Privacy Policy
Last updated: November 3, 2026 — supersedes the version dated September 23, 2026
1. Scope
This Privacy Policy (“Policy”) describes how Marc D Braun, LLC dba Encouraging Leaders (“EL,” “we,” “us,” and “our”) collects, uses, discloses, and protects personal information in connection with (a) our marketing website, encouragingleaders.com (the “Site”), and (b) MyCoach, the Encouraging Leaders coaching-delivery software platform, including any associated web application or mobile access and the AI Coach feature (collectively, “MyCoach” or the “Platform”), together with the coaching, leadership-development, and advisory services we deliver through them. Those services include individual and group coaching, live and virtual workshops, leadership-development programs, strategic-planning engagements, and programs in which we help you and your organization use artificial intelligence (“AI”), build custom AI assistants and workflows, and translate AI experimentation into organizational action (each, a “Service,” and collectively, the “Services”). Where a provision applies only to the Site or only to the Platform, or only to a particular Service, this Policy says so; otherwise it applies to all of them.
This policy is governed by the laws of the United States and, as between the parties, the State of Missouri, consistent with our other agreements described in Section 16. By using the Site, the Platform, or the Services, you understand that we will collect, use, and disclose your information as described in this Policy.
This Policy does not apply to information you provide to, or that is collected by, any third party, even where we link to that third party or it links to us. We encourage you to review the privacy policies of any third party before providing your information to it.
For most of the information covered by this Policy, EL decides how and why the information is handled and is responsible for it (sometimes called a “controller”). In some engagements, however, we handle personal information on behalf of, and under the instructions of, a client organization that has retained us. In those cases we act as a service provider or processor for that organization, our handling of the information is also governed by our agreement with it, and that organization's own privacy policy may apply to you as well. See Section 8 (Coaching Sessions, Team Workshops, and AI Experimentation) and Section 13 (Organization-Sponsored Engagements).
2. Information We Collect
“Personal information” means information that identifies, relates to, or could reasonably be linked with you, such as your name, email address, and the contents of your coaching. Some personal information is treated as “sensitive” under certain privacy laws (for example, precise geolocation, or information revealing health).
We collect the following categories of information, depending on how you interact with us:
2.1 Information you provide — Site. Name, email address, and phone number, collected when you book a discovery call, take the AI Leadership Readiness Assessment, subscribe to updates, or otherwise contact us through the Site.
2.2 Information you provide — Platform and coaching. Account information (name, email address, and role); and the coaching content you or your coach create or input, including goals, messages, assignments, daily check-ins, weekly check-ins, monthly check-ins, session notes, stakeholder feedback, and assessment responses (“Coaching Content”).
2.3 Workshop and team-program information. When you take part in a team workshop, cohort, or group program, we collect your registration and participation details and the contributions you make during the session. For example, exercises you complete, questions you submit, poll or survey responses, and notes or deliverables you create. Where a session is recorded, we will tell you in advance; see Section 8.
2.4 AI Coach Conversations and AI experimentation. Any content you submit to the AI Coach feature (“AI Coach Conversations”), addressed separately in Section 7, together with the prompts, instructions, sample materials, and workflows you develop during AI experimentation and capability-building exercises with us. Where we design or configure a custom AI assistant or agent for your organization under a separate AI Agent License Agreement, additional terms described in Section 7.5 apply.
2.5 Information from your organization and other third parties. If an employer or other organization sponsors your participation, we may receive your contact details, role, and program-related information from that organization. We may also receive information from service providers that administer assessments or scheduling on our behalf.
2.6 Payment and billing information. When you pay for Services directly, our payment processor collects and processes your payment-card or bank information to complete the transaction. We do not store full payment-card numbers; we retain only limited billing records (such as amount, date, and a transaction reference).
2.7 Information collected automatically. On the Site, we collect usage and analytics data through Google Analytics (pages viewed, time on site, general location derived from IP address, and device and browser information), which we use in aggregated form and not to personally identify you. The Platform separately logs account activity (such as login times and actions taken) for security, troubleshooting, and support. We and our analytics providers collect this information using cookies and similar technologies described in Section 9.
