Life coaching

Coaching is for people who function, but not in the direction they want. You have a good job and a clear sense it isn't yours. You've postponed a decision for three years. You set the same intentions every January and drop them by March.

The difference from therapy is real and worth stating plainly: therapy looks back in order to understand, coaching looks forward in order to build. A therapist will ask where the pattern comes from. A coach will ask what you're doing at 9am on Tuesday.

It's a practical distinction, not a hierarchy. If your state is stopping you from functioning — you can't sleep, nothing gives you pleasure, you're constantly afraid — coaching is the wrong instrument, and an honest coach will tell you so in the first session.

The first session sets the goal and, more importantly, the criterion: how you'll know you've arrived. "I want to be more confident" isn't a workable goal; "I want to run Monday's meeting without reading from my notes" is.

Then you work in short cycles. Each session produces one or two concrete commitments for the interval ahead, and the following session opens with what happened to them — including when nothing happened, because the sticking point is the most useful information in the whole process.

The coach won't hand you ready-made solutions more often than necessary. Most of the work consists of questions that force you to be specific where you have been vague for years.