of their hour with a demand attached to the end, and the demand contaminates the summary. They stop reading recaps, because recaps have turned out to be preambles.
The rule that keeps this clean is a boring one. Each message does one job, has a subject line naming that job, and stops.
How many, over a two-week gap? Normally one, sometimes two. The recap always. Then at most one thing after it, chosen deliberately.
The recap, written the same afternoon
The Updated ICF Core Competencies put this message inside the competency itself. They were issued in October 2019 and now carry rev. 07.30.21. Competency 8, “Facilitates Client Growth”, is partnering with the client “to transform learning and insight into action” and promoting “client autonomy in the coaching process”. Sub-point 6 asks the coach to “Partner with the client to summarize learning and insight within or between sessions.” Between sessions, in the text.
Read the verb. Partners with, rather than summarizes for, and rather than sends the client your notes. That’s the whole difference between a recap that works and one the client learns to skip.
A recap has four things in it and they fit in about eight lines.
What they came in wanting from the hour, in their words. Competency 3 asks the coach to partner with the client “to identify or reconfirm what they want to accomplish in the session”. That sentence was said out loud at the top of the hour. Write it down as they said it. This is also the line that lets a client tell you the session went somewhere other than where they meant it to, which is worth knowing before the next one.
The one thing that was new. One sentence, the one that got said for the first time. Usually theirs, occasionally something you offered that visibly landed. If the hour stayed on familiar ground, say something honest rather than manufacturing an insight, and see the second template below.
The commitment, exactly as agreed, with the day the client named. Copied word for word. If you find yourself sharpening it in the recap, you’re doing the client’s work in a document that arrives as settled.
The next date, with the time zone. Always, even when it’s already in their calendar. It costs a line, and it’s the only part of the message a client goes back to look for.
Then one closing sentence that makes the whole thing checkable: tell me if I have any of this wrong. That line does real work. It converts your account of their hour into a summary the two of you hold, which is what the competency asks for.
Three things about the writing.
Send it the same afternoon. The client’s own phrasing decays in your memory within a day, and a tidier version of it carries almost none of the weight. If the day is stacked, four lines today beats twelve lines on Thursday.
Keep it under a screen. Eight lines is normal. Twenty means you’re writing notes. Notes belong somewhere else. They hold your hypotheses, and a hypothesis read by the person it’s about stops being one.
Keep it to what was said. This is where recaps go wrong most often, and it’s easy to miss, because the additions always feel helpful. You think of a second action on the drive home and put it in. You reframe their goal slightly, because your version is better. Competency 8 asks the coach to acknowledge and support “client autonomy in the design of goals, actions and methods of accountability”, and to design those things with the client rather than for them. A recap carrying an item the client never agreed to is a work order in a friendly font, and the client now holds an obligation they never accepted. They’ll stay polite about it, and then do less of everything.
What putting it in writing is actually doing
The written recap outperforms the same content said warmly at the end of a session. It’s worth knowing why precisely, because the reason also tells you where the mechanism stops.
Benjamin Harkin and seven colleagues published a meta-analysis of progress monitoring in Psychological Bulletin in 2016. Their search “identified 138 studies (N = 19,951) that randomly allocated participants to an intervention designed to promote monitoring of goal progress versus a control condition”. Pooled, those interventions were “successful at increasing the frequency of monitoring goal progress (d = 1.98, 95% CI [1.71, 2.24]) and promoted goal attainment (d = 0.40, 95% CI [0.32, 0.48])”.
The part that bears on email is the moderator finding. “Progress monitoring had larger effects on goal attainment when the outcomes were reported or made public, and when the information was physically recorded.” A recap that names a commitment is both of those at once, and so is a check-in the client answers. The thing is written down, and it’s reported to another person.
Now the honest limits, which matter more than the number.
Those were experiments on monitoring, mostly on health and study behaviors, mostly over weeks. None of them involved a coach’s email. The effect on attainment is real and moderate. And 0.40 is an average across a heap of very different interventions, several of which look nothing like a message from somebody you pay.
