28 July 2026 · Sessions · The Found Self
Most people arrive at coaching with a problem they have already thought about at length. They have
turned it over on the commute, in the shower, at three in the morning. They are not short of thinking.
So it is worth being precise about what an hour of structured conversation adds that ten hours of
private rumination did not.
The short answer is that thinking alone is unusually good at producing the feeling of progress and
unusually bad at producing the thing itself. A conversation with someone whose only job is to keep
asking interferes with that in four specific ways.
Private thought moves at the speed of association. You can skip a step because you already know
what it says. You can hold a whole tangled situation as a single unpleasant feeling and call that
consideration. Saying it out loud to another person destroys that compression. Speech is linear and
slow. You have to put the parts in an order, and the order is itself information.
People routinely discover the shape of their own problem in the first ten minutes of describing it,
before anyone has asked anything at all. That is not a trick. It is the ordinary effect of being made
to serialise something you had been storing as a lump.
Continue reading “What a coaching conversation actually does”
14 July 2026 · Goals · The Found Self
Goals are written by a person with an empty calendar in front of them and executed by a person with a full one. The two are not the same person, and the second one always wins.
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30 June 2026 · Attention · The Found Self
Almost everybody has a theory about where their time goes, and almost nobody has a record. The two disagree more than people expect, and the disagreement is the useful part.
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16 June 2026 · Habits · The Found Self
If a behaviour requires you to be at your best to happen at all, it will happen only on your best days. The reliable move is to change the conditions rather than the person.
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2 June 2026 · Habits · The Found Self
Waiting to feel like it is a strategy that works precisely as often as the feeling arrives on schedule, which is to say rarely, and never on the days it is most needed.
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19 May 2026 · Sessions · The Found Self
Almost everything written about coaching addresses the coach. The person being coached also has a craft, and most of the difference between a useful hour and a pleasant one sits on their side of the table.
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5 May 2026 · Attention · The Found Self
The advice to silence your inner critic tends to fail, partly because it does not work and partly because the critic is frequently reporting something true in a voice you cannot use.
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21 April 2026 · Goals · The Found Self
The default response to a stall is to apply more force. That is the correct response to exactly one of the three common causes, and it makes the other two worse.
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7 April 2026 · Decisions · The Found Self
The hardest decisions are not between a good option and a bad one. They are between two options that are both good and not comparable, and the usual methods are built for the wrong problem.
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