Adding coaching to my professional pursuits is the culmination of my life’s experiences, self-discoveries, and profound realizations about what I value. It’s about helping ambitious people – fellow “strivers” – achieve their goals in a way that brings fulfillment and inner harmony, not just outward success, particularly for those battling Striver’s Syndrome. It’s an approach I call human capacity coaching to distinguish it from the unnecessarily limiting containers of “life-coaching” and “executive coaching”.
WHY STARTED WITH SELF-UNDERSTANDING
My passion for coaching high-achieving strivers stems from five deep, personal insights and is rooted in my lived experience as a striver:
- My “Why”: My meaning is to support others in their pursuit of growth, helping them strive better, achieve more, and cultivate wellbeing on the path to realizing their full human potential. This meaning is the consistent through-line in all the aspects of my life.
- My True Nature: I thrive as a perspective-maker, a teacher, and a compassionate advocate for courageous individuals tackling ambitious goals. I’m at my best when I fully utilize my signature strengths: perspective, fairness, forgiveness, hope, and humor, which coaching provides a vehicle for me to actualize.
- Embracing Impermanence: A significant turning point for me was recognizing the precious, finite nature of life. With approximately 1,319 weeks left, I’m committed to using this time to positively impact others’ lives and create a lasting ripple effect through what I offer as human capacity coaching.
- Whole-Brain Living: I experienced that relying solely on my “left-brained” work persona was unnecessarily limiting and ineffective. A challenging work experience helped me embrace my open-hearted “right brain,” realizing that this vulnerable, compassionate part of me isn’t a weakness, but a powerful competitive advantage.
- Striving Better: My intense focus on professional achievement often led to neglecting my wellbeing and relationships; classic signs of Striver’s Syndrome. I want to help others avoid this trap, guiding them to achieve their professional aspirations while simultaneously cultivating wellbeing and inner peace. This is the essence of how I teach others to strive better.
THE STORY THAT BROUGHT ME TO COACHING STRIVERS
Initially, I thought about titling this post “Why I Started Coaching,” but the truth is, I’ve been coaching for a long time. Early in my career, I was a small cog in a big machine. But as my influence and span of control grew, so did the number of professionals seeking me out for mentoring, counseling, and simply to listen. At the time, “coaching” was a term reserved for athletic venues; I didn’t see myself in that role or recognize what I was doing as coaching at the time. In hindsight, I was already intuitively practicing aspects of what I know refer to as human capacity coaching.
Looking back, it’s clear I was intrinsically drawn to those conversations where people sought perspective, encouragement, and wisdom. And the way I showed up in those discussions naturally drew others to me. Some of you who knew me in college might even remember my nickname, “Professor” – a nod to my nature as a guide and teacher.
The Universe’s “Curveballs” and the Path to Striver’s Syndrome Awareness
Life has a way of serving up exactly what you need, when you need it. Over the past year, the universe has been screaming at me to reflect on impermanence, my place in the grand scheme of things, and the impact of my relentless striving on my wellbeing and cherished relationships – the very patterns that define Striver’s Syndrome.
The passing of my father in August 2024 brought the finiteness of my existence into sharp focus. I did the math – actuarial tables suggest I’ll live to 88 on average. That’s 1,319 weeks left. I’ve already been here for 2,754. That math sparked big questions about how I wanted to apply the time that is left and, more importantly, how to apply my attention and the character strengths I’ve been endowed with.
In parallel, as my father faced his final days, I was experiencing another kind of “death” — shepherding a business I led through an insolvency process. It’s easy to lead when things are going well. It’s far more challenging to cultivate meaning and motivation when everyone knows the end is near and job security is uncertain. Instinctively, perhaps out of sheer necessity, I tapped into resources I hadn’t typically associated with my professional identity: compassion, empathy, open-heartedness, emotional availability, and vulnerability.
Overcoming the fear of liberating these aspects of myself felt incredibly natural and authentic. These “right-brain” qualities proved to be the antidote, enabling me to guide the company to a productive outcome for customers, employees, and stakeholders. In doing so, my overly narrow, “left-brain only” persona dissolved, making way for the whole of my character strengths to flourish. The business didn’t die, but that limiting version of myself did.
The Silence, Then the Tranquility
After that intense period, I found myself with a significant amount of space and attention I hadn’t experienced since starting full-time work in 1994. For reasons I did not fully understand at the time, I felt compelled to reject my strong instinct to return to work quickly and instead embarked on a self-imposed sabbatical.
