Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What is identity coaching?
Identity coaching is the process of figuring out who you actually are, and then learning to live as that person. The work is a dialogue: you bring the material of your life, and I bring the questions, frameworks, and tools. In practice that means typology assessments such as the Enneagram, structured narrative work, contemplative practice, and a salutogenic approach that treats your body, your mind, your relationships, your work, your environment, and your contribution as parts of one life rather than separate categories to optimize.
How is this different from career or general life coaching?
Career coaching helps you decide what to do for work. Life coaching tends to focus on setting and reaching specific goals. Identity coaching starts further upstream, with who you actually are, and from there your career, your goals, and the structure of your life tend to organize themselves more naturally than they would if we worked on them in isolation. Counterintuitively, the upstream work usually produces faster and more durable downstream results.
How is coaching different from therapy?
Therapy is the right setting for diagnosing or treating mental illness, working through trauma clinically, or processing the past with someone licensed to do that. Coaching operates differently. I work in the present and toward the future, taking your formative experience seriously without claiming to treat it. If something arises in our work that belongs in therapy, I will tell you, and the two kinds of work can often run in parallel to good effect.
What does “salutogenic” mean, and why do you lead with it?
Salutogenesis is Aaron Antonovsky’s name for the medical question that pathology-focused medicine forgot to ask: what actually makes a person well? Antonovsky identified three components that together produce what he called a “sense of coherence.” A life feels comprehensible when it makes sense to you, manageable when you have the resources you need to meet it, and meaningful when the whole project seems worth showing up for. Identity runs through all three of those components, which is why this practice starts there.
What is the values, virtues, and calling model you use?
Values are the things that matter most to you. Virtues are the character qualities that develop when those values become part of how you actually live, including things like courage, honesty, patience, generosity, discipline, and humility. Your authentic calling is the shape your virtues take when they are expressed across the whole of your life, including your work, your relationships, your body, your environment, your community, and what you contribute. Working through that model gives us a stable structure for the inquiry and for the life plan it produces.
What can I expect from a coaching session?
Sessions are conversations rather than lectures, and I am not the one with the answers. We start with what is actually on your mind, draw on assessments and frameworks when one of them helps the inquiry along, and end with something concrete enough that you can carry it into the week. All sessions are confidential, and they run on a HIPAA-compliant platform.
Do you give specific advice or a set plan?
I do not write prescriptive plans for clients, mainly because plans that arrive prescriptive do not survive contact with the person who is supposed to live them. What I bring is a set of frameworks, tools, and questions. What we build together is a plan that matches your values and the actual constraints of your life, which is the only kind that lasts.
Do you work with the body, nutrition, and lifestyle?
Yes, and this is a meaningful part of the work. I trained as a mindbodygreen™ Health and Wellness Coach, and I treat the body as one of the central domains of identity. We can address sleep, nutrition, movement, stress, attention, and recovery alongside the rest of the inquiry, with the important caveat that none of it is diagnosis or medical treatment. For specific medical concerns, your healthcare team is the right place to go.
Can you diagnose or treat medical conditions?
No, and it is important to be clear about that. Health and wellness coaches are not licensed to diagnose, treat, or prescribe medication. My work runs alongside your healthcare team’s, supporting things like behavior change, habit design, and helping your values actually show up in your daily decisions. Whenever something belongs in front of a medical professional, I will say so.
What is your background?
Twenty years of engineering leadership in Silicon Valley, followed by burnout, a long recovery, and a deliberate rebuild that took several more years. I am a mindbodygreen™ Health and Wellness Coach, and I also audited a two-year Buddhist chaplaincy program, where I studied compassionate presence and contemplative listening. Those disciplines now shape how I show up in a client conversation.
How long does this work take, and how often will we meet?
Most clients meet weekly or every other week for forty-five to sixty minutes. Some people start getting traction within a few sessions. For most, real identity work and the life redesign that follows runs months and sometimes longer. The frequency of our meetings ends up mattering less than the consistency of the work between them.
Is this online or in person, and how do I start?
Sessions happen online by video or phone, which works for almost everyone. If you are local to me, we can arrange to meet in person instead. To start, book a free 30-minute discovery call. If it feels like a fit, we move into the work from there, and pricing is on the Coaching page.
Have a question I didn’t answer?
Set up a free discovery call.
There is nothing to commit to in the call, and no sales pitch in it either. It is a real conversation about where you are and whether this work is a fit for what you are looking for.