About Your Personal Coach

Most coaching is relentlessly forward-looking: set goals, build habits, optimize. (And feel bad when you inevitably fall of some inflexible schedule.) That's fine when you know what you want and just need some external accountability. It's less useful when what's actually in the way is how you're thinking about the situation – the story you're telling yourself about it, the assumptions you haven't noticed you are making.

That's where I tend to be most useful.

I do not have a one-size-fits-all view just waiting for me to tell you that your problem is really about your diet, or your childhood, or your need to set better boundaries. Those things might be true, but we'll discover what's true together rather than me presupposing it, and imposing it where it doesn't fit. I'll follow the problem where it actually leads rather than forcing it into some favorite box. I'll present you with some relevant principles to apply to your thoughts and feelings, not tell you what you ought to think or feel.

What I do in a session is listen closely to what you say and what you don't say, and then, with compassion and humor, I challenge the beliefs and assumptions I think are keeping you stuck. I bear witness to your feelings, and show you the common humanity in those feelings so you feel less alone. Paradoxically, our biggest problems are simultaneously achingly personal and not at all unique to us. In the history of the 117 billion people who have ever lived, none of us is the only person to ever face the emotional or intellectual challenges that press upon us. Details and combinations matter, but the themes that transcend them matter more. My goal is to help you arrive at a response as personal as the problem you are addressing, in part by seeing them as less personal, and in part by considering ideas that have helped many, many others time and again. Personal answers to personal questions are the only answers that actually stick. But those distinctly personal answers are often found by considering what is universal in the human experience.

Here is a compressed example of my work with an actual client. A father came to me after his child came out as trans. Rather than telling him what to think or feel, or doing an archeological dig on everything that came before this moment, we worked through what this meant to him, what kind of relationship he had and wanted to have with his child, and what his next actions should reflect. He developed clarity within the context of his own feelings and values, which in this case evolved how he felt, and freed him to interact with his child in a manner consistent with his values, even though that was challenging. This was three sessions, not three years. This is how good coaching is supposed to work.

The breadth of my experience helps. I've studied secular Buddhism and Stoic philosophy seriously enough to have written a book integrating them (Eat The Strawberries), and I think about human behavior at a systems level – how patterns form, why they persist, what actually changes them, in individuals, groups, and societies. I have undergraduate and graduate training as well as work experience in psychology (unlike nearly all coaches), have been licensed in psychiatric nursing, have taught at the college level, and been an assistant dean of students. I spent most of my working life in the software industry as a software engineer, manager, and executive. I've been certified as a teacher of meditation and of yoga. I have studied strength training and am currently working on a book on exercise for people who hate to exercise but know they need to for their health.

I have lived with chronic pain for almost my entire life – an education of its own – and derived my own techniques yoga and strength training to materially reduce it when doctors failed to do so. I wrote a play that was produced off-Broadway as part of – and a semi-finalist in – a festival for new authors. Some technical work I led is part of the permanent collection of the Smithsonian. I have a patent for an integrated circuit fabrication process that defeats international espionage in US satellites. This strangely diverse background should reassure you that I have the capacity to take in whatever is going on for you, and help you analyze it and respond to it more effectively.

Closer to home, I've been a son, brother, friend, spouse, divorced person, re-married person, parent, and stepparent. I've had good and bad jobs, good and bad relationships, good and bad circumstances. I've done conventional things and unconventional things. I have loved and been loved, and I have left and been left. I have disappointed and angered people, and I have delighted people. I've been smart and I've been dumb. I've accomplished things and I've screwed things up. I have been considered uniquely valuable and decidedly not valuable, honored for my contributions and fired for not doing enough. All of this is what lets me follow your problem wherever it leads, with recognition rather than criticism.

I work well with people who are intelligent and self-aware enough to know something is wrong, but who haven't been able to think their way out of it on their own. Sometimes a sharp mind is very good at hiding or defending the very thing that needs to change. I'll help you see ways in which your thinking is helping you, and where it is working against your objectives.

I'm retired, which means no sales pressure and no incentive to extend an engagement beyond its useful life. We talk, we figure out what's actually going on, and we work on it until it's worked on. That's the whole offer.

I am honored that family, friends, and clients have entrusted me with hearing them out, and sharing my observations in a way that helps them develop their own. I hope to be of similar assistance to you, either through personal coaching or through Eat The Strawberries, which expresses the foundation of my practice and which readers have found useful in its own right.

Let's talk

Let's talk – no commitment, no pitch. Since I am retired, there will be no sales pressure on my side. You can contact me here.