Two things survive the move into a practice, a direction and a caution. The direction is that writing the agreement down, and having a person receive a report on it, adds something to saying it out loud. The caution is that the mechanism is reporting, and reporting is a relationship somebody has to consent to. It’s why Competency 8 puts client autonomy in “methods of accountability” as well as in the goals. A client who chose the check-in gets the effect. A client who’s being monitored gets a different experience with the same word attached, and what you’ll see is timely, cheerful, slightly hollow replies.
So ask, once, at the start: is a message in the middle useful to you, or would you rather I left the two weeks alone? Both answers are workable. Only one of them is your assumption.
Settling the channel once, and where the mail lands
There’s a standard for exactly this, and it’s one line long. The ICF Code of Ethics asks the coach, in Standard 4 of its Responsibility to Clients section, to “Have a clear understanding about how information is exchanged among all parties involved during all coaching interactions.” Its board adopted it in September 2019 and it now carries rev. 06.25.21.
All coaching interactions. The email between sessions is one of them, and it’s the one the rule usually skips.
Standard 23 says whose job that is. The coach is to “Hold responsibility for being aware of and setting clear, appropriate and culturally sensitive boundaries that govern interactions, physical or otherwise.” The client emailing you at 11:00 p.m. is doing the reasonable thing with what they know. The shape is yours to set, and to say out loud.
Standard 7 adds a line most coaches have never read. It asks the professional “to make proper use of emerging and growing technological developments that are being used in coaching services (technology-assisted coaching services) and to be aware of how various ethical standards apply to them.” Your mailbox is a technology-assisted coaching service under that sentence.
What to say to the client, in three sentences, is settled in keeping a client accountable between sessions. Two things sit outside it and are worth your attention, because they’re about the channel rather than the message.
Which address. If your client’s coaching mail goes to their work address, it lives on a system their employer runs. The Stored Communications Act, at 18 U.S.C. 2701, makes it an offense to intentionally access “without authorization a facility through which an electronic communication service is provided” and thereby obtain a communication in electronic storage. Subsection (c)(1) then removes that offense “with respect to conduct authorized by the person or entity providing a wire or electronic communications service”, and on a corporate mail system the provider is the company. State law and the employer’s own policy also bear on any particular situation, and none of this is legal advice about yours. The practical conclusion is clear enough. Ask for a personal address in the first week, and give the one-line reason. “I’d rather this went somewhere your employer doesn’t administer” is enough, and the client almost always says something like “I hadn’t thought about that.”
Where an employer is paying, this compounds. The confidentiality lists that belong in the first message are in the welcome email that builds trust. What a three-party engagement does to an ordinary mailbox, including the reply that carries eleven lines of somebody else’s session below your signature, is the inbox between sessions.
What protection the channel actually has. Clients write things into between-session email assuming it’s protected the way a medical record is. That assumption is the one worth correcting out loud, because the protection they’re picturing isn’t there. HIPAA’s protections run to covered entities, defined at 45 CFR 160.103 as “(1) A health plan. (2) A health care clearinghouse. (3) A health care provider who transmits any health information in electronic form in connection with a transaction covered by this subchapter”, where a health care provider means the Medicare categories plus “any other person or organization who furnishes, bills, or is paid for health care in the normal course of business”. A coach who bills for coaching rather than health care falls outside all three.
Keep that out of your messages to clients. It’s a reason to change where the mail lives. Standard 3 asks the coach to “Maintain the strictest levels of confidentiality with all parties as agreed upon”, and adds that the professional is “aware of and agree to comply with all applicable laws that pertain to personal data and communications”. Note “as agreed upon”. The standard defers to your agreement, so your agreement, your mailbox and your habits are the whole of the protection here. Deciding who else can open that mailbox is a real decision, and it’s one most practices leave for later.
Two limits on the code, stated plainly. Its own definitions reach only “individuals who represent themselves as an ICF Member or ICF Credential-holder”, which leaves an uncredentialed coach outside it entirely. And its force is membership rather than law. Its value is that somebody wrote this down, specifically, at an organization your buyers recognize.
What clients send you, and what each one needs back
Most advice about between-session communication covers what the coach sends. In a working engagement, more of the traffic comes the other way, and answering it well is where the hours go.
Five kinds arrive. Each needs a different reply.
The one-line win. “Sent it. He said yes.” This is the most valuable message a client will send you all engagement. It’s the only unprompted evidence you get about what’s happening between sessions. A line back is plenty, and the message itself is worth keeping. Put it against the next session rather than into a reply, and open with it in two weeks.
