I came in wanting a promotion and left with a much better question. Six sessions later I had moved teams instead — same company, half the meetings, work I actually want to do. The difference was being asked what I was optimizing for until I ran out of vague answers.
Twelve years teaching and I was two months from walking out. What we actually worked on was the eleven things I had said yes to outside my contract. Four of them came off. I am still teaching, and I finish on time on Thursdays.
Freelance work had turned into taking whatever arrived. We spent a whole session writing down what I would say no to, and then I said it, twice, in one week. My income is up about fifteen percent because I stopped filling my calendar with the cheap jobs.
I was promoted into managing eight people and was doing all of their work at night. The first session was mostly a list of things to stop. I did about half of them and it was still the most useful hour of that quarter.
Practical, unsentimental, and willing to tell me when an idea was bad. I got a written summary after every session, which meant I could not quietly forget what I had committed to. That turned out to be the whole trick.
I had read every book about running a small business and still could not decide whether to hire. Three sessions, one spreadsheet, one honest conversation about what I was afraid of. I hired in March and the shop has been calmer ever since.
What I valued most was being told, on the free call, that part of what I was describing belonged with a therapist rather than a coach. I did both. The coaching worked far better once the other thing was being looked after.
Six sessions two weeks apart, and a ten-minute written check-in on the off week. The check-in is the part I would not have chosen and the part that made it work — it is very hard to drift for two weeks when you have to write down what you did.
My weeks were full and I could never say what I had finished. We logged one real week, added it up, and it came to fifty-eight hours of commitments in a forty-hour job. Nothing organizational was ever going to fix that.
I asked for a rate I would previously have been embarrassed to say out loud. We rehearsed the sentence about four times in the session. The client said yes without pausing, which was its own lesson.
Sessions run to time, notes arrive the same evening, and cancellations are painless. That sounds like a small thing to praise but it is why I kept going for six months.
I had a training plan I had not followed since January. We did not change the plan. We changed the week around it — one session moved to a lunch break, one dropped entirely. I have not missed a session since.
The hardest session was the one where I wrote down everything I have actually done in the last ten years. I had been discounting most of it. Everything after that was easier.
