Frequently Asked Questions

My approach to coaching is a balance of conscious change, empathy, provocation, and creativity. 

• Conscious Change: I help you better design how you interact with the world while keeping your core constant. We can work on skills, sure, but I am not here to tell you that you have to twist yourself into a pretzel to accommodate other people's expectations.
• Empathy: I work to deeply understand your goals, context, and history so I can center our work on your experiences. 
• Provocation: I question and challenge your worldview and assumptions so as to help you better understand your blindspots and triggers. 
• Creativity: I work with you to arrive at next steps and experiments that solve for how you are and work best, whatever those might be.  

Most of our coaching sessions will revolve around an exploration of your goals, both personal and organizational. What is most important right now? What's getting in the way of that? What influence do you have over it? What is worth fighting for? 

My clients are generally organizational leaders whose mindset and behavior have a ripple effect on the people around them. Though they range widely in terms of specific role, size of organization, and industry, much of my work has been with members of the c-suite of tech startups like Anthropic, Anvyl, Shift, and Button. That said, my clients' deepest commonalities are that they are interested in:

• Better understanding themselves: what drives them, what triggers them, and what they are like to work with for their colleagues and direct reports
• Creating clarity in terms of goals, responsibilities, and culture — both for themselves and for their teams
• Experimenting with new approaches and designs — not seeking to change themselves for the sake of their environment, but rather to update how they interact with their environment to be most effective for them.

• The first session will be an intake session, where I will ask you about your past — the people and experiences that have shaped you, how you made the decisions you made, etc — as well as your main goals for the near future.
• Subsequent sessions will generally center on a challenge that you are experiencing, which goal that this challenge is impeding your progress in, and the context of the challenge. We will seek to understand the situation from multiple perspectives, and come up with an experiment or next steps for you to try. 
• Over time, patterns will emerge about how you are in the world, based on which we will get more and more adept at identifying experiments that work for your needs and style. We will check in on your main goals every couple of months, ensuring we are making sufficient strides in the right direction, or adapting the goals to your new reality.

• Sessions can be scheduled on a weekly or biweekly basis. I discourage clients from choosing a monthly cadence, as it is generally too infrequent for the sessions to keep up with the pace of interpersonal and organizational challenges that arise. 
• It's not unusual to start with weekly sessions and subsequently move to biweekly.

• Most of the work I do is open-ended — we continue in our relationship until you decide that the work is no longer serving you. I ask for a one-month notice of termination. 
• It can sometimes be easier to work in 3-month periods. If that appeals, then we can set up a quarter-based program.
• If you have a specific goal that you are working toward, or a specific budget that only permits a limited number of sessions, then we can structure our work to accommodate those circumstances.

• For open-ended relationships, I work on a retainer, and invoice for the coming month on the first of that month. For months where we do more than the retained sessions, I bill for the additional ones in the next month's invoice. For months where we end up doing fewer than the retained sessions, you are free to reschedule the unused session on some future date within one year. This is a use-it-or-bank-it situation (not use-it-or-lose-it).
• For sessions that you need to reschedule, you must do so at least 24 hours in advance. If it is done within 24 hours preceding the scheduled time, that session would be forfeited.