In 2016 I started writing to a small mailing list about the things I was struggling with. I called it HighLifer, and for a while it was a place to think out loud about confidence, decisions, and the gap between the life I had and the one I thought I was supposed to have. People wrote back. Some of them asked if we could talk. That is how the coaching began.
For years the work was about getting somewhere: a clearer plan, a bolder step, a better version of the person doing the stepping. It helped. It also kept circling back to the same question, in me and in the people I sat with. Who is the one who feels stuck? When we looked at that directly, the plans tended to sort themselves out.
So the work turned toward self-inquiry. I still coach, and I still ask a lot of questions. The difference is where the questions point. They point inward, at the one who is suffering, and they stay there long enough for something to be seen.
Alongside the coaching I paint, I write essays, and I host a small weekly meditation gathering. The contemplative traditions have shaped how I sit with people more than any method has.
For the record, my training runs through several coaching certifications, hypnotherapy, NLP, Integral Theory, and two decades of helping teams and organisations change. I mention it so you know it's there. I don't begin with any of it. I begin with what's happening.