COACHING FAQs

My Coaching Style and Approach

What’s unique/special/different about your coaching?

I had a pretty intense startup career up to EVP level, mostly in the engineering/product side of the house. That experience gives me a high degree of pattern-matching with my clients. When you come to a session with something on your mind, there's a strong likelyhood I've been through it personally. I’ve been interested in how people grow and change since coming to California over thirty years ago. I integrate learning from cognitive therapy, yoga, meditation, surfing (patience, persistence!), and improv (be fearless!) into my work. Our sessions can bounce between the specifics of (say) a hiring process, to a visualization backed with some challenging questions and back to a set of experience about hiring challenges at different company stages. I like to keep it light, whilst challenging as directly as I can. My personality is one of humor overlaying a deep seriousness of purpose.



What’s your goal in coaching me?

Change and learning! Learning and change! I want you to be different (and hopefully, very different), in a good way, after we’ve finished working together. I want you to be able to fully handle your current job, and be excited and ready to scale to the next level and beyond. That means you have built new practical skills based on new patterns of belief and behavior.



What’s your coaching style/philosophy?

People are endlessly fascinating, wild, creative, strange and beautiful. Leadership is an intense way of getting closer to what it means to be fully human. The journey should be adventurous, fun, and exciting as well as hard work. I believe people are fundamentally driven by personal patterns of behavior and belief, most of which are either invisible, or barely visible, to us. By making the patterns visible, we can become skillful in managing them, and then add new ones which drive new, better, behavior. I believe we change through insight - seeing the patterns that are driving us currently - and practice - repeatedly trying new behavior to build new skills and eventually new, more healthy and useful foundational patterns. To that end, I will constantly challenge you to find the personal patterns underlying behavior you wish to change, and to practice new behaviors outside your comfort zone.



Is this therapy?

No. It crosses over into that territory, but I’m not looking to “cure you” of a mental disorder! I am deeply interested in your personal patterns, and some of those may trace back directly to your family background, so we may go there. But I am more interested in giving you tools to work with your current patterns and develop new, healthier ones, than digging into your past. I want to look forward with you, not back.



What does success look like?

You’re different! You are confident, open and engaged with your job in areas that were problematic for you, and you’re looking forward to growing fast into the next one. If those things are true, we've done good work together.



What happens in the sessions?

I am guided in the sessions by what is in front of you. We may start where we left off in the previous session and check in with your practice/homework, or we may begin somewhere else entirely. During the session I am intensely focussed on digging below the surface of what is confronting you, so that we can begin the process of real change. To that end, I will ask you questions, propose reflections, try visualizations, offer stories from my experience which may illuminate your current state and challenge you to find your own answers. You will change when you are operating out of your comfort zone. My job is to get you there (safely!), and support you as you learn what needs to be learned. Our goal is to make some serious progress every time we meet.



Engagements and Sessions

What’s unique/special/different about your coaching?

I had a pretty intense startup career up to EVP level, mostly in the engineering/product side of the house. That experience gives me a high degree of pattern-matching with my clients. When you come to a session with something on your mind, there's a strong likelyhood I've been through it personally. I’ve been interested in how people grow and change since coming to California over thirty years ago. I integrate learning from cognitive therapy, yoga, meditation, surfing (patience, persistence!), and improv (be fearless!) into my work. Our sessions can bounce between the specifics of (say) a hiring process, to a visualization backed with some challenging questions and back to a set of experience about hiring challenges at different company stages. I like to keep it light, whilst challenging as directly as I can. My personality is one of humor overlaying a deep seriousness of purpose.



What’s your goal in coaching me?

Change and learning! Learning and change! I want you to be different (and hopefully, very different), in a good way, after we’ve finished working together. I want you to be able to fully handle your current job, and be excited and ready to scale to the next level and beyond. That means you have built new practical skills based on new patterns of belief and behavior.



What’s your coaching style/philosophy?

People are endlessly fascinating, wild, creative, strange and beautiful. Leadership is an intense way of getting closer to what it means to be fully human. The journey should be adventurous, fun, and exciting as well as hard work. I believe people are fundamentally driven by personal patterns of behavior and belief, most of which are either invisible, or barely visible, to us. By making the patterns visible, we can become skillful in managing them, and then add new ones which drive new, better, behavior. I believe we change through insight - seeing the patterns that are driving us currently - and practice - repeatedly trying new behavior to build new skills and eventually new, more healthy and useful foundational patterns. To that end, I will constantly challenge you to find the personal patterns underlying behavior you wish to change, and to practice new behaviors outside your comfort zone.



Is this therapy?

No. It crosses over into that territory, but I’m not looking to “cure you” of a mental disorder! I am deeply interested in your personal patterns, and some of those may trace back directly to your family background, so we may go there. But I am more interested in giving you tools to work with your current patterns and develop new, healthier ones, than digging into your past. I want to look forward with you, not back.



What does success look like?

You’re different! You are confident, open and engaged with your job in areas that were problematic for you, and you’re looking forward to growing fast into the next one. If those things are true, we've done good work together.



What happens in the sessions?

I am guided in the sessions by what is in front of you. We may start where we left off in the previous session and check in with your practice/homework, or we may begin somewhere else entirely. During the session I am intensely focussed on digging below the surface of what is confronting you, so that we can begin the process of real change. To that end, I will ask you questions, propose reflections, try visualizations, offer stories from my experience which may illuminate your current state and challenge you to find your own answers. You will change when you are operating out of your comfort zone. My job is to get you there (safely!), and support you as you learn what needs to be learned. Our goal is to make some serious progress every time we meet.



GET IN TOUCH

Get in touch, and let's schedule a phonecall to discuss what you're looking for!

Contact Info

     San Francisco, CA.

     +1-415-370-3874

     joedunn@cloudbreak.com

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