2.8 Aggregated and technical data. We also derive statistical or aggregated data that does not directly identify you (for example the percentage of users who use a particular feature), and we collect technical data about your connection and interactions with the Services. If we combine data that does not identify you with personal information so that it does identify you, we treat the combined data as personal information.
The categories above can include: identifiers (such as name, email, phone, and online identifiers); professional or employment-related information (such as role and organization); commercial information (such as Services purchased); internet or network activity (such as usage and log data); general geolocation; audio or visual information (such as workshop recording, where applicable); the contents of your Coaching Content and AI Coach Conversations; and inferences drawn to support your coaching.
3. How We Use Information
We use the information described in Section 2 to: schedule and confirm discovery calls, sessions, and workshops; deliver assessment results and follow-up coaching resources; provide, operate, support, and secure the Site, the Platform and the Services delivered through them; enable your coach (and, for team-level themes, your cohort coaches and the organization’s designated primary contact, consistent with your coaching agreement) to deliver coaching services to you; design, configure, and support custom AI assistants, agents, and workflows where that is part of your engagement; process payments and maintain billing records; respond to your inquiries and communicate with you about your engagement, and where you have not opted out, send you occasional updates about our Services; and understand, maintain, and improve the Site, the Platform, and our Services, including through de-identified and aggregated analysis; and comply with our legal obligations, enforce our agreements, and protect the rights, property, and safety of our clients, our personnel, and others.
We collect and use only the information reasonably necessary for these purposes, and we do not use personal information for purposes that are incompatible with those described here without giving you notice. We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising (targeted advertising).
4. How We Disclose Information to Third Parties
We disclose information with the following categories of service providers, each of which processes information only as necessary to provide their service to us and is governed by its own privacy and security practices, which we encourage you to review:
4.1 Go High Level. Our CRM and scheduling platform, which stores and processes booking and assessment data.
4.2 Google Analytics. Site traffic and usage data, as described in Section 2.7.
4.3 AI Coach language model provider. The AI Coach feature is powered by Anthropic (Claude), the “LLM Provider”. When you use the AI Coach, your input is transmitted to the LLM Provider to generate a response. The LLM Provider acts as our sub-processor and processes this content on our behalf, under our instructions, and is contractually restricted from using it to train its own models, unless we update this Policy to state otherwise. See Section 7 for more detail on AI Coach Conversations specifically.
4.4 Platform hosting and infrastructure. Vercel (hosting service of front-end site and platform pages) and Supabase (back-end database for Platform and website) each store Platform data on our behalf.
4.5 Payment processor. Processes payments and related billing information, as described in Section 2.6.
4.6 Coaching Partners. We work with independent coaching partners (each, a “Coaching Partner”). A Coaching Partner may access your information only to deliver coaching to the specific clients assigned to that Coaching Partner, subject to confidentiality obligations in our Coaching Partner Agreement, and only for the duration of an active engagement. We revoke a Coaching Partner’s access when the engagement ends or a client is reassigned.
4.7 Your organization. Where your participation is sponsored by an employer or other organization, we disclose information to that organization as described in Sections 8 and 13 and in your coaching agreement – for example, program-level themes and progress, consistent with the confidentiality terms that govern what a coach may share with your organization’s leadership.
4.8 Legal, safety, and compliance. We may disclose information where we reasonably believe it is required by law, regulation, legal process, or governmental request, or where disclosure is necessary to protect the rights, property, or safety of EL, our clients, our personnel, or others, or to enforce our agreements.
5. Categories of Personal Information We Disclose
The categories of personal information we may disclose to the recipients above are: account and contact information; Coaching Content and AI Coach Conversations; workshop and team-program information; billing information (to our payment processor); and usage, device, and technical data. We disclose each category only to the recipients, and for the purposes, described in this Policy.
6. Sale and Sharing of Personal Information
We do not sell your personal information, and we do not “share” it for cross-context behavioral advertising, as those terms are used under the California Consumer Privacy Act (as amended) and other U.S. state privacy laws. We have not sold or shared personal information in the preceding 12 months. Because we do not engage in these activities, we do not need a “Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information” mechanism; if that ever changes, we will update this Policy, provide the required opt-out, and honor opt-out preference signals (such as the Global Privacy Control) as required by law.
