Coaching

Co-Founders

Co-Founder relationships are personal relationships in a professional environment. Even great ones can have micro-tensions that cause stress, reduce productivity, and pull focus away from key objectives. 

I help co-founders have the conversations that matter most, understand their differences,  and develop healthy communication habits for the long game.

Founders

Many founders get guidance on building their business, but few get guidance on leading their people.

As a leader, your job is to accomplish goals through others' work. Meaning, people are your most important "resource."

How do you...

• Coach reports into the leaders need to be?
• Delegate in a way that actually reduces your IC work?
• Inspire people to care about the vision?
• Know when to fire someone or coach them?
• Build a culture of high performance and belonging?

I help founders work through these questions and become their best leadership self.

A VC friend of mine says, “The average VC-Founder relationship lasts longer than the average American marriage. But we have to choose to get hitched in under 3 weeks.”

In order to assess a founder's potential, earn their trust, and make sound investment decisions at that pace, you must be mentally sharp, emotionally self-aware, and crystal clear about your values and decision making paradigm. I help you create a lifestyle that supports the highest possible mental and emotional functioning. This includes calendar management, delegation, EA best practices, and mind/body routines that help you access an inner state of calm focus. I also help with discovering your unique value add as a VC, marrying thesis and mission, and navigating team dynamics within your firm. If interested, I can also help you get better at assessing founders themselves, not just their business.

Most teams struggle to go from “We’re fine” to ”We're crushing it and actually happy to be here.”

Leaders usually blame “communication,” it’s usually deeper than that. I help teams work through the tensions that block high performance.

My favorite tool for teams is a personality framework called the Enneagram. You can read about my approach with it here.

"Non-Traditional" is my term for leaders who are navigating contexts that don’t get their struggles — e.g. moms in VC, minority founders raising money from white investors, and sensitive souls who want to succeed without abandoning their hearts. In addition to the normal stress of leadership, non-traditional leaders privately navigate difficult social dynamics involving gender/race/identity:

• “Will my colleagues respect me if I take full maternity leave?”
• “Should I speak up about my colleagues' racist comments?”
• “My friends see me differently now that I’m a founder.”
• "My colleagues expect me to be cutthroat and ruthless, but that's not who I am. How do I succeed but stay true to myself in this environment?"
• “I want to be an authentic leader… but I’m stressed. How can I be strong for my team when I’m barely keeping it together myself?”
• “Should I stay in my current misogynistic job and change the system from within… or quit and start my own thing?”

I help leaders navigate difficult and under-emphasized questions like these.

Many leaders are high achievers who’ve been "go go go"-ing their entire lives. This lifestyle produces a certain kind of success, but many leaders wake up one day wondering, “Is this really me? Am I really happy? Is this the life I want to live?”

These questions can be really scary and feel like existential crisis or the "b-word"... burnout. It can be very helpful to have someone walk with you during this moment to help you honor who you've been up til now and explore who you are becoming. 

I know these questions intimately myself, and I'm honored to create spaces for you to take a step back, do some important self-reflection, and discover what wants to come through you now. 

The Enneagram is a personality framework. It’s an incisive self-awareness tool that helps you see the patterned ways you get “stuck” and stay disconnected from your true nature.  

There are a lot of personality frameworks out there, but the Enneagram is by far the richest, deepest, and most facilitative of vertical development. It is as interested in your “strengths and weaknesses” as it is in your core wounds, defensive patterns, and who you are underneath. It also includes a spectrum of “health” and provides a map for how to become a healthy version of your type. The very process of learning the Enneagram in certain contexts has been shown in early studies to facilitate vertical development.

The Work of Byron Katie is a simple and powerful tool for inquiring within. I credit it for the most important healing moment of my life. Here’s how it works.

You begin by thinking of a situation that bothers you, for example, “My wife doesn’t listen to me.” Then you fill out a Judge Your Neighbor Worksheet, which guides you in putting all of your judgmental thoughts on paper. Then, for each statement you write, you ask 4 questions: 

1. Is it true?
2. Can you absolutely know that it’s true?
3. What happens when you believe the thought?
4. Who would you be without the thought? 

