For most of my career I was the person everyone else leaned on — the one who could absorb pressure, hold a room together, and keep capable people moving when things got heavy. It made me effective. It also taught me the thing most coaching misses: the leaders carrying the most weight are the ones with the least room to be honest about it. I built my practice in that gap.
Publicly, I’m known as the People Displeaser — I’ve spent years helping a large audience reclaim their boundaries and their self-trust. That work matters. But the deeper work happens privately, with leaders who are already capable and carrying real weight.
What I learned coaching them: the higher you rise, the more your reasonableness costs you. Senior leaders don’t need motivation. They need someone who can hold them steady while the stakes climb — so they can act with authority without negotiating with themselves first.
My work is not to be seen. It is to make the person at the top harder to knock off balance — to give them one room with no agenda but their own clarity. The best of it is the work no one else ever knows happened.
Over the years that has meant founders who built companies worth hundreds of millions — one past a billion — CEOs and COOs running real organizations, operators, surgeons, and a few names you would recognize. Different industries, same private problem: highly capable people who had become very good at carrying everyone but themselves.
I take a small number of these clients at a time, and the work is quiet by design. Most of the leaders I work with never mention that we work together at all. That’s usually the point — the strongest version of someone rarely advertises how they got there.
My book, I Hope You Hate This, arrives from Penguin Portfolio in 2027 — the formal articulation of everything this work is built on. It’s not a funnel and it’s not a pitch. It’s the clearest account I’ve written of why being the most reasonable, accommodating person in the room eventually costs the people who can least afford it — and what it takes to lead from somewhere steadier. It’s also a large part of why senior leaders increasingly seek out the private side of what I do.
I take a small number of private clients at a time.
Apply to Work Together →