For a lot of clients, the session is where the coaching feels like it happens — the conversation, the questions, the moments of clarity. What happens between sessions can feel like the aftermath: life returning to normal until the next call.
This is a misunderstanding of how coaching actually works. The session creates the conditions for insight. The time between sessions is where that insight either takes root or doesn’t. A coaching engagement that is vivid inside sessions and dormant between them will produce some real moments and limited lasting change.
Why “homework” is the wrong word for most of it
When coaches use the word homework, clients often picture tasks — things to do before the next session. Read this article. Complete this worksheet. Make that call you’ve been avoiding. And sometimes that’s exactly what the work is.
But much of what happens between sessions isn’t task-based at all. It’s noticing. It’s sitting with a question. It’s paying attention to a pattern you’ve been ignoring. It’s the slow, often uncomfortable process of letting an insight from the session actually land — rather than nodding at it in the moment and filing it away.
The between-session work in coaching falls into roughly four categories, and they’re not equally familiar to most clients. Understanding what each one is asking of you — and why — makes it more likely you’ll actually do it.
Inquiry: living with a question
Some of the most powerful between-session work involves no action at all. It involves carrying a question.
In a coaching session, your coach might offer what’s sometimes called an inquiry — a question designed not to be answered in the moment, but to be held. Something like: What would you do if you weren’t trying to manage what other people think of you? Or: What does “enough” actually mean to you? Or simply: What do you actually want?
These questions aren’t meant to produce an immediate answer. They’re meant to change how you move through your week — to create a kind of background processing that surfaces things your ordinary thinking doesn’t reach.
Reflection: making sense of what happened
A coaching session often produces more than can be fully processed in the moment. Something shifts or becomes clearer — and then the session ends, and you go back to your day.
Reflective between-session work is the practice of returning to what happened in the session and letting it settle. This might look like journalling — writing about what came up, what surprised you, what you’re still thinking about. It might look like a few minutes of quiet after the call ends, before moving on. It might look like a conversation with someone you trust about what you’re working through.
The form matters less than the intention. Reflection is the practice of making meaning out of the raw material the session produced — not rushing past it into the next thing.
Write for ten minutes immediately after a session — no editing, just capture what’s live.
At the end of each day during the coaching period, note one moment that feels relevant to what you’re working on.
Before each new session, spend five minutes reading what you wrote after the last one.
None of these are mandatory. All of them make the coaching more valuable.
Some clients find reflection uncomfortable. If the session surfaced something difficult, returning to it voluntarily isn’t appealing. That discomfort is worth noting — and worth bringing to the next session. What are you avoiding? The avoidance is often as informative as the reflection itself.
Action: doing the thing
Sometimes between-session work is exactly what it sounds like — something to do.
You committed to having a conversation you’ve been avoiding. You said you’d apply to one job this week. You agreed to try a morning routine for five days and see what you notice. You’re going to say no to one thing you’d normally say yes to.
Action-based between-session work is where coaching connects to real change in the world. Insight without action is interesting but limited. The moment of clarity in a session needs to meet the messy reality of your actual life — and that meeting is where you find out whether the insight was real or just compelling in the moment.
Smaller is usually better. A small action that happens is more valuable than an ambitious one that doesn’t. If you’re choosing between committing to a five-minute daily practice and a forty-five-minute one, choose five minutes and mean it.
Not doing it is also information. If you commit to something and it doesn’t happen, that’s not a failure — it’s data. What got in the way? Was the action wrong, or the timing, or is there something in the way that hasn’t been named yet? Bringing an incomplete action to the next session is often more useful than the completed action would have been.
The action isn’t the point. The action is a vehicle for learning — about yourself, about what’s actually in the way, about whether what you said you wanted is really what you want. The coaching isn’t trying to produce a list of completed tasks. It’s trying to produce change in how you think and act. The action serves that — it isn’t an end in itself.
Awareness: paying attention differently
The fourth type of between-session work is the hardest to describe and often the most valuable.
Awareness practice is the deliberate act of paying attention to something you normally move through automatically. Your coach might ask you to notice — during the week — when you feel the impulse to take over a conversation, or when you deflect a compliment, or when you feel a particular kind of anxiety, or when you find yourself in full flow. Not to change anything. Just to notice.
So much of what coaching is trying to shift operates below the threshold of ordinary attention. You can tell someone they have a pattern — and they can agree — and yet the pattern continues because they don’t see it happening in real time. Awareness practice builds that real-time visibility.
The practice is simple in structure and genuinely difficult in execution. Most clients find it easier if they attach the noticing to a specific trigger: every time I walk into a meeting, I’ll check in with what I’m feeling. Every time I finish a difficult conversation, I’ll notice what I did and didn’t say.
What you’re building through awareness practice is not insight, exactly — it’s the capacity to see yourself clearly enough that insight can land somewhere useful.
How to make between-session work actually happen
The most common failure mode is the same as with most good intentions: the ordinary urgency of the week displaces it.
Write it down at the end of the session. Whatever you’re committing to — inquiry, reflection, action, awareness — write it down before the session ends. Not in your head. The act of writing makes it concrete and gives you something to return to.
Schedule it. If the work involves a specific action, put it in your calendar. If it involves reflection, block fifteen minutes. Unscheduled intentions become forgotten ones.
Make it smaller than you think it needs to be. Consistency matters more than intensity. A ten-minute practice that happens every day is more valuable than a forty-five-minute one that doesn’t happen at all.
Bring what happened — or didn’t — back to the next session. The between-session work is not separate from the coaching. It’s material for the coaching. What you noticed, what you tried, what you avoided, what surprised you — all of it belongs in the conversation.
A word about resistance
If you find yourself consistently not doing the between-session work, that’s worth examining — not as a character flaw, but as information.
Resistance can mean the work doesn’t feel relevant. It can mean the pace is wrong. It can mean you’re not actually ready to look at what the work would require you to look at. It can mean the coaching relationship isn’t quite right yet.
- The session creates the conditions for insight. The work between sessions is where that insight takes root — or doesn’t.
- Between-session work falls into four types: inquiry (living with a question), reflection (making sense of what happened), action (doing the thing), and awareness (paying attention differently).
- Inquiry is a lens, not a puzzle. Let the question work on you over the week rather than resolving it in one sitting.
- Not completing an action is information, not failure. Bring what happened — or didn’t — to the next session.
- Awareness practice builds the real-time visibility that lets insight land somewhere useful. Attach noticing to specific triggers.
- If you’re consistently avoiding the between-session work, say so. That conversation is usually more valuable than the homework itself.