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. As PGA golfer Max Homa put it, working with a mental coach isn’t about fixing what’s broken — 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. 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…This is the truth expressed by the phrase,’Where attention goes, energy flows.’”

It’s easy to absorb outside voices — investors, peers, advisors, family — and lose track of your own compass. Coaching creates space to think independently and make decisions grounded in your values, not external pressure. Are you thinking about the way you are meant to lead as a unique individual and organization, or are focused on 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?

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. That is, the importance of resisting the “institutional imperative,” which Buffett defines as the pressure to think and act like your peers.

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.”

Every action you take is a vote for the person you want to become and the identity you ultimately embody James Clear puts it succinctly in Atomic Habits, “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.”

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 Renowned golf sports psychologist, Dr. Bob Rotella writes in his book, How Champions Think, “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.”

Leaders often over-index on “doing.” Coaching helps you slow down enough to think strategically, ensuring your actions align with your vision. Retired navy captain, David Marquet, contends in his book, Leadership is Language, “While balance is necessary, we have long been biased toward doing, down to the language we use and the ways we design our organizations. We need to call the plays that will balance all that doing with more thinking at every level of the hierarchy, not just at the top.”

Your mental game is directly tied to how well you care for your body. Coaching reinforces the habits that create mental clarity and emotional stability. A reality reinforced by the work of Lisa Feldman Barrett; a leading expert on the psychology of emotion. In her book, How Emotions are Made, she writes, “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 is borrowed from Jim Collins business classic, Good to Great. In the book, Collins and his team found that this duality was a defining characteristic of CEOs and teams that were able to significantly outperform 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.”