FAQ
- Launch:
- Fill in the intake form to understand where you are now and where you want to go.
- Read the tailored guide “how to get the most from your coaching experiment”.
- Session #1:
- Discuss your intake form and identify promising growth areas.
- Connect as humans. 🙂
- Discuss questions you might have.
- Crucially, get to work on something important that’ll improve your life.
- Weekly sessions.
- Session #6:
- Discuss if/how to continue.
- Connect as humans. 🙂
- Impact evaluation.
- Ensure that you have systems in place (ideally with an accountability buddy) that enable you to further improve in the absence of coaching.
- Coaching report: Discussion of recent successes and challenges and a follow-up on actions from the previous session based on the coaching report you create prior to our session.
- Topic selection: We collaboratively decide on the topic of the session. Sometimes, it’ll be based on “situational inspiration” and intuition. Other times we deliberately decide what to work on.
- Topic progress: Mainly, this will be via note-taking and questions but we’ll also do free-flowing conversation.
- Coaching actions: We’ll conclude by translating your progress into actions that’ll pragmatically improve your life.
- Feedback: We take a few moments to do feedback on the session.
Excellent question! This takes a more rigorous answer and I encourage you to check out the Impact page where I present different lines of evidence for why working with me is likely impactful. If you want a broader case for coaching you can read this blog post that also explores some of the academic evidence.
For various cultural and psychological reasons, ambitious people will often experience a strong, almost constant, urge to be exceptionally impactful and productive EVERY. SINGLE. MOMENT.! While this can be good for brief periods, it can lead to optimizing for very short timescales (e.g., this week). This is rarely a good strategy for the trajectory of your life (or the trajectory of our civilization), and investing in yourself such that you can be more impactful in the long run is a wise decision. Additionally, coaching will often pay off on short time scales and can positively influence your week in overall productivity and well-being – e.g., by enabling you to say no to commitments or prioritizing and planning your weeks.
Coaching is expensive and that sucks in many ways. There are a couple of reasons for why any given coach might seem expensive.
- There are some unwholesome dynamics in the personal development and coaching industry where coaches overly optimize for income (in part because that’s an easy metric/signal of success/progress and cultural norms around chasing extrinsic goals believing that it’ll make us happy). I can pretty confidently say that I don’t fall in that bucket – in fact, I could be charging 2-5X of what I currently do if I cared about this by becoming an “executive coach” and only working with business leaders who can pay a lot.
- Coaches have to do many other things than actual coaching (finding coachees, setting up websites, get proper training, etc.) so they’ll charge a rate that’s higher to compensate for all of the non-paid work.
- It isn’t really psychologically possible to be facilitating deep and sometimes emotionally intense sessions 12, 10, or even 8 hours per day five days per week. Especially not if the coach wants to facilitate highly impactful sessions.
So while something like $250 per hour might seem outrageous, this will only translate to an actual hourly rate of $50, if on average, 20% of every single workday is spent in actual coaching which is high.
- Get a grant: Depending on your cause area and career path, you might be able to get a grant via Effective Altruism Funds (especially the infrastructure fund or long-term future fund).
- Get funding from your workplace: Some organizations have benefits in the form of training budgets that you can use on activities like coaching.