A client reached out a few days out from an event she'd agreed to speak at. The organizers had changed the arrangements after she'd said yes, and what she'd committed to months earlier had quietly turned into something much bigger than the thing she'd agreed to.
She felt trapped. She'd made a promise. She didn't want to let anybody down. And underneath all of it was the thing that actually had her stuck, which had nothing to do with the logistics.
We got on the phone a few hours later.
Once we slowed it down, the real problem showed up fast. It wasn't about the arrangements. It was about how hard she finds it to disappoint people. So she made the call. She didn't over-explain, didn't build a case, didn't apologize four times. She said she was sorry, that due to personal challenges she wouldn't be able to join them, and that she hoped it went well.
That was it. No damage. They invited her back the following year in a larger role. The catastrophe she was bracing for didn't happen, which is worth noticing, because the story in her head had been very confident about what would.
I'm Todd Palmer, an executive coach who works with CEOs and founders. The short answer to the question in the title is that the cadence matters less than most people think, and I'll give you the numbers in a minute. But I want to be honest that the cadence isn't the interesting part of this, and it isn't what I want to leave you with.
How Often Should You Meet With An Executive Coach?
Most executive coaching runs somewhere between weekly and monthly. An hour every couple of weeks is common, and corporate programs often run on a biweekly rhythm over about six months. I'd treat those as what coaches typically describe rather than a hard benchmark, because the honest answer is that practice varies a lot. My own baseline with most clients is monthly, which makes the gap wider than the industry norm, not narrower. If you want the fuller picture of what happens inside the rhythm, that's covered in what to expect from executive coaching.
There are good reasons most coaching isn't designed around constant access. The spacing is deliberate. You go try something, you live with it, you come back with real evidence rather than theory.
There's also a serious argument against the thing I'm about to advocate, and I want to make it properly. Some coaches deliberately hold that boundary, and their reasoning is sound. The space between sessions is where you do your own work. If I'm always one message away, I can quietly become the thing you outsource your thinking to, and then I haven't built a more capable leader, I've built a dependency with a monthly invoice. That's a real risk. I've watched it happen, and I've been the coach participating in it.
So I don't think biweekly is wrong, and I don't think monthly is wrong either. The cadence is the easy question.
Reflection Is Not The Same As Intervention
Here's the distinction I think is actually useful, and it's worth having whether or not you ever hire a coach.
A scheduled session is usually where you reflect. What happened. What did you learn? What pattern showed up. What might you do differently next time? That work is genuinely valuable, and it's most of what coaching is.
The days in between are sometimes where you get a chance at something different. You're about to act from the pattern, and there's a window where it can be interrupted before it becomes a decision. Both matter. One helps you learn from what happened. The other occasionally helps you choose differently while it's happening.
Do the arithmetic on my client's week. Her situation blew up on a Tuesday. On a biweekly rhythm, depending on where she landed in the cycle, the honest answer to "when can we talk about this" is anywhere from one day to thirteen. On a monthly rhythm, it can be a month. The event was in four days.
Look at what would have happened. She'd have gone, resentful and exhausted, because that's what you do when you can't disappoint anyone. And two weeks later she'd have arrived at her session and told me about it in the past tense, as a story. I'd have coached her on a decision she'd already made under pressure with no help. We'd have learned something real. But the moment where it could have gone differently was gone.
Coaching a decision and debriefing one are not the same work.
I'll say where this comes from for me. When I was running Diversified Industrial Staffing, and I was $600,000 in debt, staring at payroll and genuinely not knowing what I was going to do, there was nobody to call. I had advisors. I had people who cared about me. But there was no one I could send the ugly, unfinished, three-in-the-morning version to without managing how I came across.
Here's what took me years to understand about that. It wasn't only that I lacked the phone number. I wouldn't have used it.
Because by the time I'd have made it presentable, I'd have already decided, and I'd have been asking for approval rather than help.
I see entrepreneurs do this constantly. We don't necessarily hide the problem. We curate it. We wait until we've cleaned up the emotion, organized the facts, and built a respectable explanation for what we're going to do. Then we call somebody and tell ourselves we're asking for advice. A lot of the time we're actually asking for approval.