Finally, you are invited to consider alternatives to your original statement, such as:

1. My wife does listen to me.
2. I don’t listen to me.
3. I don’t listen to my wife.

The Work is the most consistently ego-dissolving tool I have ever come across. It’s for this reason that people often resist doing it, myself included. We humans cling to our suffering and our stories about the world, and The Work calls them directly into question.  

Byron Katie herself is a beacon of clarity, love, and wisdom, and the way she works with people is extraordinary. It’s worth checking out her books, podcast, and YouTube channel.

If you’ve never done The Work, please try it first with a facilitator, since some aspects are not intuitive.

We all avoid hard conversations. Unfortunately, the conversations we avoid are the ones we most need to have. So the question is… how do you go about it? How do you actually start one? What words do you even use?

Nonviolent Communication (NVC) is a structured way of speaking and listening that enables meaningful, authentic connection. It helps you identify your feelings and needs, express them cleanly, and hear those of others’. Sounds simple, but the results are radical. 

In case you haven’t noticed, conversation shapes our world. It’s amazing to me that this isn’t talked about more. Every brainstorm session, every board meeting, every family dinner is shaped by conversation. We build relationships, explore possibilities, and coordinate action through conversation, and what we say or don’t say makes conversation smooth or bumpy. NVC provides conversational “training wheels” in the form of vocabulary, sentence structures, and mental models for navigating the conversations that matter most.

In my coaching with teams and executives, no topic surfaces more frequently than breakdowns in conversation, usually in the form of people not saying something that needs to be said or saying something too abrasively. NVC can help.

Many vertical development practices are done alone or with a partner. NVC is one of the only tools that can be applied in the fray of normal living. The other person doesn’t even have to know what NVC is. It still works.

In the 80s, therapist Richard Schwartz noticed that clients said things like, "Part of me loves him, and part of me wants to strangle him.” He asked himself, “What’s the deal with all of these parts?” He invented Internal Family System to work with them. 

The basic insight isn’t new. We are not a single, unified consciousness. Instead, we are comprised of “many I’s” that contradict each other. Schwartz’s innovation was to have you interact with your parts as though they are independent, intelligent entities.

This may not seem revolutionary, but it is. For example, a part of you may feel afraid to say “no” to social invitations, so you end up saying yes and getting overwhelmed with obligations. In IFS, you ask the part questions like, “What are you afraid will happen?” and it answers you back. In the process, you uncover your “Self” — the calm, clear “You” that is now speaking to this part. Major healing and transformation can happen from here. 

IFS facilitates vertical developmental by releasing trauma patterns and helping you experience (not just “see”) that you are bigger than your parts. This is a key developmental step, and one that we do again and again as we “climb the ladder” of development. 

IFS is a non-pathologizing form of therapy and is itself a product of post-conventional stages of development. Earlier-stage therapies talk of treating pathology, but IFS takes the view that there are “no bad parts.” They are all here for a reason and are best met with compassion and respect — not just because they protect your deepest vulnerabilities, but because that’s what actually gets results.

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Note: It is fascinating to look at the evolution of any field from a developmental perspective, since the ideas that define a discipline arise from humans at particular stages of development themselves. Psychology inherited its pathology model from medicine, which gave rise to the Diagnostics and Statistics Manual (DSM) — the great tome of psycho-pathologies that therapists use to diagnose patients and bill insurance companies for “treatments.” The field of psychotherapy has evolved through ideas like Behaviorism, Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy, Humanism (or client-centered therapy), transpersonal psychology, and the now emerging Integral psychology, of which IFS, with its treatment of individuals as holons made of parts, is a part. The history of psychotherapy itself follows a clear trajectory of vertical development.

20th century American philosopher Eugene Gendlin was fascinated how meaning exists before we give it words. It’s somewhere — but where? In the body. Gendlin coined the term felt sense to describe one’s non-verbal, bodily sense of a whole situation.