7. AI Coach, AI Tools, and Custom AI Agents
7.1 What happens to your AI Coach Conversations. AI Coach Conversations may update memory or be stored as part of your Coaching Content (Section 2.2) so that you can revisit them and, where relevant to your engagement, so your human coach can see themes from them to inform your coaching. We do not use your individual AI Coach Conversations, and we do not permit the LLM Provider to use them, to train or fine-tune any AI model. We may use de-identified, aggregated patterns across AI Coach Conversations to improve the Platform and our coaching methodology. The content you submit to the AI Coach, and the responses it generates, are processed and stored within the United States, as described in Section 12.
7.2 Human visibility. Your assigned coach and the coaches assigned to your cohort may view data from or summaries of your AI Coach Conversations as part of delivering your engagement, consistent with the confidentiality terms of your coaching agreement. EL staff outside your coaching and cohort relationship do not routinely access individual AI Coach Conversations except as necessary for support, security, or as required by law.
7.3 No solely automated decisions. The AI Coach and other AI tools we provide are support and productivity tools. They do not make decisions that produce legal or similarly significant effects about you on their own; a human coach exercises judgment in your engagement, and you remain responsible for exercising your own judgment regarding any AI output before relying on it. Because these tools rely on probabilistic language models, their output may be inaccurate or incomplete, and you are responsible for verifying it, and for ensuring you have the rights and consents needed for any content you submit and do not submit others’ personal, confidential, or regulated information except as necessary and permitted by law.
7.4 Retention and deletion. AI Coach Conversations are retained and deleted on the same schedule as your other Coaching Content, as described in Section 10.3.
7.5 Custom AI assistants and agents. In deeper programs, we may design or configure a custom AI assistant or agent for your organization under a separate AI Agent License Agreement. Those agents are installed on a third-party AI platform (for example, ChatGPT, Claude, or Copilot) that you select and operate under your own account and subscription. In that arrangement your use of the third-party AI platform is governed solely by that provider's own terms of service and privacy policy, not by this Policy, and you are responsible for the data you choose to input, including any personal or client-identifying information. Once an agent is installed in your environment, EL does not retain ongoing access to, or visibility into, the agent or the data you input into it (“Client Data,”) except to the extent you share specific excerpts with us for support, which we use only to resolve your request and do not retain longer than reasonably necessary.
8. Coaching Sessions, Team Workshops, and AI Experimentation
Coaching is a candid, personal process, so we treat the information generated in it with particular care and distinguish it from ordinary administrative and platform data.
8.1 Confidential coaching content vs. administrative data. We distinguish the substance of your coaching from the administrative and technical data we need to run the Services. We apply the confidentiality standard set out in your coaching agreement to the substance of your coaching.
8.2 Recordings. Where we record a session or workshop, we will tell you before we do so and explain how the recording will be used and how long it will be kept.
8.3 Share only what you are comfortable sharing. Coaching conversations may touch on personal or sensitive topics. We encourage you not to share more than you are comfortable with in any coaching context, whether human or AI-assisted, and not to include others’ personal information unless necessary.
9. Cookies and Tracking Technologies
We use cookies and similar technologies, including web beacons and pixel tags, to operate the Site and Platform and to understand usage. These fall into three general categories (a) essential/functional cookies, which are necessary for you to log in, stay logged in, and use the Platform securely; (b) analytics cookies, used on the Site via Google Analytics to measure traffic and usage; and we do not use (c) advertising cookies for cross-context behavioral advertising. Our analytics provider may collect usage information through these technologies on our behalf. You can control or disable cookies through your browser settings; though, some features may not work as intended if you do so.
10. Data Retention and Deletion
10.1 Retention. We retain personal information only as long as reasonably necessary for the purposes described in this Policy, or for a longer period where required or permitted by law.
10.2 Site information. Retained as needed to respond to your inquiry and maintain our CRM records, or until you request deletion.
