I learned to notice the hard way.
For a long time my strategy was the one most high achievers use. Push through, perform, and keep it all inside. It worked until it stopped working.
What changed things was learning to pay attention. Years of travel, farm work, and meditation taught me to notice what was happening in me and around me before it turned into a problem. Building and running my own company then taught me how fast that attention disappears under load.
That's the work I do with leaders now. We slow down enough to see the signals in your body, your decisions, and your team, and then we put them to use.
How I work
My coaching comes from the Gestalt approach as taught at the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland. The program is ICF-accredited, and I'm on the path to the credential. In plain terms, we work with what's happening in the room as it happens. If your pace changes when a topic comes up, that's information, and I'll point to it.
I'm also a Registered Psychotherapist in Ontario, and about ten years of that work shaped how I listen. I notice the small things, I'm comfortable with silence, and I don't flinch when a conversation gets uncomfortable. Coaching is a different kind of work, with a different goal, and that background is what I bring to it.
Background
- Training as a coach at the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland, on the path to an ICF credential
- Advanced Gestalt training, Gestalt Institute of Toronto
- Registered Psychotherapist (CRPO), Ontario. About ten years of that work led me into coaching
- Founder and director of my own company, so I know the load of leading from the inside
- Bachelor's degree, University of Toronto, Eastern philosophy and Buddhism
- More than a decade of meditation practice
Why I added coaching
Technology has been a passion of mine for forty years. I've watched it change what people can build, and I've watched what building it does to the people doing it.
The leaders I want to work with are the ones shaping what comes next. I know what I'm good at, and I know it can help them get there with their judgement intact.
Coaching isn't psychotherapy. If something comes up that needs more than coaching, I'll say so and help you find the right support. I don't coach anyone who is or has been a psychotherapy client of mine or of my psychotherapy practice. More on what coaching is and is not.