The stuck message. Longer, written mid-problem, usually ending in a question. The instinct is to coach in the reply. Email is a poor room for it: no pauses, no face, and no way to ask the second question that would have changed the answer. A stuck message needs one of exactly two things. Either a single question they can answer in a line, or a date. “Which part of it are you stuck on, the ask or the timing?” is the first. “This is worth twenty minutes rather than a paragraph, and I have 8:30 on Thursday” is the second. Three questions and a framework is what you send when you’re trying to be worth the fee, and it’s the reply that sits there unanswered.
The 11:00 p.m. one. Long, unpunctuated, written in a state, and often followed by an apology in the morning. Leave it until the morning. Answering at midnight teaches the channel a speed that breaks down in March. It also teaches the client that a message written in that state produces a coach. Answer in the morning, briefly, and say what you’re doing with it. What a fast promise costs you over a whole year is worked through in setting client response-time expectations, and the late-night mailbox as a habit is in the inbox for a solo coaching practice.
The one that sits outside coaching. Grief, a health event, something that reads as clinical. Say the boundary plainly, keep diagnosis and theory out of it, and answer the same week. Going quiet is what most coaches do here, because the sentence is hard to find. The ICF code asks the coach to stay alert to a shift in the value of the relationship and to encourage the client toward another professional where that’s the right answer. The same standard, in its pre-engagement form, is covered in following up after a discovery call. What you owe here is one warm, specific sentence about where your part ends, and a continued relationship on the parts you are the person for.
The ask that is really a new engagement. “Could you look at my board deck before Friday.” “Would you sit in on the offsite.” Answer it as a scope question, warmly, the first time it happens. The first time is the cheap time. Say what’s inside the fee, and what’s separate work you’d be glad to quote for. Vague generosity here is how a six-session package becomes an on-call retainer by February, and the coach who let it happen is the one who feels resentful about it.
A sixth thing arrives, which is silence. A gap with no inbound message in it is ordinary, and plenty of good clients send nothing. It becomes a signal when it changes, and what to do then is never letting a quiet client drift.
Six you can send
The accountability check-in sits out of this list on purpose. It has its own page, and a version here would be a worse one.
The recap, sent the same afternoon.
Subject: Tuesday, and the twenty minutes with Ray
Hi Marisol,
You came in wanting to work out why you keep agreeing to things you know are wrong on the day you agree to them.
The new thing, in your words: it isn’t the saying yes, it’s that nobody has ever asked you for a reason, so you’ve never had to have one.
What you said you’d do: send Ray two lines asking for twenty minutes, on Thursday.
Next session is Tuesday, September 22, at 10:00 a.m. ET, 60 minutes, same link.
Tell me if I have any of that wrong.
Dana
The recap for a session that did not land anywhere.
Subject: Tuesday, and where we got to
Hi Theo,
Honest summary: we spent the hour on the hiring process, and I don’t think either of us found the thing underneath it. That happens, and it’s usually a sign the question is one layer down from where we were looking.
Nothing to do before we next meet. If something occurs to you in the meantime, send it in a line and I’ll come to Tuesday having read it.
Next session is Tuesday, October 6, at 10:00 a.m. ET.
Dana
The thing you said you would send.
Subject: The Kegan chapter
Hi Priya,
The chapter I mentioned is attached. Pages 40 to 55 are the part I meant.
No need to read it before Thursday and no need to have an opinion about it.
Dana
The reply to a stuck message.
Subject: Re: the conversation with finance
Hi Marcus,
One question rather than a paragraph, because I think everything else follows from it. Are you stuck on what to ask them for, or on the fact that asking makes the problem official?
A line back is plenty. If it’s the second one, that’s worth the session rather than an email, and we have Tuesday.
Dana
The morning after the 11:00 p.m. message.
Subject: Re: sorry for the essay
Hi Aisha,
No apology needed, and I read it this morning rather than last night, which is how I work with these.
I’d rather answer this out loud than by email, because half of what you wrote is about how the last two weeks have felt, and email is the wrong shape for that.