As I shared the start of the sabbatical with others, I sensed they were expecting me to embark on a grand adventure – travel around the globe, hike Denali, or go into low Earth orbit. But my overwhelming sense was that the “space” I needed to explore wasn’t above me; it was inside me. I needed to reconnect with myself: my mind, body, values, and humanity.
The first couple of weeks were unsettling – antsy, anxious, constantly checking emails. Work had been my identity for 30 years, and “not working” felt like withdrawal. As the withdrawal subsided, I felt a stillness that invited me to make conscious choices about my time and attention.
In that stillness, I rediscovered dormant interests, particularly in the philosophy and science of living well. I devoured books on ancient philosophy (Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus), the science of happiness and positive psychology (Arthur Brooks, Sonja Lyubomirsky, Martin Seligman), and the application of positive psychology to leadership (Kim Cameron).
I wrote extensively – private notes about my nature as a striver, the false choices I had made, my values, and my beliefs about a meaningful life. As I wrote, I realized that the science and philosophy I was exploring were reflections of each other. Synergies revealed themselves with philosophy and modern happiness science allying to illuminate a path to enduring fulfillment, or what positive psychology calls “flourishing” (authentic happiness) and ancient Greek and Roman philosophy refer to as eudaimonia – a higher order of happiness not grounded in pleasure (hedonia), but rather in something more fundamental, intrinsic, self-actualized.
In addition, I sought to understand myself better through various assessments (VIA Character Strengths and PERMAH Wellbeing, for example), gaining deeper insight into my values, wellbeing, and mental resilience.
The Breakthrough and Inspiration to Coach Strivers
Everything became clear – I was suffering from Striver’s Syndrome.
You have likely witnessed Striver’s Syndrome in others, and perhaps even experienced it yourself – the tendency for highly driven individuals to become so focused on achievement that they experience a lack of fulfillment, self-doubt, burnout, and diminished happiness that ultimately hinders achieving their true potential and living joyfully.
The awareness of the impact of my striving nature called me to delve deeper into research and resources about the tools and practices of positive psychology, their application to Striver’s Syndrome, and the modalities of positive psychology coaching. The connections I’d been making, the notes I’d been keeping, my lived experience as a striver, and these learnings became the foundation of a system and method for living a more flourishing life that I created for myself, that I wish I’d had access to years ago, and which I’m on a mission to bring to others.
When we learn, we are preparing to teach. When we teach, we learn.
While I started applying these ideas in my own life, I also began bringing them to others informally to friends and a few “beta” clients, and then formally integrating them into a human capacity coaching system I designed for strivers.
TAKING STRIVER’S SYNDROME HEAD-ON
Before you get the idea that I’m off convincing people they should give up their worldly possessions and become monks, let me be clear… the remedy to striver’s syndrome isn’t to stop striving. After all, striving is in our nature. The answer is to strive better (differently, harmoniously, more consciously) toward goals that are worthy of us while cultivating inner harmony, actualizing our strengths, and living according to our nature. Research indicates that consciously focusing on these areas not only leads to greater individual achievement and personal thriving but also fosters a positive ripple effect on those around us – our families, friends, colleagues, communities, and beyond.
“What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him.”
VIKTOR FRANKL, Man’s Search for Meaning
In Frankl’s terms, coaching strivers to strive better is work worthy of me. This is why I’m taking Striver’s Syndrome head on and integrating coaching into my vocation. You can learn more about my approach to coaching strivers reckoning with Striver’s Syndrome on my coaching website.
My approach integrates the ancient wisdom of philosophy (including Greek and Roman teachings), evidence-based practices from positive psychology, evidence-based coaching modalities, and insights from positive leadership research. All of this fused with my own lived experience as a striver who has both enjoyed the benefits of ambition and suffered its difficulties and unintended consequences.
My approach supports strivers in:
- Understanding their true nature.
- Learning and applying evidence-based practices that align actions with values.
- Cultivating wellbeing.
- Building the resilience required to tackle ambitious goals.
WHY I COACH
Human capacity coaching offers a vehicle for me to actualize my “why,” leverage my strengths, focus my attention on what I value, show up as my whole self, share what I’ve learned and learn by teaching, and empower others to strive better in a way that truly enriches their lives.
If you are a striver reckoning with the consequences of your striving nature, I invite you to be courageous and explore how to strive better by learning about the coaching Pathway I’ve designed for me and you.
