Coaching

the short version

I coach people through the passages that competence can't solve.

Not the problems — you're good at problems. The passages. The company sold and the money changed nothing. The uniform came off and took more of you with it than you expected. The thing you built finally works, and something in you is over anyway, and you can't say what.

The company has grown and you're not sure how to lead without losing your center. You've got 1000 voices in your head and it's hard to pick out which of those voices to listen to - to pick out which of those voices is yours.

These aren't problems. They're thresholds. What worked before no longer works. Our culture quietly threw away the technology for crossing them, then told you that if the crossing is wrecking you, something must be wrong with you.

Nothing is wrong with you. Something is ending on schedule.

why me

I spent over a decade as a Navy SEAL officer. Since then I've built software for the Department of Defense, started a company, buried a company, and sat across the table from a lot of founders. I'm also a father and a husband.

None of that is the qualification.

The qualification is that I came home from Afghanistan in 2012 out of my mind, spent years at the bottom of my own life, and made it back. Not by toughing it out — toughing it out nearly killed me — but by surrendering to the actual work. I wrote about part of it in how tomatoes saved my marriage. In the years since, I've studied the crossing the way I once studied my first profession: deliberately, with teachers, on the cushion, in myself and on the page, in circles of people working toward the same goals.

So when I sit with you while your old life dissolves, I'm not working from a certification. I'm sitting with you as a man who has been there and knows the way back.

I've been in that room. I've been at the bottom of that hole.

I know the way through because I walked it, poorly at first, and then learned to walk it with skill.

And now I'm in your corner.

caterpillar soup

Here's a true thing about caterpillars: they don't grow wings.

Inside the cocoon, the caterpillar dissolves. Enzymatically. To soup. If you were to ask the caterpillar, it would probably regard this as a death.

The butterfly gets built from small clusters of dormant cells that were in the caterpillar all along, waiting for the dissolution to make room. Biologists call them imaginal discs. That's their real name.

Imaginal discs. Imagine that.

The dissolving isn't the failure state — the dissolving is the mechanism. What you're becoming was already in you.

That's the shape of the work: a cocoon, a breach, a metamorphosis. I call it threshold work.

(And, for the record, in my first professional vocabulary a breach isn't a rupture. It's a trained act. The deliberate way through a wall that has no door.)

what this is not

It's not therapy. If what you actually need is a therapist, I'll say so plainly and help you find a good one.

It's not accountability coaching. I will not be checking whether you did your cold plunges. That stuff can be fun/invigorating, but it can often mask symptoms more than it solves anything structurally.

There are no frameworks, no worksheets, no OKRs. There's you, me, and whatever is actually true, one hour at a time.

how it works

We work one-on-one for six to twelve months. A call every other week, and me in your corner between them. Everything you say stays between us. Full stop.

Your company can pay for this — companies fund executive coaching all the time, and I'll help you set that up cleanly.

the first conversation

The first conversation isn't a pitch. There's no deck. It's a session — the real thing, an hour, free. Bring whatever is actually going on.

If the work is right, we'll both know it by the end of the hour. If it isn't, you'll have had one real hour anyway, which is rarer than it should be.