Coaching FAQ
what is your coaching style?
I am a conscious leadership coach with a 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership certification from the Conscious Leadership Group.
Conscious leadership coaching is different from many other forms of coaching in that it focuses on the context from which you are being with your issues and goals, rather than the content of the issues and goals themselves. For example, you may want to solve a problem at work, or be a more effective leader, have healthier relationships, develop new habits, etc. That is the content. I believe that if you attempt to solve your content issue or go after a goal without addressing the context from which you are being with the issue/goal, you are likely to not only recycle the issue or fail to achieve your goal, but also create stress and drama in your life.
Some of the context questions we explore in coaching are:
Are you being with an issue or pursuing a goal from a state of threat and fear or a state of trust and love? When we’re in a state of threat, our bodies and minds are in fight/flight/freeze mode, and we’re not available for creativity, learning, and authentic relationships with ourselves and others. We’re not available to deeply question our stories and beliefs and imaginatively contemplate different ways of being in the world.
Are you willing to take full responsibility for the circumstances of your life, understand and accept how they differ from the results that you say you want, and identify and own your unconscious commitments to having the life and results that you actually have?
Are you willing to see everything and everyone in your life as an opportunity for self-awareness, growing, and learning?
Are you willing to acknowledge and feel your feelings, express your truths with candor, listen deeply, and honor your agreements with yourself and others?
In summary, I support leaders to move in the world from a state of grounded presence, in which they are more available to listen and respond to themselves and others from open hearted awareness and playful curiosity.
Are you professional or life coach focused?
I believe that the distinction between professional/career and life/home is a false dichotomy:
You carry the same ‘self’ every where you go. The same stories/beliefs, reactive patterns, and habits that cause you drama and upset in your professional life are the same stories/beliefs, reactive patterns, and habits that are causing you suffering in your home life.
Ultimately, the self is as illusory as the home/work distinction itself. There is only consciousness and its contents.
So to answer the question another way, I am focused on coaching individuals into wholeness with themselves, which includes dissolving artificial barriers & constructs and addressing their core beliefs and personas that are holding them back from expressing their full magnificence, both professionally and in their personal life.
What career/life stage is your ideal client?
I prefer to answer this in awakening of consciousness states rather than career / human age terms. One of my favorite coaching models is the 4 states of being: to me, by me, through me, and as me (which in my experience are always occurring simultaneously, and we can choose which of them to place our attention/experience on, akin to different wavelengths of light refracted by a prism):
In to me, life is happening to me. I am at the effect of my boss, my wife, my kids, the weather, the stock market. I believe that I am a victim of circumstances that are outside my control. To me is rooted in victim consciousness and there is little room for empowered creation of one’s own life. There is no agency or free will.
In by me, I choose to take 100% responsibility for my life, including its circumstances, conditions, and results. I choose curiosity and learning over being right. Every challenge, interaction, or setback is merely an opportunity to wake up to beliefs, stories, and personas that I have not fully faced. Everyone and everything in my life are allies for me and opportunities for my personal growth. By me is rooted in taking radical responsibility for creating the life that I really want.
In through me, there is a loosening of the sense of a personal self and what I think is happening to me or by me. There is an opening of trust in something bigger than myself, something larger than my individual life and comings and goings. From that place of basic trust in the universe, I begin to surrender the personal agency that I worked so hard to achieve in the transition from to me to by me. I get more curious in listening to what wants to happen through me. From love, from oneness, from creation itself. I am more interested in being in service of and surrendering to something greater than myself, trusting that it is truly for me and my unfolding.
In as me, there is an awakening to the non-duality of existence itself. The quality of the through me experience contains a glimpse of this in the surrendering to the something greater than myself which connects all people and all conscious beings, that I get curious about how I can be in service of. In the fullness of as me, there is a dissolving of the illusion of separation between self and other, you and I, us and them. There is a recognition that all duality is an illusion, a byproduct of our need to identify with thought and form in order to secure the ego identity and create the illusion of permanence. And that underneath it all is merely consciousness or awareness itself.
