J Health Behav Med Hist 2025-18.
Coaching in Practice: Designing the coaching space: structure as the foundation of effective interaction
Robert C. van de Graaf, MD, director
MEDTCC Institute for Health, Behaviour, Medicine and its History, The Netherlands.
Abstract
This paper introduces the concept of interaction techniques (Its) as the foundation of effective coaching. While behaviour change techniques (BCTs) shape what clients do, interaction techniques determine how change becomes possible. Focusing on the first cluster — Design of the Trajectory — the paper shows how structure provides safety, clarity, and sustainability within the coaching relationship. Integrating insights from coaching and psychotherapy research, it argues that structure is not administrative background work but the invisible scaffolding that allows coaching to succeed.
A beginning coach walks into her first session.
She is eager, full of questions, and ready to inspire. Yet as the conversation unfolds, it drifts without a clear beginning or end. Time slips away, the session overruns, and the client leaves uncertain about what has been achieved or what to expect next time. The coach, too, feels the lack of impact. What was missing was not energy or goodwill, but structure.
When people think of coaching, they often picture meaningful dialogue, powerful questions, or practical tools for behaviour change. These are the behaviour change techniques (BCTs): the visible actions that directly influence what clients do. Yet BCTs cannot function in isolation. They require a holding space — a framework that shapes, supports, and directs the process. That holding space is created through interaction techniques (ITs).
The interactional context of coaching
Interaction techniques do not directly change behaviour. Instead, they create the interactional context in which behaviour change becomes possible. In the literature, they are often referred to as modes of delivery or common factors. In one of my earlier books we called them intervention techniques (Dijkstra, et al., 2025). Here, however, I prefer the term interaction techniques, since these techniques focus on creating an optimal interactional context in which behaviour change techniques (BCTs) can be effective.
They are techniques because each has a specific purpose, clear characteristics, and natural boundaries. Crucially, they can be learned, practiced, and mastered, just like BCTs.
Interaction techniques can be grouped into four essential clusters:
- Design of the Trajectory — the structural dimension of coaching: how sessions and processes are designed, monitored, and adjusted.
- Optimizing the Relationship — the relational dimension: building trust, safety, and alliance between coach and client.
- Strengthening Motivation — the motivational dimension: fostering the client’s willingness to engage in the process.
- Supporting the Ability to Be Coached — the cognitive and energetic dimension: ensuring the client has the presence, focus, and energy to benefit from coaching.
These clusters do not compete with behaviour change techniques — they enable them. Without structure, relationship, willingness, and ability, even the most sophisticated BCTs will fall flat. Coaching is never just about tools for change; it is about cultivating the conditions in which change can thrive.
The structural dimension: design of the trajectory
This paper focuses on the first cluster: Design of the Trajectory. Structure is not administrative background work but a set of concrete techniques that together form the scaffolding of effective coaching.
Some of these techniques are applied in advance, before the coaching begins or at the start of a session. They include the intake assessment, agreements about frequency and duration, decisions about location and setting, clarity around communication channels and financial arrangements, the use of materials and media, agreements about reporting, and criteria for referral when coaching is not sufficient. At the session level, structure also involves setting a joint agenda and monitoring time.
Other techniques are applied along the way. Continuous assessment is central here: an ongoing evaluation of progress, satisfaction, and readiness. This allows the coach to make thoughtful adjustments to the trajectory or to a single session — always within the boundaries agreed upon.
Finally, structure also matters in the moment. Coaching conversations are dynamic and often unpredictable, and the coach must constantly decide which techniques — both interactional and behavioural change — to use at a given time. This selection and timing is itself a structuring skill, giving coherence to the dialogue and clarity to the process. Continuous assessment plays a cross-cutting role here, informing decisions at every level.
Boundaries and sustainability
Every structuring technique has its boundaries. For the client, these boundaries provide clarity and safety: they know what coaching can and cannot offer. For the coach, boundaries ensure sustainability: coaching must remain feasible in terms of time, energy, scope of expertise, and financial viability. Beginning coaches are often tempted to be endlessly available, but professionalism requires discipline.
Structure means knowing both what is possible and what is not — it is compassion with boundaries.
Why structure matters?
Experience in practice, supported by insights from coaching research, shows that structure makes a decisive difference. When coach and client agree in advance on the process and its goals, clients feel more focused and progress comes more naturally. A well-structured alliance gives both parties clarity about expectations and keeps the work on track. Regular check-ins on progress strengthen engagement and make it easier to adapt the approach when needed.
The most effective coaching trajectories are those built on a clear framework — one that combines stability with enough flexibility to respond to the client’s evolving needs.
Structure within the broader interactional context
Although this paper has focused on the structural dimension, structure cannot stand alone. The four clusters of interaction techniques are deeply interdependent, each balancing and reinforcing the others. Structure on its own may bring order, but without relationship it becomes cold and rigid. Relationship without structure may feel warm but risks dissolving into endless talk without direction. Motivation provides energy, yet without the ability to be coached it quickly turns into frustration. Ability provides focus and readiness, but without motivation it becomes passive and inert.
Real behavioural change requires the integration of all four dimensions. Only when structure, relationship, motivation, and ability are cultivated together does the interactional context become strong, safe, and flexible enough to support effective coaching.
Conclusion: interaction is everything
Coaching is often described in terms of methods, tools and techniques for change. But these only work when the interactional context is properly designed. The structuring techniques of the Design of the Trajectory cluster form the hidden foundation: they create safety, clarity, and sustainability. Relationship techniques add trust, motivational techniques generate willingness, and ability-focused techniques ensure that clients are cognitively and emotionally ready to benefit.
For beginning coaches, the key message is this: mastering interaction techniques is just as important as mastering behaviour change techniques. Without them, the process falters. With them, coaching becomes not only possible but powerful.
Coaching is not only what you do with a client — it is how you shape the space between you and the client. That space — the interactional context — is where change truly begins.
References
Dijkstra A, Van de Graaf RC, Kootstra Y. Hét praktijkboek voor de leefstijlcoach. Evidence-based technieken voor langdurige leefstijlverandering. Academie coaching en leefstijl 2025.