Category Archive

On the first day of soccer practice, one of my little charges stubbornly sat on the sideline and wrote across her white T-shirt, with my sharpie: Do Not Disterb She’s seven years old, and I don’t mess with seven-year-olds who write Do Not Disterb across their fronts. I let her be. I’ve been thinking about the parallels between being an effective little-girls’ soccer coach, and an effective personal/professional coach for adults.  I know there’s some really profound connection, but all …

A favorite coaching client sat down and began talking about a meeting he was scheduled for later that afternoon. “It’s all executives at that meeting,” he said. “I guess they just need me there to actually do the work.” I went all coach-y on him. “Is there anyone else with your expertise in [xyz] at the meeting?” I asked. “No.” “Were you self-sabotaging just then, when you concluded that you were invited just to do the work?” This client and …

A favorite coaching client “graduated” this month: she achieved the goals we set at the beginning of the coaching engagement. Her primary goal was to leave a job she hated. In a couple of weeks, she starts in a new role that she had said was “impossible” (and I quote) when we started five months ago. Along the way to that goal, she re-found her confidence and made a course correction in her career to meaningful, well-compensated work. This client …

A favorite coaching client describes her job as a suckfest. “It’s not so bad,” she says in the same breath, “as long as I have two glasses of red wine every night.” Her job is isolating. Enervating. The place where ideas go to die. It’s killing her soul, she says with a laugh, as if that’s not true. I’ve been working with her on finding a new job. I have a theory about career success. A lot of it has …

A favorite coaching client recently received a troubling performance review. He feels paranoid: his colleagues seem to be distancing themselves, as if they somehow know. He described a coworker who used to be friendly. Now she never stops to chat. “Does she know something I don’t?” he wondered. I challenged him to ask her. That way he’d know. The next time he saw her, he smiled at her. And she smiled back at him in relief. He found out that …

We went camping and forgot the dog. We were 30 minutes on our way when I realized. “Any other children you’ve forgotten?” my partner asked as we turned around and drove back to the house. And there was Zilly curled up quietly in his crate. Zilly is a very polite, appreciative, quiet little dog. He’s well behaved, does what he’s supposed to do, doesn’t make any demands, is pleasant to have around. In fact, he’s a lot like how some …

I had lunch with a colleague recently. He asked me what kind of issues I’m working on with my coaching clients. I told him* about a favorite client who emails me at 5 a.m. every morning. This particular client’s life flows better if he gets up early, goes to the gym, and then heads to work. He beats himself up if he doesn’t follow this schedule. And heads down a spiral of self loathing. So it’s important he gets up …

Housework is my guilty secret. I find it deeply satisfying keeping my house in order. A clean house feels reassuring. But I’ve been thinking about the balance between keeping my house clean and getting anything else done. Housework is a lot like email was in my corporate jobs. Never ending. You could spend all your time on it. Never get to the strategic, high priority, hard stuff, and wonder what you did with your day. With your life. For a …

I told a favorite coaching client to stop being such a fucking puppy dog. This guy is a rock star at work (he just received a performance review that many of us have spent years aspiring to), but he always feels on the verge of failure. He’s constantly seeking validation in a corporate culture that doesn’t give it out much. This causes him some anxiety. Together, we named that need for external validation “Max.” He’s the puppy dog that needs constant …

I have a new favorite client. And I made him cry. We were talking about a pattern in his professional life where he feels like Chicken Little: he sees a bad course of action underway, but his executive management doesn’t listen to him. He’s lived this pattern happen over and over. I said, “So let’s break the pattern.” And tears welled up in my client’s eyes. We were sitting in the Great Hall of Union Station in Seattle – a …