To return to the question, I am interested in coaching individuals that are willing to take responsibility for their life and get curious about how they can shift from ‘to me’ to ‘by me.’ If you are committed to living in victim consciousness, you are likely not ready for coaching. One of the first distinctions I explore there is the difference between wanting to shift and willingness to shift. I am also interested in coaching individuals that are ready to open to a ‘through me’ state of being, where I believe the next generation of influential leaders will move in the world from. I myself am toddling with falling into trusting, surrendering, and listening to love itself, and I am delighted to co-create that journey with coaching clients as well. All the while accepting myself and others for falling back into scare and threat in ‘to me’, as we all do and will do as long as we’re human.
In terms of life age, it can vary greatly. I have coached individuals in their early 20s who are incredibly willing to awaken to their unconscious commitments and patterns around living in ‘to me.’ Some of us are not ready to awaken to this form of self discovery until our 40s or 50s. And some of us will not be interested in this journey at all in this lifetime. And that’s OK. In conscious leadership, it’s more important to be aware and accepting of where you are vs. being in a particular state.
What are some examples of limitation/resistance/road blocks this person would have at this stage?
We are all incredibly intelligent and purposeful creatures, whether we realize it or not. We stay in ‘to me’ for good reasons:
To me creates a feeling of illusory certainty/safeness. If I can’t control things, I don’t have to be responsible. I can absolve control and in so doing absolve myself of responsibility for the circumstances and conditions of my life and the world around me. This can be a comforting 'free pass’ from taking full responsibility. Taking radical responsibility for my own life is scary because then I might have some sort of God like power to manifest what I want, and then I’m on the hook for making sure that it’s what I really want and is aligned with my highest values and purpose. It’s much easier to just resign myself to not being able to do anything about it!
To me is filled with drama and drama can be fun! We play roles of victim, villain, and hero, dancing around the drama triangle entertaining ourselves and those around us. It doesn’t always feel like fun, but we are playing these roles as an actor on stage would, to frighten and scare ourselves, and to make ourselves laugh and be entertained. To be the best damn hero and villain we can be.
There is a sense of relationship in ‘to me.’ We get to experience surface level connection - “woe is us, we’re all at the effect of Trump or the economy or those people in marketing.” Part of this is human nature - forming tribes and in groups and out groups. But it cuts us off from a deeper connection to all people.
You can be incredibly productive in ‘to me.’ You can get real results from living from fear & threat. Sticks and carrots. Do this and you will get recognition, reward. Don’t do it and you’ll be punished. This is the common motivational scheme of most families and organizations. Willingness to shift to radical responsibility for my own life is also a willingness to stop trying to control others, and choose to see them as fully capable empowered creators of their own lives too, which most of us are not willing to do.
In short, the road block for all of us is a belief that we are separate selves who are lacking and experiencing ‘not enough-ness’ (I don’t have enough ‘X’ - where ‘X’ might be time, money, energy, love) and I am not ‘Y’ enough, where ‘Y’ might be smart, pretty, witty, capable enough), and as a result of believing that we are insecure as a result of not having/being enough, we go out there in the world to try to get the security, approval, and control that we crave. From that place of fear and threat to our survival and safety (which by the way is perfectly normal and evolved to keep us alive in the savannah), we will ultimately fail at achieving true security, approval, and control, which can only be sourced from within. As long as we set ourselves up in relationships with others with the expectation that they can/will give us what it is we think we lack, we set ourselves up for drama and suffering.
What value do you believe you can add?
My journey has been one of an evolutionary shift from interest in content to context. Content is literally the content of our lives: our jobs, relationships, roles, skills, desires, dreams, fears, plans, etc. Context is how we’re being with the content of our life (from to be, by me, through me, or as me).