Two options. I have 8:30 tomorrow for twenty minutes, or we hold all of it for the 14th and start there. Either is fine and I don’t have a preference.
Dana
The scope reply.
Subject: Re: the board deck
Hi Sam,
Happy to, and worth being clear about which thing it is.
Inside what you’re already paying for: talking through what you want the board to walk out believing, in a session. That’s coaching, and it’s the part I’m better at.
Outside it: reading the deck and marking it up. That’s real work rather than a favor, and I’d want to quote you for it properly rather than do it badly in twenty minutes on a Thursday.
Which would be more useful this week?
Dana
Three things run through all six. Each has a subject line saying what the message is about rather than who sent it. Each does one job. And each is shorter than the version you first want to write.
What does not belong in one
Your session notes. They hold your working hypotheses about a person, and that person reading them changes what they’re for. Keep them separately, and keep them somewhere you’ve actually decided about.
An item that was agreed only in your head. Covered above. It’s the failure that does the most damage while feeling the most generous.
Encouragement instead of information. “So proud of you” turns a summary into something the client now has to live up to, and it raises the cost of telling you anything honest in two weeks.
Anything about money. A payment date in a recap converts the message into an invoice with a preamble. It has its own moment and its own craft: handling a payment reminder gracefully.
Anything about the renewal. Especially in month four, wrapped in a check-in. That conversation belongs in asking for the renewal without pressure.
A reschedule. Moving a session is a separate message with a separate subject line. It’s the one thing in this list that needs a reply by a date.
A worksheet nobody asked for. If the session agreed on one, send it. Anything else arrives as homework.
A question only a client who did the thing can answer. This is the single failure that costs the most replies, and the design constraint that fixes it is in keeping a client accountable between sessions.
What a check-in will not fix
A gap that is too long. Six weeks between sessions is a scheduling decision wearing a communication problem’s clothes. The fix is a nearer session.
Work that has migrated into the mailbox. If the substantive coaching is happening in writing between sessions, the engagement has drifted, and the client is buying something other than what you agreed. Notice it in month two rather than month five.
A client who never agreed to be checked on. They’ll answer politely, and the answers will tell you nothing. Ask again, properly, and change the arrangement.
Being written by somebody who was not in the room. A recap drafted in your phrasing from your own bullet points is ordinary practice. A recap generated from nothing is a template with a name in it. The part carrying the value is the sentence the client actually said.
A wrong fit. If the sessions themselves are struggling, better between-session mail makes the engagement last longer at the same quality. A direct conversation in the next hour serves you both better.
Sending these on the weeks with no room in them
The recap is easy to write once and hard to write thirty times. It’s due in the ten minutes between one session and the next, which is exactly when you have the least left.
Point sits on top of the Gmail or Microsoft 365 account your clients already write to. Point takes over the carrying, and leaves the thinking with you.
The recap starts as a draft. Ask for it in one line on the thread. What comes back is in your phrasing, with the name, the next date and the time zone already in place. The draft waits for the two sentences only you can write, which are the ones the client said. Standing habits are held as plain sentences you can read and change: every coaching recap ends with the next date, never send client mail to a work address, keep the money out of a session message. Each kind of work has its own place on a dial with three positions: suggest something, prepare it and wait, or handle it. Every kind begins in the middle one, so a recap waits on your screen until you change that for recaps specifically. What Point did is listed in order in the activity log, and undo works back along it. One limit holds everywhere: once a message has landed on the client’s server, nothing pulls it back.
Then Point holds the dates, which is the part an inbox is worst at. “Write to Marisol on the 16th” is a dated task fastened to her thread, and it arrives on the 16th. “Tell me if Priya has not answered by the 19th” is one sentence, said once, and then off your mind. When several things about one client come due at once, they arrive as one alert rather than six. And when you want one client’s world before a session, their thread, the invitation, the file they sent and the task it created sit together.
For the message that genuinely should not be readable in transit, Point offers an end-to-end encrypted channel. It’s one way to send, not a property of ordinary email, and that’s worth knowing precisely. If you’re weighing whether to let software near correspondence this private, the direct answer is what Point can see, and what it cannot. The rest of what changes in a working week is on the benefits page.
Common questions
How often should I check in with a coaching client between sessions?