10.3 Coaching Content and AI Coach Conversations. We retain Coaching Content and AI Coach Conversations for the duration of your active engagement plus twelve (12) months, so that you can resume your coaching if you return, after which they are deleted from active systems. If you close your account, we will make your Coaching Content available for export for thirty (30) days and then delete it from active systems. In either case, we will delete it sooner at your written request, and we will retain it longer only at your written request or where the law requires us to. Residual copies in routine backups are overwritten in the ordinary course of our backup cycle.
10.4 Billing records. Retained as needed to meet tax, accounting, and legal record-keeping obligations.
10.5 How to request deletion. Email info@encouragingleaders.com. We will confirm receipt and complete reasonable deletion requests within 30 days, except where we are required or permitted to retain information for legal, security, or legitimate business record-keeping purposes. If you participate through a sponsoring organization, some records may also be subject to that organization's own retention arrangements with us.
11. Your Rights
Depending on where you live, you may have some or all of the following rights regarding your personal information: to know or access the personal information we hold about you and how we use it; to correct inaccurate information; to delete your information; to obtain a portable copy of information you provided; and to opt out of marketing communications. Because we do not sell or share personal information, engage in targeted advertising, or make solely automated decisions that produce legal or similarly significant effects, the related opt-out rights do not apply to our current practices.
11.1 How to exercise your rights. Contact us at info@encouragingleaders.com, or for Platform information, through your existing account. We will take reasonable steps to verify your identity before responding and we will not require you to create a new account to make a request. You may use an authorized agent to submit a request on your behalf where the law allows, subject to our verification of the agent’s authority. If we decline a request, we will explain why and – where the applicable law provides for it – you may appeal that decision by replying to our response; we will inform you of the outcome.
11.2 State privacy laws. Residents of California and of other states with comprehensive consumer privacy laws have the rights described above to the extent those laws apply. You may ask what personal information we hold about you, request correction or deletion of it, or opt out of future communications, by contacting info@encouragingleaders.com. If you are located in California, the European Union, or another jurisdiction with its own data-protection framework (such as the CCPA or GDPR), you may have additional rights under that framework; we will do our best to honor applicable requests.
12. International Data Transfers
EL is based in the United States, and we and our service providers store and process information in the United States. If you access the Services from outside the United States, you understand that your information will be transferred to, and processed in, the United States, where data-protection laws may differ from those in your location.
13. Organization-Sponsored Engagements
When an employer or other organization retains us to provide coaching, workshops, or AI capability-building for its executives or teams, we handle certain personal information on that organization's behalf and under our agreement with it. In that role, the organization is responsible for its own privacy practices and notices, and its policies may apply to you in addition to this one. What we report back to the organization is governed by your coaching agreement and the confidentiality commitments described in Sections 7 and 8.
14. Security
We use reasonable, industry-standard administrative, technical, and physical precautions to protect information on the Site and Platform, appropriate to the nature of the information including the security measures applied by the third-party service providers described in Section 4. No method of storage or transmission is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security. The security of your information also depends on you: please safeguard your account credentials and notify us promptly of any suspected unauthorized access. If we become aware of a security incident affecting your personal information, we will notify you and any affected organization as required by applicable law.
15. Age of Use
The Site, Platform, and Services are intended for adults and are not directed to children. By using them, you represent that you are at least the age of majority in your state, province, or country. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13 (or under the age specified by applicable law). If we learn that we have collected such information without the consent required by law, we will delete it.
16. Relationship to Other EL Documents
This Policy should be read together with, and is hereby incorporated by reference into, our Website Terms of Service and our MyCoach Subscription Agreement. Where we provide a custom AI assistant or agent, the AI Agent License Agreement separately governs that agent, and your own coaching agreement governs the coaching relationship. In the event of a conflict specifically regarding data handling, this Policy controls.
17. Changes to This Policy
We may update this Policy from time to time, and we will provide notice of changes as required by law. Changes are effective when posted, and we will update the “Last updated” date above. Where changes are material, we will note them on this page, and where practicable, provide additional notice. We will review and, if needed, update this Policy at least once a year.
18. Contact
Questions, concerns, or requests regarding this Policy or your personal information can be directed to info@encouragingleaders.com or to Marc D Braun, LLC dba Encouraging Leaders, 9909 Manchester Rd # 175, Saint Louis, MO 63122.