the way you got here won't get you there

My name is Dave Madden.

I work with founders and executives who want to go a lot further than their current way of operating will take them.

book a free first conversation

what are you leaving on the table?

When I was a Navy SEAL officer, I'd have told you I was running at full capacity. So would everyone around me. I was good at the job, and the results proved it.

In reality I was running at a fraction of what was in me. Not for lack of effort. Most of my horsepower was going somewhere I couldn't see: carrying a thousand stories and patterns I'd picked up decades earlier and compensated for so well I'd stopped noticing them.

I was carrying the death of friends with me. I was carrying the fact that I was punished for saving lives because I was in the wrong uniform. I was carrying a thousand datapoints all telling me I still wasn't worthwhile, screaming it me to do more or I would never be worth anything.

But I didn't have a problem.
I had a system for managing the problem, and it was excellent.
Which was the problem.

I was carrying unresolved trauma and it cost my family and me a lot.
Competence hid the cost.

why me

After a decade as a SEAL officer I built software for the Department of Defense, started a company, and buried a company. I've sat across the table from multi-billion-dollar founders. I'm also a husband (we've been together 20 years), and a father of 3.

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, which nearly killed me, but by surrendering to the actual work. I wrote about part of it in how tomatoes saved my marriage. Since then 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.

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

So when your old way of operating starts to dissolve, I'm not working from a certification or a flowchart. I'm sitting with you as someone who's been there and has studied the way out for years.

how this works

Ninety minutes, as often as every week, about whatever is actually running your life right now. Usually that's a decision, a person, or a pattern you keep hitting.

We go underneath it. Not to analyze it, but to find what's driving it and take it apart, so it stops costing you.

Here's what happens when you start doing this:

• Clearer thinking. The 3am loop stops, because the thing driving it gets handled instead of managed. It feels like your mental CPU just got an upgrade.
• Better decisions. Most stalled decisions aren't information problems. There's something you don't want to feel. Once that's gone, the decision mostly makes itself. Things get easier.
• Better leadership. Less of your team's energy goes to managing you, because less of yours goes to managing yourself. People around you feel this and gravitate.
• More capacity. Whatever you were spending to carry the old stuff comes back, and you get to point it where you want it.

You don't need another framework. You get your own attention back, sharper every session, pointed at what matters.

caterpillar soup

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

Inside the cocoon, the caterpillar largely dissolves. If you asked it, 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 dissolving to make room. Biologists call them imaginal discs. That's their real name. Imagine that.

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

That's the shape of the work: a cocoon, a breach, a metamorphosis. (And 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.)

We find what's active in you, what your own life is pointing at, and work out what it's trying to say. You get better and better at listening to yourself, and the transformation happens there.

how it works

We work one-on-one, in 90-minute sessions, weekly or every other week, with me in your corner between them. Most people work with me for several months.

Engagements start at $1,200 a month.
Everything you say stays between us. Full stop.

getting your company to pay for it

Your company can pay for this. Companies fund it all the time because the judgment, decision speed and bandwidth of the people in charge is always worth optimizing.

If you need to explain it to a CEO or a board, I'll help you write the email.

the first conversation

90 minutes, free.
Bring whatever is actually going on.

If we both feel the work is right, we'll talk about how I can help.