What is coaching?

As Peter Drucker wrote in The Effective Executive, “Self development of the effective executive is central to the development of the organization…As executives work toward becoming effective, they raise the performance level of the whole organization…Organizations are not more effective because they have better people. They have better people because they motivate to self-development through their standards, through their habits, through their climate.”

When you’ve already nailed execution, coaching helps unlock your next gear. I like the framing that professional golfer Max Homa’s former caddie, Joe Greiner, used to convince Homa to work with a sports psychologist for the first time. As Greiner put it, working with a mental coach wasn’t about fixing what’s broken. Rather, it’s about “boosting you real high in this game.”

You probably already know what to do. Coaching focuses on the why you’re not doing it — uncovering unhelpful beliefs, fears, and patterns that hold you back. As professor and researcher, Brene Brown, wrote in her book The Gifts of Imperfection, “I’ve never seen any evidence of ‘how-to’ working without talking about the things that get in the way.”

Much of what drives performance happens outside conscious awareness. Coaching helps you notice the autopilot patterns shaping your choices, and intentionally rewire them toward clarity and focus. Research has shown that as much as 99.9995 percent of our brain’s bandwidth is not available to our conscious mind. In Mind Magic, physician James R. Doty writes about the impact of this reality, “As a result of this vast gap in processing, the brain is wired for inattention and inertia, rather than attention and choice. Most of our choices are made from unexamined habits or wired response associated with threat, so we often don’t pause in the moment to ask ourselves what we would decide if we were really considering it. Instead, we just let our subconscious make the call. The result is that there is often a disconnect between what we truly desire and what we actually do. Therefore we must consciously create healthier habits of attention…”

In his 1989 Chairman’s letter, Warren Buffett famously wrote about the most surprising and important lesson he’d learned after 25 years at the helm of Berkshire Hathaway. Buffett emphasized the importance of resisting the “institutional imperative,” which he defined as the pressure to think and act like your peers. In the age of the internet and social media, resisting that pressure is more difficult than over. Coaching creates a container for thinking independently and making decisions grounded in your values, not external pressure. We’ll explore questions such as: Are you thinking about the way you are meant to lead as a unique individual and organization, or are you focused on emulating someone else’s path? How much of your day to day is informed by what you think you should be doing and not what feels truly aligned?

You can do anything, but not everything. Coaching helps you identify what truly matters, make peace with tradeoffs, and direct your focus toward meaningful, high-impact work.

As Oliver Burkeman writes in Four Thousand Weeks, “...a limit embracing attitude to time means organizing your days with the understanding that you definitely won’t have time for everything you want to do, or that other people you want to do — and so, at the very least, you can stop beating yourself up for failing. Since hard choices are unavoidable, what matters is learning to make them consciously, deciding what to focus on and what to neglect, rather than letting them get made by default — or deceiving yourself that, with enough hard work and the right time management tricks, you  might not have to make them at all.”

We will build self trust by focusing on action oriented “votes” that reflect the identity of the person you want to become; a framework inspired by James Clear’s writing in Atomic Habits. Clear contends, “No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity…Each habit not only gets results but also teaches you something far more important: to trust yourself.”

Growth often feels uncomfortable. As neuropsychologist Julia DiGangi writes in Energy Rising, “If you have never held a boundary before, the holding of a new boundary will initially feel like terror. So what. To change, you must understand that there is an other-worldly difference between being in danger and feeling in danger.” We will work to change your relationship with uncertainty and discomfort so that you can be empowered in the face of the unknown, rather than becoming paralyzed or operating from fear.

Together, we’ll develop tactical and mental practices that keep you accountable — emphasizing effort and process over short-term results; a mindset embodied by elite athletes at the highest levels of professional sports. In his book, How Champions Think, renowned sports psychologist, Dr. Bob Rotella, makes the case for this kind of sustained long term commitment writing, “The question of how good someone can be is only answered after the individual has put in a long period of sustained, committed adherence to a process of improvement. By, ‘a long period,’ I don’t mean days or weeks or even months. Typically, a long period might mean years.”

In his book, Leadership is Language, retired navy captain, L.David Marquet, argues that the nature of modern work makes it all too easy to over index on the “doing” work of execution, which often limits an organization’s ability to create conditions for the learning, debate, reflection, and iteration work that are essential to adapting to changing conditions and information. Coaching helps you slow down enough to think strategically and helps you put the right conditions in place to ensure that your organization can think strategically at all levels.

Through coaching, we work to identify the habits that allow you to live and perform at your best. After all, your mental game is directly tied to how well you care for your body; a reality that aligns with modern research on the psychology of emotions. In her book, How Emotions are Made, Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett contends, “The most basic thing you can do to master your emotions, in fact, is to keep your body budget in good shape. Remember, your interoceptive network labors day and night, issuing predictions to maintain a healthy budget, and this process is the origin of affective feelings (pleasantness, unpleasantness, arousal, and calmness). If you want to feel good, then your brain’s predictions about your heart rate, breathing, blood pressure, temperature, hormones, metabolism, and so on, must be calibrated to your body’s extra needs.”

This framing is borrowed from Jim Collins' business classic, Good to Great. In the book, Collins and his team found that the ability to maintain this duality was a defining characteristic of CEOs and teams that were able to significantly outperform their peers in the public markets over the long term. Collins asserts, “On the one hand, they stoically accepted the brutal facts of reality. On the other hand, they maintained an unwavering faith in the endgame, and a commitment to prevail as a great company despite the brutal facts.”