Do the thing to become the thing
I’ve always been nervous to call myself a coach without some kind of certificate hanging on my wall. For the past few years, that absence has felt like a gap, maybe even a fraudulence.
But a few weeks ago I passed 700 hours of professional coaching conversations. That’s 700 hours of sitting with people in messy, uncertain moments and trying to help them see more clearly. That’s 700 hours of empathetic listening, of asking difficult questions in easy ways, of balancing challenge with support.
(I tried to capture what those hours taught me in a short film that just dropped on YouTube: 700 hours of career coaching in 17 minutes).
Stills from the new video
True qualification, for me, is the work itself. The only way to become the thing is to do the thing.
This is true for coaching (within the obvious limits of psychological safety of course), but also for everything else I’ve been building in this little life of mine. Films, essays, frameworks, music. None of it arrived neatly packaged this month. (When does it ever?) Each was a workshop unto itself: half-finished drafts, trial-and-error, gradual craft. But what matters isn’t the sheen, it’s the hours.
And this month I’ve been putting in the hours on a few fronts.
(Friendly PSA: if you find any of the work I do valuable, you can tip me here. Every bit of support gives me more space to write, film, make music, and to keep sharing it freely).
The new video is something a little different, an attempt to blend coaching takeaways with the vibe of an actual coaching session. I tried to compress what I’ve learnt from 700 hours of coaching into practical, pattern-based advice drawn from hundreds of conversations.
The second video from earlier in the month is perhaps more tactical: Don’t niche down. Be multipassionate instead. It’s about resisting the pressure to build a highly-focused business or initiative and instead consider making something that contains multitudes.
Over at Theory of Change I’ve kept publishing my “Anti-Pattern” series, pulling apart overused frameworks and rebuilding them. New editions include newsletters on Net Promoter Score, OKRs, the concept of the Minimum Viable Product, Holacracy, and the dreaded strategic refresh.
And I redrafted my homepage a bit to make it more coherent.
I’ve been recording a lot of new music in my studio too — still drafts, still need mixing and mastering, but you can get a flavour here.
The garden needed a lot of work this month.
But I think we identified the night visitor. A stone marten!
This month's activities (whether that was writing weird post-rock or checking the trailcam) taught me something I internalised long ago, but still don't recognise enough: that craft is less about mastery and more about stamina.
You show up, again and again, until the shape of the work (or strawberry-stealing mammal) reveals itself. Whether you’re coaching, building, writing, composing, or photographing, the principle holds. Do the thing to become the thing.
Anyways, that's me. How are you?
Adam