I did not wake up one morning and decide to build a coaching system.
There was no announcement. No defining moment. No point at which I thought, This is where everything changes.
Before there was Coach by Design, before strengths language, before communication styles, before any formal structure, I was doing what most leaders do.
I was reacting.
Solving problems as they surfaced. Addressing issues in real time. Listening, responding, and moving forward. I trusted that awareness, paired with experience, would eventually translate into improvement.
Sometimes it did.
Sometimes it did not.
At the time, I did not call what I was doing coaching. I called it leadership. Someone on my team would bring something to my attention. Tone, pacing, follow-through. And I would acknowledge it. Not defensively. Not dismissively. Just aware.
I believed awareness was enough.
Most of us learned something about this in elementary school, though we didn’t have the language for it at the time. You probably played the game. One person whispers a sentence to the next person, who whispers it to the next, and so on down the line. By the time the message reaches the last person and they say it out loud, the room laughs. Not because anyone was careless. Because there was no mechanism for preserving accuracy between passes. Each person received something, held it briefly, and passed on their best version of it.
That is exactly what episodic coaching does. A conversation happens. The person receives something. They hold it for a few days. The next week arrives with new pressure, new distractions, new emotional weather, and what they pass forward into their own behavior is their best version of what they remember. Which is not the same thing as what was said. And by the third or fourth cycle, you are coaching a version of the original conversation that neither of you would recognize.
I did not see this at the time. I thought each conversation was complete in itself. I thought the problem was the person. I did not yet understand that the problem was the gap between conversations, the space where everything I had said was quietly dissolving.
What that looked like in practice: Someone would have a slow week, and I would sit with them and talk through what happened. We’d identify the gap. I’d offer something I believed was useful. They’d leave the conversation with what felt like a plan. And then the following week, I’d be watching the same patterns reemerge, sometimes in the same conversations, sometimes in slightly different form, but recognizably the same underlying problem, still unresolved.
I didn’t name that as a failure. I named it as the nature of development. Growth is nonlinear. Change takes time. These were the things I told myself, and they were true enough to be useful and incomplete enough to be dangerous.
Because what I was really doing, what I wouldn’t understand until much later, was treating each week as its own isolated event. A problem appeared. I responded. The problem receded or didn’t. I moved on. There was no architecture connecting one week to the next, no system that remembered what we’d tried, no structure that held a person accountable to their own stated intentions between our conversations.
I was coaching episodically. And episodic coaching, no matter how skilled, is always fighting the environment instead of working with it.
I think you may recognize that belief, that awareness is enough. Most leaders carry it longer than they should. It feels responsible: attentive, honest, fair. And it works just often enough to seem reliable.
Until it doesn’t.
What unsettled me was not that people struggled. It was that the same feedback, delivered with the same intent and clarity, produced very different outcomes depending on who received it. One person adjusted immediately. You could see it in their behavior almost right away. Another nodded, agreed sincerely, and changed very little. A third tried so hard to get it right that their confidence quietly eroded.
I replayed those conversations in my head more times than I can count.
I knew what I said.
I knew why I said it.
I knew I said it clearly.
So why did it land for one person and not another?
That question stayed with me. It followed me from one conversation to the next, accumulating weight slowly, the way unresolved questions do. It wasn’t loud. It was persistent.
As my role expanded, so did the weight of coaching. These were no longer casual conversations. They carried real consequences, for performance, confidence, and trust. And yet the approach stayed the same.
Be clear.
Be consistent.
Be professional.
The realization that this was not enough did not arrive all at once. It surfaced gradually, in follow-up conversations that felt oddly repetitive, in capable people who stalled for reasons I could not clearly name, and in moments where effort was visible but progress was not.
I was not failing as a leader. But I was uneasy. Because something about the equation was incomplete.
That unease, the persistent, low-grade discomfort of knowing something isn’t quite right but not yet knowing what, marked the beginning of a different way of thinking about coaching. One that did not start with what to say, but with how people hear, process, and act.
Before you go on: if you haven’t taken the two surveys I made for readers of this book, take them now at thecoachbydesign.com/survey. They’re my gift to you.