To protect confidentiality while meeting a client's request for coaching notes, provide a summary focused on their progress, key takeaways, and action steps without disclosing sensitive or personal information. Clarify boundaries by explaining what information is kept confidential and ensure they understand the purpose of the notes. Always obtain written consent for sharing any specifics, and follow your ethical guidelines to protect their privacy and maintain trust.

To balance confidentiality with the client’s needs, consider these steps: Summarize Key Insights: Provide a high-level summary that highlights key themes, progress, and actionable insights without disclosing specific details. Gain Consent: If team members are involved, get their consent to share relevant aspects. Redact Personal Details: Remove any sensitive information that could compromise individual privacy. Set Boundaries: Clearly communicate the limits of shared information, focusing on overall progress rather than personal discussions. This ensures transparency while respecting confidentiality.

Offer Summarized Insights is the most profound approach to balancing transparency and confidentiality when a client requests access to your coaching notes. Instead of sharing raw notes, which may contain sensitive information, providing a summarized version ensures key takeaways and progress are communicated while protecting privacy. A game-changer approach would be to co-create these summaries with the client during sessions, reinforcing clarity and trust without breaching confidentiality. This method maintains professionalism while empowering the client with actionable insights.

We need to define the client here. Is it the sponsor or the coachee? If you take notes about the client and your sessions, this needs to be addressed in the contracting at the beginning of the relationship. It is an ethical responsibility to let the client know how you take notes, what you include in those notes, where you keep them, how secure they are, how long you keep them and the confidentiality. When this is addressed in the contracting, either written or verbally, you can also talk and agree on how the sharing of notes will work.

Here are three steps to address a client's request for coaching notes while protecting confidentiality: Clarify boundaries: Review your coaching agreement with the client and emphasize the importance of confidentiality for both parties. Remind them that this protects their interests. Provide summaries: Offer to share high-level summaries of goals and progress, rather than detailed session notes. This approach balances the client's need for information while safeguarding sensitive discussions. Consent and communication: If a third party requires access to coaching notes, seek your client's explicit consent before sharing. Together, decide on what information can be released while preserving client-coach confidentiality.