Why Coaching?
Startups are a singular experience. They are often stressful, exhilarating, draining, and energizing all at the same time. Work blends with life; personal blends with professional. It is all too easy to get swept along in the demands of a startup without a conscious decision to slow down, reflect, discuss, and get really clear on what is truly important.
Every coaching relationship is different and tailored to the individual, but we tend to work in these areas repeatedly:
Vision
Together we work to create a rich, compelling picture of your vision for yourself and your company. This clarifying action helps you move forward in all other areas we work on. What are your personal values, and how do you translate those into the values of your company? How does that impact your company mission, vision, and culture? How do you know you're living up to your own high ideals?
Planning and Focus
The stuff of business books — KPI’s, roadmaps, organizational structures, processes, and systems — is the “easy” stuff of coaching. Together we clarify what goals and tasks are important, and continually create and refine a plan for accomplishing those things. What are next steps, what are the roadblocks and opportunities, and how do you decide between all of those things? We also create structures to keep you accountable to the person who matters the most — you.
Soft Skills
Increasing the quality of your relationships with everyone in your orbit is one of the best ways to gain leverage in the world. Together we work on skills like negotiation, leadership, emotional intelligence, listening, decision making, delegation, and management. We role-play, experiment, and try different approaches to get you comfortable with how to move forth powerfully.
Meta-Thinking
It's difficult to see the entire field when you're always in the middle of it playing the game — you never have a chance to observe it from outside. The key difference is perspective. Working together, we’ll uncover how you think, what leads you to act (or drag your feet), and how to optimize for the things you want. This is something that is particularly hard to do alone — the reflection a skilled coach provides can get you through resistance and confusion much faster than you can do it yourself.
Whole Person
Startups are uniquely intense environments, and that intensity sometimes allows vital things to slip through the cracks. Together we zoom out and take inventory of your entire life — physical health, mental health, fitness, recreation, friends, family, money, career, personal development — and work to balance the same high performance in all of those areas that you have in business.