Jeremy Fein describes his coaching work as fundamentally conversational. He listens, he talks, and those are his primary tools. But that’s also what makes the work hardest to share, because he doesn’t want to record coaching sessions:

“They’re much better when they’re not recorded, right? They’re better for the client, which is what matters. And so podcasting felt like a way that I could maybe bridge a gap between the actual work that I do, and—let’s call it content creation. You go to write a caption on Instagram, and it’s just so divorced from the work that I’m doing on a regular basis with clients.”

So he started a podcast called “Nothing Makes Perfect.” Twenty-five episodes in—high-quality work, thoughtful guests, genuine exploration of ideas—he paused. Not because it failed, but to figure out how to amplify what worked and let go of what didn’t.

But here’s the question lurking beneath that decision: Is there actually a way to bridge the gap between coaching work and content creation, or is the gap itself the point?

Consider what makes coaching sessions better when they’re not recorded. It’s not just about technical quality or the client’s comfort level, though both matter. It’s that recording fundamentally changes the nature of what happens in the conversation. When you know it might be shared, even anonymously, something shifts. The conversation becomes performance-adjacent. You’re not just talking to this person in front of you; you’re potentially talking to anyone who might listen later. That awareness, however subtle, creates distance from the actual work.

Instagram captions are “divorced” from the coaching work for the same reason. You’re translating something that happened in intimate conversation into public-facing text. The work itself resists this translation. It’s context-dependent, relationship-specific, emerging in real time from what this particular person needs in this particular moment. Turn that into a caption and you’re left with either bland generalities (“consistency is key!”) or decontextualized specifics that might mean something to the person who was there but read as random advice to everyone else.

Podcasting seemed like it might bridge this gap because conversation is the medium of both coaching and podcasting. If the actual work is listening and talking, maybe recording yourself listening and talking about movement would feel closer to the work than writing captions. And maybe it did—for a while. But then Fein paused.

The unanswered question is whether that pause represents a solvable problem (he just needs to find the right format) or recognition of an unsolvable tension. Maybe some work fundamentally resists public sharing. Not because it’s secret or exclusive, but because what makes it valuable is precisely the qualities that disappear when you try to capture it for an audience.

Think about what happens when you try to bridge this particular gap. You can create content about coaching—discussing principles, sharing frameworks, exploring ideas related to movement and practice. That’s what Fein did, and it can be genuinely valuable. But it’s not the coaching itself. It’s content about coaching, which is a different thing entirely. The gap between “what I do with clients” and “what I share publicly” doesn’t disappear; it just becomes explicit.

Or you can try to make the content more like the actual work. Record real sessions (with permission), share actual conversations, preserve the intimacy and specificity. But then you’ve compromised the work itself. The sessions become content creation, which changes them into something other than pure coaching.

This reveals something interesting about the relationship between private work and public sharing. We often assume the challenge is finding the right medium or format—the right way to translate what happens in private into something sharable. But what if some work is valuable precisely because it exists in private, because it resists capture, because the gap between doing it and sharing it is what allows it to be what it is?

The question applies beyond coaching. Teachers know this tension. Therapists definitely know it. Anyone whose work depends on genuine presence and relationship probably feels some version of this gap between the actual work and what can be shared about it. We want to bridge it because we want to share what we’ve learned, help people who aren’t in the room, build credibility, create connection. All legitimate desires.

But maybe the attempt to bridge always requires compromise on one side or the other. You can create authentic content that’s removed from your actual work, or you can share your actual work and watch it become content, but you might not be able to do both simultaneously. The gap might not be a problem to solve but a fundamental feature of doing work that depends on privacy, presence, and relationship.

Fein paused his podcast to figure out how to amplify what worked. But what remains genuinely unresolved is whether what worked can scale up without changing into something else. Can you bridge the gap while preserving what makes both sides valuable? Or is the real insight recognizing that some work should stay on one side of the gap, and content creation should stay on the other, and the space between them is exactly where it needs to be?

This field note references the Movers Mindset podcast episode “Perspectives with Jeremy Fein,” published January 30, 2024.