I love the world of content. Specifically in the realm of professional life, I love building products that affect peoples’ lives in meaningful ways. At Uber that’s involved building UberPOOL and unlocking more efficient, cheaper transportation for people to get around their cities. There’s a real freedom in not having to drive your own car and getting that time back to meditate or read or talk to others without focusing on driving, not to mention the congestion that can be saved and the flexible earning opportunity that it creates for Uber drivers. When we innovate on our matching and pricing algorithms to improve network throughput, we lower ETAs which means people get where they want to go faster and drivers spend more time earning on trips.
All of this is great, but what I have realized is that my contribution going forward will be less about the optimal algorithm (there are plenty of wicket smart PhDs who are far more capable of this than I am) and more about helping all these smart people get out of their own way. To shift from to me to by me and even open to through me. For individuals at Uber, that might look like, ‘what wants to happen to the future of cities and how people live, work, and move around their physical environment, and how could I be of service in manifesting that glorious future? How could I further give riders their time back and empower drivers to earn on their own terms and choose how to spend their time with their families and in other pursuits? How could I radically empower riders and drivers to live life on their own terms?’
Steven Johnson dubbed this wonderful phrase “the adjacent possible” in his book Where Good Ideas Come from:
The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself. The strange and beautiful truth about the adjacent possible is that its boundaries grow as you explore them. Each new combination opens up the possibility of other new combinations.
I love this quote, and it maps beautifully to the coaching work that I do. As long as I am stuck in ‘to me’ consciousness, I believe that the boundaries of the room of my life are fixed and unmoving. I can’t take responsibility for opening new doors because I can’t even see them, because I’m so stuck in my beliefs and rightness about how things are. Shifting to ‘by me’ opens millions of new possibilities. There’s a curiosity about how things are working or not working for me and the world, and from that place, I can create and open new doors of possibility for how to be and create the life that I want.
In a a product/engineering construct, this has beautiful implications for the possibility of innovation as well. If I as a product manager can let go of my need to be right about how the product should be, what’s good/bad about it, the competition, etc. I can open myself to a world of wonder and curiosity. What product could I create from that place of radical curiosity, where there is no need to be right?
The work of conscious leadership is about unfolding ourselves step by step to these new possibilities, and in so doing unlock the magnificent shadow future that awaits us all, if we are only willing to do what is necessary to go and get it.
Why? What experience do you have that relates?
I experienced the sorrow and suffering of ‘to me’ consciousness first hand at Uber. I joined Uber in 2014, when the UberX ride-sharing product was taking off exponentially, due to unprecedented product market fit. I created UberPOOL and took part in building marketplace platforms that unlocked new mobility and delivery solutions. There was a sense of possibility of an incredible future of transportation and logistics, where Uber would replace car ownership and be the packet switched network for the physical world.
And then it all went to hell in 2017. There was a collective devolution into full on to me victim consciousness. The fall of Travis, the emergence of Susan Fowler’s story, the outside investigations, the board leaks - all of this contained an incredible performance on the drama triangle. Susan was the victim, Travis was the villain, and Softbank and Dara were the heroes. And even within that larger story, there was so much toxic blame and criticism. Managers didn’t value HR enough, #deleteUber was a misunderstanding, this board member should be fired. The year was ripe with toxic blame and criticism amidst a meltdown in market value and potential for the world. All of it rooted in fear (will Benchmark lose its mega return on investment? Will Uber implode? Will Lyft rise and take over?)
My experience in all of this taught me that as long as we are in the mindset of to me consciousness, we will never be able to get out of the horn locked drama that we create in that state. I know first hand the cost of commitment to being right and blaming and criticizing. And I’ve seen the lack of results that is created from that state of being.
I choose to believe that it is never too late to shift. For Uber, for you, for your family, and for your teams and organizations. I believe that in every disappointment, downfall, or setback, there is the possibility of radical learning and regrowth. Just as the phoenix emerges from the ashes, there is often tremendous wisdom and evolution gained from the burning to the ground of one’s life. Sometimes it is only when we have broken or been broken that we are truly ready and willing to shift into the next stage of our unfolding.