Through research with Carl Rogers,⁷ Gendlin discovered that a clients’ ability to improve from therapy depended not just on the therapist’s skill, but on the clients ability to access his felt sense. One of Gendlin’s students, Ann Weiser Cornell, explains: 

Clients who pause in the midst of talking and allow a fresh “felt sense” to form about the life situation they are wrestling with, and then continue to pay attention to it, tend to do better in psychotherapy than clients who don’t. This finding has been replicated in more than 50 studies (Hendricks, 2001).⁸

Gendlin realized that the ability to access one’s felt sense could be taught, and he called the process Focusing. It’s kind like meditation, but you do it with a parter who helps you “stay with” your felt sense. 

Why would you do that? Because felt senses imply a way forward. When you put your finger on a hot stove, the pain “implies” that you should remove your finger. Similarly, a murky pit in your stomach also implies something, but it’s usually not clear right away. 

Focusing is a close cousin of IFS in that what you encounter as a felt sense is often a “part.” Focusing helps you meet your parts “from the body up,” as opposed to “from the mind down.”

Of the tools on this page, this one may seem the most abstract. But in my experience, it’s the most grounding tool on the list, tied with Alexander Technique.

The breath is the only part of the autonomic nervous system that you can control, and it turns out that by breathing in certain ways, you can access non-ordinary states of consciousness that help you process deeply held trauma, experience transpersonal states, and even contact mystical truths and spiritual ecstasy. (Transpersonal just means “beyond yourself.” For example, in a transpersonal experience, you might feel at one with humankind, nature, or the universe.) Sounds cool, and it is. Also maybe sounds scary, and it can be, but breathwork is safe when facilitated by an experienced practitioner who can scan for contra-indications and support during intense moments. 

Many people explore non-ordinary states of consciousness as recreation. Many people who experience temporary transpersonal states make the mistake of thinking that they have stabilized at a higher stage of development. This is a false conclusion. Ken Wilber has made clear that we can glimpse reality from later stages during peak experiences, but we interpret those experiences from our current center of gravity. Breathwork and psychedelics are promising vertical development accelerators, but they do not catapult us into advanced stages permanently. We must still “do the work.”

Note: Breathwork is an umbrella term for various techniques that help you reduce stress, get “in the zone,” and more.

Surprised to see this here? Psychedelics are incredibly exciting vertical development tools, since they can induce stable states of non-ordinary consciousness for long enough to really “get somewhere” on an inner journey.

Psychedelics can terrify people, and with reason. They can take you to intense inner places that, without proper preparation or oversight, can overwhelm you. 

But the history of psychedelics is by and large positive. Indigenous cultures around the world have used them ceremonially for millennia to connect to Nature, God, and each other. Many Western people report that their first experience with psychedelics is one of the most beautiful and important moments of their lives, after which they felt more connected to their hearts, to themselves, and to humanity. 

From a brain point of view, entering a non-ordinary state of consciousness simply means going beyond your “Default Mode Network” — the set of neural nets that comprise your “normal” state and therefore shape your perception of reality. Research has shown that psychedelics create new neural connections and open you to fresh ways of seeing the world. They can also temporarily decrease feelings of fear and defensiveness, allowing you to confront old memories and process trauma that would otherwise be too painful.

On the whole, Western media has painted too dark a portrait of psychedelics. I believe that with proper facilitation, the benefits outweigh the risks. If you are skeptical, please check out the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), whose research on MDMA is currently in stage 3 clinical trials for treating PTSD and is showing extraordinary results. Johns Hopkins is studying psilocybin as a treatment for depression, with similar results. Clearly, there is tremendous healing power in psychedelics, and I believe that making facilitated psychedelic experiences available at scale can pave the way for a mentally healthy and vertically developed society more than just about any other single stroke. 

However, a warning belongs here. Psychedelics can facilitate vertical development, but they are not silver bullets. You still must “do the work.” And, as much potential as psychedelics have to help you heal trauma and connect to your higher self, they should be treated with caution and respect. The book’s How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollen and Consciousness Medicine by Francoise Bourzat are good places to start learning.

Psychedelics are, of course, also illegal in most states, and I do not condone or encourage breaking the law. All of this is offered as information only.