What does confidentiality mean with a coach?
How confidential is confidential? Can I say anything to my coach? Will she tell my boss? My spouse?!
TL:DR…. You can be comfortable talking about anything with me. Our contract will spell out confidentiality and I have an ethical obligation to maintain that confidentiality; I don’t really take notes, we don’t record sessions, we can minimize the use of third-party software if needed, and I can sign a non-disclosure agreement if you’d like. The safer you feel to talk about whatever you need to, the more you’ll get out of coaching.
Confidentiality Overall:
Especially if you’ve never worked with a coach, it can be daunting to be asked questions that make you go deep for your answers. Like Tom Landry is quoted as saying, coaches ask the questions you don’t want to hear, so that you can be the person you were always supposed to be. Even I, as a coach myself, have been asked questions by my coach to which my immediate reaction, in my head anyway, is “f***.” That’s not my response, mind you, it’s my reaction. My reaction to being seen and understood, in a way that I don’t even see myself. It’s the question that gives me not only insight, but also shines a light on my path forward. Questions like this only work because I trust my coach. I trust her judgment, I trust her experience, and I trust that she’s not going to leave our session to call my spouse…or my mother.
The coach/client relationship doesn’t have statutory confidentiality in the way that attorney/client or doctor/patient relationships do. However, coaches who, like me, are members of and certified by the International Coaching Federation (ICF) affirm that we will act in accordance with the ICF Code of Ethics, which states that we will maintain the strictest level of confidentiality. That confidentiality is specifically spelled out in my coaching contracts, so you’ll know what to expect. In short, not only do I not discuss what my clients bring to our sessions, but I don’t even identify them as my clients. If I see you on the street, I'll say hello, but if someone asks how I know you, I’ll say something vague like we have mutual connections, or we met at a conference. As the client, you can tell whomever you chose that I’m your coach; you can feel free to talk about what you and I work on in our sessions, but I won’t ever talk about you. There are only very limited, specific circumstances in which I can reveal anything about a client: If I am ordered by a court to disclose information; or if I reasonably believe that a client is a current risk of hurting themself or someone else. And honestly, neither of these things has happened to me since I’ve been coaching.
Other Privacy and Confidentiality Considerations:
Like most businesses, my coaching company uses third-party software for things like signing contracts, billing, scheduling, calendaring, video conferencing and accounting. The information you provide to them in doing business with me is stored on their servers, and while they take privacy seriously, we all hear the news about hackers and personal identifying information available on the dark web. If you really need to assure your privacy as a client, talk to me directly. Most of what I use third-parties for can be accomplished manually or over the phone to minimize the electronic trail that includes your confidential data.
I don’t really take notes - I may write down a word I've heard a client use several times so I can check in, “I've heard you use the word ‘fight’ three times in talking about your siblings. What do you think is behind that?,” but I’m more interested in really listening to what you’re saying than in taking lots of notes. Plus my handwriting is illegible, sometimes even to myself. (I had a moment in my former corporate life, where I had to testify in court about a meeting that had occurred years earlier. Almost all of the questions from the opposing attorney were about how I was able read my own notes, and how a particular scribble could mean what I said it meant. And whether I had been trained to take shorthand. (What?! No.) In short, my coaching notes will contain your first name only, the date of our session, and then vaguely illegible scribbles to remind myself to follow up on something with you. And then all my notes are destroyed twelve months after the end of our working together.
I note your name and contact information, with the dates of our sessions, on my ICF coaching log, to verify the number of hours of coaching I’ve completed as part of my professional certification. ICF could audit my log, by contacting you to verify you were a client, but I never indicate what we talked about, and ICF will never ask. My ICF coaching log is also included in my written agreement with every client.
We don’t record coaching sessions. Part of my professional certification includes an evaluation of a recorded coaching session, but I’ve always used a coach colleague for this, and we’ve always talked about it in advance, and she knows the conversation will be recorded for evaluation. ICF even requires that we say on the recording that we both agree we will be recorded for the purpose of my evaluation. I will never record a coaching session for any other purpose; I think knowing we’re being recorded makes both of us too self-conscious of saying “the right thing” and it becomes a distraction. For the same reason, I don’t use AI to take notes of our sessions. And frankly, a session recording uploaded to an AI cloud somewhere isn’t confidential.
If your company pays for your coaching with me, I will confirm with them that you showed up and participated, but will never tell them what we’ve talked about. Particularly at the beginning of this kind of coaching relationship, the company representative will likely tell me what they’d like from coaching for the client (like improved communication skills, or greater executive presence), and they will likely give me updates on how the client’s performance is changed over the course of working with me, but again, they won’t hear from me what the client and I have worked on. This is explicitly covered in the contract between me and your company.
I’m happy to sign a non-disclosure agreement. In most coaching, the kind of work you do comes up only tangentially, to provide context for what you want to work on in coaching. For example, if you say you want to refine your executive presence, it’s helpful to know whether you’re the EVP in a multinational technology company or the Executive Director of a regional nonprofit. Trade secrets and confidential information about your company’s business won’t really come up in our work together. You may tell me that there’s an upcoming product launch or a lawsuit that has you stressed and distracted, but our work together will focus on how you want to show up as a leader and how you want to minimize the impact of the stress. I never need to know any of the details of what you do in order to be your coach. An NDA more often comes up when I work as your advisor, when we’re much more likely to talk about what you and your company do, how your company operates as an organization, and where things aren’t going as smoothly as you’d like. Here we’ll talk about people, their performance, what’s going wrong and how to fix it. I’m never going to be an expert in your industry, whatever it is, but I am an expert in people; it’s the people we’ll talk about, in the ways you would with an internal human resources executive. Our contract for this work is clear about confidentiality. In some cases, you may want your attorney present, or I may recommend you do. In any event, like with coaching, I really don’t take notes that would be useful in describing what happened or what your intent was in implementing anything we talked about.
And finally, my whole professional life has been in human resources, organizational strategy and coaching, in and for many different kinds of organizations. The majority of my professional conversations and decisions involved confidential information: personnel data, negotiations strategies, legal positions, public safety strategies, medical and psychological information, industry trade secrets, and more. Some of that information I had was confidential by contract, but much of it was confidential by state or federal law. (I’ve written some amazing Glomar* letters, one of which even got me a thank you in reply.) I’m so accustomed to maintaining the confidentiality of most of what goes on in my ordinary workday, that it doesn’t feel like I’m keeping secrets, it’s just who I am. Your secrets are safe with me too.
*Glomar refers to a response to a request made to a government agency for information, in which the existence of that information can be neither confirmed nor denied, and in which if, hypothetically, such information did exist, it would be exempt from disclosure. An informational article about Glomar is available here: NCND/Glomar: When Agencies Neither Confirm Nor Deny the Existence of Records | National Archives.
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