We are excited to share with you the next interview in our “Beyond the Page” series featuring Flo LaBrado.
Trust isn’t a vibe we hope for; it’s a set of behaviors we can name, practice, and renew. We sit down with leadership and career development coach Flo LaBrado to turn trust from a fuzzy concept into a shared language that makes coaching safer, braver, and more effective.
We break down the four distinctions of trust popularized by Charles Feltman—care, sincerity, reliability, and competence—and translate them into everyday coaching moves. Care means centering the client’s agenda, not the coach’s preferences. Sincerity is saying the hard thing with honesty and respect. Reliability lives in punctuality and follow-through. Competence is knowing your scope, telling the truth about your limits, and referring when needed. Flo shares how she bakes these into client agreements so expectations are explicit from day one.
We also tackle technology transparency and AI. Whether you keep analog notes or lean on digital tools, clients deserve clarity about recordings, storage, deletion, and who or what is responding. Some will want searchable transcripts; others will want no data kept at all. By offering options and inviting pushback—“Is this okay?” rather than just “Do you understand?”—we build agency and deepen the container. We explore cultural nuance, where trust signals vary across identities and contexts, and show how a shared vocabulary helps coach and client align without erasing difference. Finally, we touch on trauma-informed coaching: recognizing overwhelm, slowing down, and honoring the boundary between coaching and therapy.
If you’re ready to make trust a teachable skill rather than a hopeful assumption, this conversation is a practical roadmap. You’ll walk away with language to use in your contracting, ways to model reliability, and questions that help clients grow their own self-trust beyond the session. If you found this helpful, follow the show, share it with a colleague, and leave a review to help more coaches find it.
In this episode, I talk with Flo about her article published in our September 2025 issue.
Know of an author we should interview? Send me an email to podcast@choice-online.com
Let’s continue the conversation by connecting with your colleagues on our Facebook page
If you are not already, click here to subscribe to choice magazine.
