There are two ways the words around a behavior can get you into trouble. One sits in your coaching. The other sits in your marketing. Both come back to the same idea.

Dr. BJ Fogg points out that it's far easier, neurologically, to build a new behavior than to stamp out an old one. Trying to stop something keeps your attention fixed on the very thing you're trying to leave. Building something new gives the energy somewhere to go.

In your coaching, that matters for scope. When you frame the work around stopping  (Overcome Your Emotional Eating; Break Your Sugar Habit), you pull the conversation toward why the old behavior exists. And why usually lives in the past, in pain, in shame. That's the slow drift toward therapy. Build new behaviors instead, and the conversation stays forward-looking, which is exactly where coaching belongs.

In your marketing, the same idea shows up in what you name things, and this is the part I want you to really hear.

The name of your program is a scope signal. Overcoming Your Binge Eating implies you treat an eating disorder. Reversing Your Diabetes implies you treat disease. Healing Your Anxiety implies a clinical claim. You may mean none of it that way. It doesn't matter. The boards read those words plainly, and so do the algorithms that now sit between you and your audience.

Name your offer around the new thing you help people build, not the condition you imply you'll fix. This is the same truth that runs through everything I teach. Scope-safe language and algorithm-safe language are the same language. Your titles aren't an exception. They might be the loudest signal you send.

So build new, and name new. Point your client, and your copy, at what's being created rather than what's being defeated. It's safer, it's truer to what coaching actually is, and it works better besides.

Knowing the Line is where this whole framework comes together, including how to name and word your work so it reads as coaching, not treatment. Five short modules. You can start it here.

This post draws on the work of behavior scientist Dr. BJ Fogg and his Fogg Behavior Model. The ideas are his. The words, and the application to scope-safe coaching, are mine. You can learn the model directly from the source at behaviormodel.org.