An unusual combination — deliberately

My path into coaching didn't start in coaching. It started on an operations team at a Wall Street firm, where I was the developer my boss threw problems at, and then the person running the team. We built and ran the systems that had to be correct before the market opened. I spent about a decade there, and got tired of being woken at three in the morning because a file hadn't arrived.

So I left to play music full time. That lasted a couple of years, until the arithmetic caught up with me, and I came back into technology as a program manager — another decade of it, across fast-growing technology companies — payments, lending, education, HR platforms.

I took that job because I thought a program manager was the person who gets to understand all the pieces and put them together. Some of them are. That wasn't the job I ended up doing. What I was actually running was a layer of surveillance over other people's work, and I was good at it, and it wasn't the thing.

In April 2023 I stopped. I spent the time on music, on meditation, on movement, and on figuring out what I'd actually been paying attention to for twenty years. What I kept coming back to was flow — the state I'd found on stage, at a keyboard at two in the morning, and almost never in a meeting. I trained as a coach through the Flow Research Collective, the peak performance research organization founded by Steven Kotler, because it treats flow as trainable rather than lucky.

My first paying clients came from the stage. I was telling a story mid-set about how badly I was failing to apply the flow protocols I'd just learned — seven calendars, no results — and people came up afterwards and asked what I was talking about.

How this shows up in the work

Twenty years inside technology organizations means I've been the person with too many systems and not enough people, the one holding the context nobody else has. I know what that costs, and I don't need it explained to me. So the work starts wherever it's actually live for you this week — a presentation, a boundary with a peer, a decision you've been circling — and the patterns underneath surface from there. That's usually faster than starting from a framework, and it's always more honest.