About Your Personal Coach

Most coaching is attractively simple, but actually naive: set goals, build habits, optimize. (And feel bad when you inevitably fall off 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 way you understand it, the assumptions you haven't noticed you are making, the feelings you have that keep you struggling.

That's where I can be most helpful.

How I work

Unlike many coaching programs, Zen-ish Coaching does not squeeze you into a one-size-fits-all viewpoint. I am not just waiting to tell you that no matter what problems you face, the answer is <my favorite answer>. We will discover what's true for you, together, rather than me presupposing it and imposing something where it isn't helpful. I'll offer you relevant principles, questions, and experiments you can use to examine your thoughts and feelings, not tell you what you ought to think and feel.

What that looks like in practice is laid out in a real client example on the How It Works page.

Background

The breadth of my experience helps. Most directly relevant, I have undergraduate and graduate degrees and work experience in psychology (unlike nearly all coaches). I have been licensed in psychiatric nursing. 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. As a lay minister in a Unitarian-Universalist congregation, I gave sermons integrating religious teachings, psychology, and philosophy. I have taught at the college level, and been an assistant dean of students. Additionally:

• Most of my vocational life was spent in the high-pressure world of software engineering, as a developer, manager, and executive.
• Technical work that I led is in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian, for Outstanding Achievement in Information Technology.
• I hold a patent for an integrated-circuit fabrication process that defeats international espionage in U.S. satellites.
• I have been certified as a teacher of several styles of meditation and of yoga, and as a massage therapist.
• I am a fitness coach, and wrote Exercise For People Who Hate Exercise As Much As I Do.
• A play that I wrote was produced off-Broadway, and recognized as a semi-finalist in a festival for new authors.

This strangely diverse background should reassure you that I have the capacity to take in what's going on for you, and help you analyze it both rationally and compassionately, and respond to it more effectively.

Life experience

I have lived with chronic pain since childhood. I have been treated by general practitioners, neurologists, orthopedists, osteopaths, physiatrists, chiropractors, physical therapists, Pilates instructors, acupuncturists, massage therapists, and Rolfers. I have done yoga, meditation, mindfulness-based pain reduction, resistance training, and cardio. None of it materially helped more than briefly. I eventually obtained substantial and durable relief from techniques I developed myself, drawn from principles I extracted from yoga and resistance training.

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 issues wherever they lead, with recognition rather than judgment.

Who I work well with

I work well with people who are intelligent and self-aware enough to know something is wrong, but who haven't been able to find their way out of it on their own. (We all need that help from time to time, myself included.) Sometimes a sharp mind is very good at hiding or defending the very thing it needs to change. I'll help you see where your thinking is serving you, and where it is working against what you want to accomplish.

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 you are ready to take further steps on your own. That's the offer.

Let's talk

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.

Set up a free introductory call