So if you have access to somebody and you never use it, don't assume that's a scheduling problem. Get curious about what the delay is protecting you from.
Which brings me to why timing matters as much as wisdom does.
When you're activated, scared, angry, or feeling rejected, your perspective narrows. I've experienced it plenty of times myself. You can become incredibly certain at exactly the moment when curiosity would serve you better. And in that state you will still make decisions. That's the problem. You'll fire off the email. You'll agree to the thing you don't want to do. You'll cave on the price, overreact to the resignation, or go quiet on your partner for another six weeks.
My job in that moment isn't to lend you my judgment. It's to slow the situation down long enough for you to get access to your own again.
There's research that may help explain part of why that works, and it's worth being precise about what it does and doesn't establish. Matthew Lieberman and colleagues at UCLA studied what they call affect labeling. When people put a feeling into words, amygdala activity in response to the emotional stimulus went down, and activity in a regulating region of the prefrontal cortex went up. Saying the thing out loud appears to change how the brain handles it.
What that research does not measure is timing, or coaching, or whether you sent a message. It's a lab study about naming emotion. The conclusion that it matters when you name it is mine, drawn from watching founders do this for nearly a decade. But the finding gives me a reasonable explanation for something I'd already observed: a founder who names it while they're still in it tends to make a different decision than one who names it two weeks later, after they've acted and built a tidy story about why.
There's an important boundary here. I'm talking about moments when a leader gets emotionally activated around a business or leadership situation. I'm an executive coach, not a therapist. When something crosses into a mental health issue or crisis, that's clinician territory, and I take that distinction seriously.
What The Delay Actually Costs
I want to be careful with the money argument here, because the lazy version is "access to a coach produces ROI," and that isn't true and isn't interesting.
The return doesn't come from access. It comes from a consequential behavior changing early enough to alter the outcome. The chain runs: something happens, you interpret it, you react or avoid, that becomes a decision, the decision has an organizational consequence, and the organizational consequence has a number attached.
Three versions of it, all of which I've watched.
A client sends an email that reads as disrespectful. The founder answers defensively within the hour. The relationship cools. Six months later, the renewal quietly doesn't happen, and nobody in the company connects it back to that email.
An employee disappoints the founder. The founder avoids the conversation for another quarter, then another. The wrong person stays. The high performers absorb the slack and start noticing that nothing happens when someone underdelivers. Trust erodes, and productivity goes with it.
A founder can't stand to disappoint someone, so she says yes to something she doesn't want to do. Her attention goes to it for a month. The work that actually mattered waits.
Not one of those shows up on a financial statement. Delay is one of the most expensive items on an entrepreneur's P&L and it is invisible on the P&L.
There's also a smaller version worth naming. If the only channel is a scheduled hour, little things don't survive the wait. They feel too minor to save up, so they get dropped. The little thing you didn't think was worth bringing up in March can become the thing we're trying to clean up in June.
Now, I've had to look at my own side of this too. There are engagements where I've over-served clients, and I know it while I'm doing it. Being needed can feel pretty damn good to the coach, and if I'm going to write about entrepreneurs who get their identity from being useful and indispensable, I have to be willing to turn that mirror around. Access should help a client become more capable, not make me necessary. If my availability is feeding their dependency, or my own need to be useful, we're not doing the work well anymore.
How To Use It Well, And When Not To
If you have this kind of relationship, or you're evaluating a coach who offers it, here's what separates useful from decorative.
The weakest version of the message is "tell me what to do." That hands over the decision, and taking it would be doing you a disservice even when it feels helpful in the moment.
The version that works looks more like: here's what happened, here's what I'm feeling, here's the story I'm telling myself about it, and here's what I'm about to do. Help me see whether I'm seeing this clearly before I act.
That's four different things, and separating them is most of the work. What happened is usually smaller than the story about it. My job isn't to make the decision. It's to help you make it from a better place.
Send it before you've tidied it up. The instinct is to compose something presentable, which means waiting until you've processed it, which means you've already decided. I don't need it organized. I need it honest.
And if I miss something, don't make my silence mean something it doesn't. Follow up. I've watched entrepreneurs send a vulnerable message, not get an immediate response, and then let their head trash finish the story: I'm bothering him, this wasn't important enough, I shouldn't have reached out. Don't do that. Follow up.
