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Coaching is supposed to help people get closer to who they are. Sometimes it does the opposite. Many of the people I work with have spent years adjusting themselves to fit: quieter in some rooms, more polished in others, always a step ahead of what's expected. That's masking. Kept up long enough, it blurs a person's sense of who they are underneath the adjustments, which psychologists call identity diffusion. Then they sit down with a coach, who asks who they really are and w

You have probably seen a few posts about coaching, or a claim on LinkedIn about what it did for someone. Whether that left you curious or sceptical, the same question sits underneath: does it actually do anything? The short answer is yes, it does. Thirty-seven controlled studies covering around 2,500 people show a clear, measurable effect. The strongest study we have Most coaching research has a hole in it: no comparison group. If you coach thirty people and they improve, you

"I'm not enough" is not a feeling. It's a rule: I'm only allowed to feel okay once I've done more. I hear this from clients doing well by every external measure — good title, good results, respect from people around them. And still, no relief. That gap is performance guilt, and it's one of the most common things I work through with high-performing founders and operators. It's not a confidence problem. It's what happens when effort becomes the only proof of worth you accept.

In a recent intro call I had with a new client, they asked me what actually happens in a session, and what makes coaching for founders different. At first, I hesitated with my answer because I didn't want to say "it depends". The truth is every session is different, but they share a few threads. Some weeks a founder comes in and needs to think through a hire. Other weeks they can't stop thinking about a conversation with a co-founder that went badly, and the business question

You knew within the first year. The mission shifted, or the role narrowed, and you noticed. You stayed anyway, hoping it would come back, or telling yourself you needed two years before leaving would "look right." It feels strategic. It's actually a transfer of power: handing the decision to a future you explaining this job later, instead of the you living it now, with full information. In my work with operators, I see this constantly. And it usually backfires exactly the wa

There's a version of success that looks exactly like what you aimed for, but doesn't feel like it. I spent close to ten years assuming that was the trade-off — that performing at a high level meant accepting it wouldn't feel good. It took losing all external structure to realise the problem wasn't the role, the company, or the ambition. It was how I was operating.

Most startups don't fail because of a bad product. They fail because a smart team couldn't execute together consistently enough to find out whether it worked. Great people self-organise. The problem is that they self-organise around different goals. The fix is the minimum structure that lets them execute together — a Minimum Viable Operating System.