Once per gap as a rule, twice at most. The recap always goes, within a few hours of the session. After that, at most one deliberate message: the accountability check-in, the thing you promised to send, or a note with nothing owed either way. Past that, the client starts working for the report rather than for their own week, and the replies get faster and less true.
What should a coaching session recap email include?
Four things, in about eight lines. What the client said they wanted from the hour, in their words. The one thing that was new. The commitment exactly as agreed, with the day the client named. And the next session’s date and time zone. Close with an invitation to correct any of it. The ICF Core Competencies ask the coach to partner with the client to summarize learning and insight within or between sessions, and the correction line is what makes it partnered rather than your version of their hour.
Should the recap include anything the client did not agree to?
No, and this is the mistake worth guarding against, because the additions always feel helpful. A second action you thought of afterward, or a sharper version of their goal, arrives as an obligation the client never accepted and can’t easily refuse in writing. The Core Competencies ask the coach to support client autonomy in the design of goals, actions and methods of accountability. Bring the new idea to the next session instead.
Is email between sessions confidential?
Only to the extent your agreement and your practice make it so. HIPAA’s protections run to covered entities, which the regulations define as health plans, health care clearinghouses and health care providers billing for health care, and a coach is generally outside all three. So the protection is your own: where the mailbox lives, who else can open it, and what your agreement says. The ICF code’s confidentiality standard defers to what was agreed, which is another reason the agreement has to say something specific.
Should I email a client at their work address?
Ask for a personal one, and say why in a line. Mail on an employer’s system sits on a facility the employer provides, and the Stored Communications Act’s prohibition on unauthorized access does not apply to conduct authorized by the entity providing the service. State law and company policy also matter in any specific case. The practical point holds anyway: ask in week one, while it’s a small logistical question rather than an implication about anybody’s employer.
What do I write when a client emails me at midnight in a bad state?
Answer in the morning, and keep it short. Say you read it, say you’d rather handle it out loud and why, and offer exactly two things: a short call inside a couple of days, or holding all of it for the next session. Leave the content until morning. Answering at midnight teaches a response speed you can’t sustain, and it makes the late-night message the way to reach you.
Does a written check-in actually change whether the client does the work?
Somewhat, and the size of the effect is known. A 2016 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin pooled 138 studies covering 19,951 people and found that prompting people to monitor progress toward a goal promoted goal attainment at d = 0.40, with larger effects when the outcome was reported to somebody or physically recorded. A recap and a check-in are both of those. Those studies were mostly short-horizon health and study behaviors, none of them involved a coach, and 0.40 is moderate rather than dramatic. It’s a real effect and a small one.
My client never replies to my check-ins. Should I stop sending them?
Ask first, then decide. Some clients want the gap left alone and struggle to say so without seeming ungrateful. The recap is still worth sending to somebody who never answers it, because it’s a record rather than a question. If the silence is new rather than characteristic, that’s a different signal with its own handling, covered in when a client goes quiet.
Can I automate between-session check-ins?
Automate the timing and the scaffolding, and write the content yourself. A dated task that puts the message in front of you on the right day, a draft carrying the name and the date, a standing rule that every recap ends with the next session: all of that is admin, and it’s where the time goes. The two sentences quoting what the client said have to come from you, because the whole value of the message is that it proves somebody was listening.
The short version
Give each message one job. The recap goes out the same afternoon, every time. It carries what they wanted from the hour in their words. The one thing that was new. The commitment as agreed, with the day they named. The next date with its time zone. And a line inviting them to correct any of it. Keep it to what was said out loud, and keep your notes out of it.
Settle the channel once, in writing. Two parts of it get skipped: which address the mail goes to, and what confidentiality the mailbox actually has. Ask whether a message in the middle of the gap is wanted before you build a habit of sending one. Then handle what comes back on its own terms. The win, the stuck message, the midnight essay, the one that sits outside coaching and the ask that is really new work all need different replies, and only one of them needs a long one.
The rest depends on what you sell. A coaching practice running six-month engagements has gaps long enough that the contact inside them is part of the design rather than a courtesy. A four-session package needs the recap and little else. An employer-sponsored engagement is a channel decision before it’s a communication one. The other trades this was built for land somewhere between. The constant is that the message proving you were listening is worth more than any three proving you’re available.