A healthcare VP contacted me expecting to book a one-day presentation training. By the end of that first conversation they had decided on something quite different: a six-month coaching program with access to me two or three times a month. It produced steady improvement and, more importantly, it matched the stressful situations that kept popping up in their job.
I keep coming back to this one because the interesting decision happened before any training did. They arrived with a format already in mind and changed it once the actual problem was on the table.
Training and coaching are not the same product
People use the two words interchangeably and then get frustrated when the thing they bought does not fit. The distinction is worth being precise about, because it decides everything else.
Training
Training is usually a focused block of time, typically a one-day or two-day program, built around plenty of recorded practice and playback. It is concentrated and it moves people fast. You should see the change within a few hours, and by the end of a full day people often realize how far they have leapt. Our one-day and two-day programs are the core offering for exactly that reason.
Coaching
Coaching happens over weeks or months. It comes with things to practice inside your daily routine, and improvement accumulates rather than arriving in one burst. You are not clearing an afternoon; you are keeping a standing appointment while your real job continues around it.
Both have merit and there is crossover between them. The honest way to choose is to talk it through with a coach who will give you a few options rather than sell you the one product they run. That is the conversation this VP and I had, and the fuller version is at presentation training versus coaching.
Are you preparing for one identifiable high-stakes moment, or are high-stakes moments a permanent feature of your job? A single moment points to an intensive. A stream of them points to coaching.
Why their answer was a stream, not a moment
What emerged in the conversation was that there was no single event to point at. There was a rolling supply of stressful situations that kept popping up: the kind of thing that arrives with three days of notice and lands in front of an audience that matters.
That pattern is normal for a healthcare VP. Clinical leadership, boards and committees, regulators and accreditation, staff who need to hear something difficult, and community or media moments that arrive without warning. The pressure is not seasonal. It is the job.
An intensive is a superb instrument for a known event. Aim it at a recurring, unpredictable stream and it has one structural weakness: everything is front-loaded. The skills are strongest the week after and the reinforcement stops exactly when the real tests start showing up.
What two or three touchpoints a month actually buys
Three things, in rough order of value.
1. Rehearsal against the real thing
When something lands on the calendar with a week to go, there is already a session on the books. The work stops being hypothetical exercises and becomes the actual board update, the actual difficult announcement. Practice on live material transfers more completely than practice on invented material.
2. Habits that get corrected before they set
After one intensive, everyone slides back a little; that is how skills work. With a touchpoint every two weeks or so, the slide gets caught while it is still small. The alternative is a year of quiet drift and then another intensive to undo it.
3. Practice built into the daily routine
The most valuable part of coaching is not the session, it is what you are asked to do between sessions inside the work you were already doing. Every team meeting becomes a rep. That is where steady improvement actually comes from.
An intensive is aimed at a moment. Coaching is aimed at a pattern. Their job was a pattern. Jess Todtfeld
What steady improvement actually feels like
People expect coaching to feel like a series of breakthroughs. It does not, and the expectation is worth correcting before anyone signs up for months of it.
The early sessions usually do produce a jump, because the first recorded playback is a large event for almost everybody. After that, the shape changes. Improvement arrives as a series of small, unglamorous corrections that stop being conscious and start being default: landing the ends of sentences, cutting from five points to three without a fight, telling the story rather than referring to it, pausing where you used to fill.
The tell is not that any single session feels dramatic. It is that the presentations you dreaded three months ago have quietly stopped being the ones you dread. For somebody whose calendar keeps producing stressful situations at short notice, that shift is the entire product.
When the one-day intensive is still the right call
Often. I am not arguing that longer is better; I am arguing that format should follow the problem. Choose the intensive when there is a specific event on the calendar, when a whole team needs to move together and share a vocabulary, when the schedule genuinely cannot hold a standing appointment, or when someone needs to see fast, visible proof that they can do this before committing to more.
That last one is real. A day of recorded practice with playback is the most efficient belief-changer I know, which is what happened to the leader in the United Nations case study.
What the scoping conversation should cover
The reason this VP ended up with a different format than the one they called about is that the first conversation asked better questions than "how many days do you want." If you are about to have that conversation, these are the ones worth putting on the table.
- What is the next presentation that actually matters, and when is it? A date changes the answer immediately. No date at all usually means the pressure is continuous.
- Is this one person or a team? A team needs shared language, which favors a block of time together. An individual leap favors one-on-one, where every exercise is yours.
- What happens after the program? If the answer is another twelve months of hard rooms with no support, that is an argument for coaching rather than a single event.
- How much of the program is practice? Ask for a number. Plenty of trainers fill a day with war stories and have people practice only in the morning and again at the end, which is nowhere near enough.
- Is the practice recorded and played back? Practice you cannot watch is worth a fraction of practice you can, because the recording is what settles disagreements about how something landed.
- Has this coach done the thing you are trying to do? Never take advice from somebody who has not had the experience, and insist on a video call so you can see how they present themselves.
Cost, scope and how to have this conversation
Presentation and public speaking training typically runs $1,000 to $5,000 to $15,000, depending on scope and how many people are in the training. Format is the biggest driver of where you land in that range, which is why the scoping conversation matters more than the price list. A short session may simply not be the right solution for your outcome. It would be silly to go to college for two or three hours, and the same logic applies here.
When you speak to a coach, ask for a few different options rather than a quote for the thing you walked in asking about. A coach who only has one answer is telling you something. More on the money question in how much presentation training costs, and on timelines in how long presentation training takes.
- The format should follow the problem. One identifiable event points to an intensive; a rolling stream of pressure points to coaching.
- Coaching catches the slide. Everyone regresses after an intensive. A touchpoint every couple of weeks corrects it before it sets.
- Live material beats invented material. Rehearsing the actual board update transfers better than a generic exercise.
- Ask for options. A coach who offers only one format is describing their business, not your problem.
If this is your situation
Healthcare leaders present into a difficult mix of audiences: clinicians, boards, regulators, staff, and the public, often about the same subject in the same week. That is the work in presentation training for medical and healthcare leaders, and for the moments with the most riding on them, high-stakes presentation training.
Other questions buyers ask before choosing a format are collected in the presentation training questions hub. To talk through which format fits, describe the situation on the quick quote form.
Not ready yet? No problem. Start with a copy of my book Media Secrets or grab the 7 Media Interview Secrets and put a few ideas to work first.