Beyond The Session: The Cost of Sameness

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We are now in Issue #004 of Beyond The Session, the Coaches Newsletter made for Coaches ready to take their practice to a new level. If this is the first time enjoying our newsletter…Welcome! You can subscribe to receiving the newsletter as well on LinkedIn. Enjoy!

I've been reading a lot of coach and practitioner profiles lately.

Different names, different backgrounds, almost the same language.

"Transformational."

"Holistic."

"I help leaders unlock their potential."

None of it is wrong...

...Most of it sounds the same.

Here's what I keep coming back to:

Over years of working with clients, leaders, teams and organizations, experienced practitioners develop pattern recognition. Certain questions repeatedly unlock something. Certain interventions create movement. Certain principles hold up across very different people and situations. Eventually, experience becomes methodology.

The problem is that many exceptional coaches and leadership practitioners never make that methodology visible. It stays where it started: in their head, in the room, available only to whoever is sitting across from them.

I think that matters more now than it used to. In a world where anyone can generate polished content in seconds, polish is no longer enough to signal expertise. Trust will come increasingly from discernment.

The practitioners who stand out won't necessarily be the ones who publish the most. They'll be the ones willing to make their thinking visible: to articulate what years of working with people, leaders and organizations have taught them, to have a point of view, to say what they believe works, what doesn't, and why.

That requires something AI can't manufacture on your behalf: earned judgment.

What has your experience taught you that you haven't yet said out loud?

I believe in you,

Katja, Founder - Viveka

Laura Berman Fortgang keeps a memory from early in her coaching career: a mentor telling her that after 100 clients, she would finally know what she was doing. She took him literally. Every session, she made a tick mark next to the phone. One, two, three, five.

"I remember that 100th person," she says. Somewhere around then, a pattern she had been repeating without naming it came into focus. That pattern, she now tells coaches, is the thing most of them are sitting on without realizing it.

"There is a method to your madness, and you don't even know it, and it's costing you millions of dollars," Fortgang says. Her point is not about marketing tactics. It is about recognition.

Every practitioner who has worked with enough clients has developed a repeatable pattern: a way of creating a particular result that holds up across different people and situations. Most never articulate it. Until they do, that pattern stays locked inside them, real expertise that never becomes visible, let alone something others can learn from or build on.

Fortgang built her own career on the opposite bet. After 25 years in career and executive coaching, much of it inside corporate C-suites, she distilled her approach into a book, "Now What? 90 Days to New Life Direction." The book led to training other coaches, then a TEDx talk that has drawn more than two million views, then a second book. What started as a way of working with individual clients became a body of work, the intellectual property that made her identifiable in a crowded field, what she now calls "a category of one."

Fortgang is candid that this runs against some of coaching's own training. "We're technically trained to ask more questions than anything else," she says, and she still believes in that. But she draws a line between the open-ended discovery of a coaching session and the discipline of naming what actually happens inside it. "Magic and your juju that you do in your sessions is not repeatable," she says.

A method is. A client who can see a beginning, a middle, and an end trusts the process before they have even started it.

Her advice to practitioners searching for their own method is not to invent one. "I don't think it's about picking it. It picks you," she says. It shows up in the clients you keep getting the best results with, the ones you look forward to, the work you would do even without being asked. Coach enough people, she says, and the pattern finds you. The work is simply paying attention long enough to see it.

That recognition, sustained and eventually articulated, is the shift from experience to thought leadership. Not inventing a framework for its own sake, but making visible the judgment years of practice already built: what you believe works, what you no longer believe, where you'd disagree with the conventional wisdom in your field, and why. The goal isn't to be louder. It's to become identifiable through the quality of your thinking.

Laura Berman Fortgang, MCC, is a founding board member of the International Coaching Federation. A Viveka Coach Spotlight.

Register here for her upcoming Masterclass on Becoming A Category of One happening Wednesday, September 30, 2026: https://coach.viveka.world/masterclass/laura-berman-fortgang/

Look across your body of work.

Try this this week Write down one thing your years of practice have taught you that you believe deeply, can substantiate through experience, and rarely hear expressed clearly by others.

That's the beginning of both methodology and thought leadership.

For coaches building out the practical side of a professional profile, the 10 Best Practices for Coaches in 2026 guide is a useful companion: https://coach.viveka.world/10-best-practices-for-coaches-2026

Reputation inside the Viveka network doesn't grow from broadcasting. It grows from the conversations coaches and leadership practitioners have with each other, and from watching what earned judgment actually looks like up close.

That's exactly what's coming up: Laura Berman Fortgang's live session, Become a Category of One, on September 30 at 12 PM ET.

This is for experienced coaches and leadership practitioners who know there's something distinctive in the way they work, but haven't yet translated years of experience, expertise and results into a methodology and positioning that others can immediately understand.

Save your seat → https://coach.viveka.world/masterclass/laura-berman-fortgang/

If you're a practitioner with a peer conversation, referral story, or insight worth sharing with the network, reply to this email. Community Pulse is built from what's actually happening between coaches, not from us telling you it's happening.

Laura's session on September 30 is built around a simple, uncomfortable question: if a client couldn't see your name, would they still know it was you?

In the next issue, we'll bring you the takeaways from Become a Category of One, along with what happened when a room full of coaches and leadership practitioners tried to answer that question about their own practice.

Explore the Viveka Coach Network → coach.viveka.world