So many elements beyond activities or conversation form part of coaching relationships. In counseling and psychotherapy, these are often referred to as ‘the frame’.
In coaching it might include things like the setting for the coaching sessions, fixed times and durations, holiday breaks, the fee charged, the origin of the coaching relationship - part of a leadership development programme, an organizationally sponsored session with a remedial aim, or a personally financed development initiative, agreements in relation to confidentiality, the extent to which managers and organizational stakeholders are involved and informed of the progress and outcomes of coaching and so on.
The flexibility demanded of coaches and their clients with busy work roles and the developmental aim of coaching as opposed to the healing, reparative aims of therapy mean that the frame is not often explicitly considered in coaching literature. I found it useful, though, in thinking about work with clients that included ‘breaks’ in the frame of various kinds.
Anne Gray. (1994). An introduction to the therapeutic frame. Routledge.