Here's the part that belongs in the same breath. Not everything warrants the call.
Sometimes the honest move is to sit with the discomfort for a day and see what it turns into. Some things are genuinely better brought to the scheduled hour, where there's room to go slowly. And if you find yourself reaching out every time you feel something, that's worth examining too. The distinction is the same one I apply everywhere: is waiting going to give you information or perspective that changes the decision, or are you just hoping the discomfort passes? The first is discernment. The second is avoidance.
I don't have a clean rule for telling them apart in the moment, and I'd be suspicious of anyone who claims they do. But the question is usually enough.
When you're evaluating a coach, ask the specific version rather than the general one. Not "do you offer support between sessions," because almost everyone says yes. Ask what happened the last time a client reached out in the middle of something. Ask how they think about the difference between helping someone decide and deciding for them. The answers tell you whether it's a practice or a line on a proposal.
Now, I'm obviously biased toward coaching, because I've seen what it can do. But this doesn't have to be a coach. It could be a Forum mate, a mentor, your spouse, or the friend who knows you well enough to call bullshit when your head trash takes over. What matters is whether somebody has access to you before you've cleaned up the story.
So here's where I want to leave you, and it isn't really about coaching.
Think about the last decision you made while you were spun up. Not a considered one. A hot one. The email you sent at 10pm, the yes you gave because you couldn't stand to disappoint someone, the thing you said in a meeting that you were still turning over three days later.
Who could you have called in the ten minutes before that? Not afterward, to be told it was fine. Before.
And if a name came to mind, sit with the harder version of the question. Would you have let them see you in that state, unfinished and not yet sure what you thought? Or would you have waited until you had it composed, which is another way of saying until you no longer needed them?
Because you can have a coach, a spouse, a Forum, a board, and a leadership team, and fifty people you could technically call, and still be completely alone if nobody gets to see you until you've figured out what you're going to say.
Access without vulnerability is still isolation.
Maybe you already have that person, and you've just never let them see the unfinished version of you. Maybe you genuinely don't have one. Those are different problems, and they require different work. But either way, I think they're worth solving. Because the most dangerous time to be alone isn't two weeks after the decision. It's the ten minutes before you make it.
If you need someone who can help you slow the moment down, separate what's actually happening from the story running in your head, and get back to your own judgment before you act, that's a conversation I'm always willing to have.
Here when you need me,
Todd
Frequently Asked Questions
How often should you meet with an executive coach?
Most engagements land somewhere between weekly and monthly, with an hour every couple of weeks being common and corporate programs often running biweekly over about six months. Practice varies widely, so treat those as typical rather than standard. The spacing is deliberate and sensible: it gives you time to apply something and come back with real evidence. The thing worth examining isn't the number, it's what you and your coach have agreed happens in the days between.
Can you contact an executive coach between sessions?
Practice varies, and proposals are often vague about it. "Asynchronous access" can mean a same-day reply or an acknowledgment next week, and some coaches deliberately hold the boundary because they believe the space between sessions is where you do your own work. That's a defensible position. My own approach is that clients can reach me between sessions, and how quickly I can respond depends on where I am and what else is happening.
What does an executive coaching retainer actually include?
Ask for specifics rather than a list of deliverables. Scheduled sessions are the easy part to compare. The questions that separate one engagement from another are: what happens when I reach out in the middle of something, will you work with my leadership team or my spouse if that's where the constraint is, and how do you think about the line between helping me decide and deciding for me. If those answers are vague, the retainer is mostly the calendar.
Is contacting my coach in a crisis appropriate?
For business and leadership situations where you're activated, generally yes, and sooner is usually better than later. For a mental health crisis, no. Coaching is not therapy and I don't diagnose or give mental health advice. If that's what's happening you need a clinician, and a good coach will tell you so directly rather than trying to hold it.
Could between-session access create dependency on a coach?
Yes, and it's a fair concern that runs both ways. If a leader can't regulate without a phone call, the coaching has created a problem rather than solved one. It's also worth asking whether the coach's own need to be needed is feeding it. The measure I use is direction of travel: a client should need that call less often in year three than in year one. If the dependency is deepening rather than easing, something is wrong with how the relationship is being held.
