We will pay for swim lessons without a second thought. Golf lessons. A personal trainer who watches us squat and tells us our left knee is caving in. Nobody flinches at coaching the body. We assume the body needs an outside eye, because of course it does. You cannot watch yourself swim.
The mind is where we hesitate. Hiring someone to coach how we think, lead, decide, and carry pressure still feels like an admission of weakness to a lot of people. It is the same gap, the same blind spot, the same impossible-to-watch-yourself problem. We just treat one as obvious maintenance and the other as something to keep quiet about.
A good coach is not someone who tells you what to do. If a coach is handing you the playbook, you hired a consultant, and that is a different purchase. A good coach exposes your blind spots. They show you where you have given your power away, so you can choose to bring light to it. You can call your power back. You can dive into where you need to hone a skill, gain a perspective, do the work that positions you to show up. The work is not to install their judgment in you. The work is to clear away the parts of you that are running the show without your permission, so the version of you that should be leading actually gets to.
I built a stable of coaches on purpose
I have had coaches and mentors most of my adult life. Financial coaches. Triathlon coaches. Business coaches. A spiritual mentor. A therapist who is, functionally, my psychological coach. I have never once regretted it. Not one engagement, not one dollar, not one hour.
No single person can see all of you. The financial coach works your money, the body worker your shoulders, the mentor your patience, the therapist your nervous system. The work is the same in every room: chiseling away a piece when you are ready for it to go. If you want to be coached as a whole person, you need more than one set of eyes.
Carl Jung gave me the language for what all of them are actually doing. The shadow, the part of you that stays hidden, runs you until you make it visible. Once you can see it, you can move beyond it. You cannot integrate what you refuse to look at. Every coach I have kept does the same job in a different room of the house. They make a shadow visible so it stops quietly running me.
Here are examples of four of them.
The therapist: four pops and the voice went quiet
I went to therapy because it sounded fun. A friend told me he had gone back to a memory from when he was four, something that had seemingly been erased but was obviously still buried deep, and he processed it. I thought, that sounds kind of fun. I can remember most of my childhood. I want to try that. I also had a loud voice in my head that never shut up, and I was curious whether I could quiet it.
That curiosity turned into two years of weekly ninety-minute sessions and a journey I had no idea I was signing up for. We went into every nook and cranny of my conscious and subconscious, looking for trauma clusters and busting them up.
One session we were doing EMDR, and I felt my brain pop. Four times. Pop, pop, pop, pop. The voice I had lived with thoughout my whole life, the one I later learned was a manager in the Internal Family Systems sense, completely went away. I do not mean it softened. I mean it was gone. It was like fragments of me had been holding the world at a distance, and they came back, and I was no longer dissociated. I was fully present in my body for the first time I could remember.
You cannot pop a shadow you refuse to look at.
The body breaker: the backstroke I could not see
My body worker does massage and fascia release, and he is a body whisperer. There are a hundred stories. Here is one.
I was telling him about my swim training, talking with my hands the way I do, and he asked if I was doing more than freestyle. I threw my arms into a backstroke motion to show him. He said, let me see that backstroke. I did it again. He said, okay, watch me. And the way he moved his entire body, I went, oh. He said, yeah, you will wreck your shoulders if you do not rotate from your core.
Two weeks later I jumped into the Tennessee River to complete my first 70.3 Ironman, with all the fear that open water brings. Tried freestyle, could not settle into it, flipped onto my back, and swam the entire race backstroke at a 2:12 pace. The thing I literally could not see myself doing, he saw in one motion. That is the whole value of an outside eye. You cannot watch yourself swim, and you cannot watch yourself lead a meeting either.
The mentor: presence on a longer clock
I have a mentor who owns an architecture and engineering firm. I see him a few times a year, and the wisdom lasts a lifetime.
He told me once that when you anchor yourself in a place, a community, a location, and you stay, over time your surroundings begin to attract themselves to you. The right people, the right work, the right opportunities start to find you, but only on a clock most people are too impatient to run. It is a lesson about presence and patience that I did not have the wiring for naturally. My shadow there is the urge to move, to optimize, to force the next thing. He exposed it just by living the opposite in front of me.
The spiritual coach: a grounded home
My spiritual coach has taught me a thousand lessons. One I still practice weekly is grounding and protecting the energy of our home.
I am not going to oversell it or explain the mechanics. I will just tell you what it produced. Our home is a beautiful place for my wife and kids. We are relaxed in it. We are content in it. We are grounded in it. Whatever was ungrounded in me, the part that carried the day's noise through the front door, that practice keeps surfacing and clearing it. The result is not a feeling I chase. It is the baseline my family gets to live inside.
What all four have in common
Mind, body, place, spirit. Four coaches, four rooms, four shadows pulled into the light.
I did not collect them to be told what to do. I placed each of them in my life to help me remove the parts I no longer wanted, so that I could show up present every day. That is the through-line, and it is Jung's whole point. The shadow has to be made visible before you can move beyond it. A coach is just someone whose job is to hold the light steady while you look.
How my coaches made me a better coach
This is the part that matters if you are deciding whether to hire someone like me. The same work I just described, the therapist, the body worker, the mentor, the years of it, is exactly what makes me good in a room with your leadership team. I have spent hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of dollars conditioning myself to be absolutely present with founders, CEOs, and executive teams. That is not a credential I put on a slide. It is the reason I can see what is actually happening in your company.
I am not just looking at the strategy that stalled or the story that fell flat. Almost every business constraint is grounded in a human one. My job is not to embarrass anyone or call them out. It is to facilitate the room, strategically and energetically, so that hope, humility, and honesty become the undercurrent. People shed their fears and reservations and show up in a new light, ready to remove the constraint and go after the goal.
I am not interested in a team hitting a number while staying trapped in toxicity, fear, and anxiety. I am interested in a team becoming the best version of themselves, or at least as much of it as they are willing to become in that moment, building real alignment with their peers and reaching the magic beyond the goal, the part they are actually proud of. If their families at home do not feel that a different person walked through the door after a long workshop, I have room to improve.
If you are a founder building a company around a story you believe in, the constraint usually is not the strategy. It is the part of you the strategy keeps running into. The work I do on myself is the work I can do with you.
So much respect.
Frequently asked questions
Q: Should I hire a coach or a consultant? A: They are different purchases. A consultant hands you the playbook and tells you what to do. A coach exposes your blind spots so you can lead as your whole self. If you need the play run, hire a consultant. If you need to see what you cannot see about how you operate, hire a coach.
Q: Why do successful people hire coaches if they are already successful? A: For the same reason elite athletes keep a coach. You cannot watch yourself perform. Outside perspective is most valuable precisely when you are already good, because at that level the remaining gains are in the blind spots you cannot reach alone.
Q: Is it normal to have more than one coach at once? A: It is more common than people admit. No single coach can see your finances, your body, your leadership, and your inner life. Different systems need different eyes. Many high-functioning leaders quietly keep several at once.
Q: What does a good business coach actually do? A: A good business coach does not install their judgment in you. They expose your blind spots so the best version of you gets to lead. The goal is to clear away the parts running you without your permission, not to make you dependent on their advice.