Choose your own odyssey: results & insights from Tee Barnett Coaching Training (TBCT)

By Tee @ 2024-04-08T15:44 (+27)

Introduction

From the Table of Contents, you might've guessed that this post makes different offerings to different people making personal growth investments.

It's built like a playlist for your interests. Jumping to sections that beckon your interests is a great way to navigate this mosaic of reporting, reflection and interpretation about the first Tee Barnett Coaching Training (TBCT) program cycle. 

Moving through the standard sections –  

  1. Executive Summary (read time: ~2 mins)
  2. Program Design (read time: ~5 mins)
  3. Our Approach (read time: ~3 mins)
  4. How Things Played Out (read time: ~4 mins)

– reveals progressively more context via the old-school “Choose your own Adventure” format.

This was our playful way of carving some sense out of the voluminous richness of the coaching training data and experiences.

Start here instead if you need background info on TBCT. The rest of the report breaks out into stand-alone bookmarkable sections for audiences seeking different things.

TBCT By the Numbers, Interpreting the numbers, and Cohort Testimonials are other ways of quickly getting a sense of how things went.

The non-standard arrangement is our attempt at synthesizing a lot of “hopes” that we have in retelling what happened.

We hope you’ll uncover things that matter to you. We hope to popularize a distinct approach to personal growth that applies to almost any walk of life. We hope that prospective and existing coaches can learn from our takeaways. We hope program leads and designers get useful insights from our thoughts. That funders will come to understand and get involved. That we can elevate the quality of the life coaching industry by sharing open questions about the industry & craft we’re thinking through. That we can inform people to help make better decisions about their personal growth journeys.

Or you just might want to browse around. Whatever the case, you have my sincere thanks for taking the time to read this. Feel free to express interest in future cohorts and programs. You can also reach out at tee@teebarnett.com about any of it. 

Table of Contents

Choose your own Odyssey

Your choose-your-own odyssey[1]  adventure begins as an audience member of a fireside chat about TBCT with the co-developers, Tee Barnett and Emily Crotteau 

Executive Summary – Choose your own Odyssey #1

Tee: Thank you all for attending this “fireside chat” with Emily and me about how the TBCT program went. For those of you who don’t know, Emily was the co-developer of TBCT. She was primarily responsible for producing the curriculum, but also served a lot of important functions for the program. 

We’d like for this fireside chat to be driven by your questions! So I’ll be giving a brief overview of how I felt the coaching training program went last year and we’ll open things up for questions from all of you in the audience.

Well, my headline take: nearly everyone had the caliber of intense experience that can meaningfully affect life plans, including me.[2] 

The program seems to have accelerated, but also substantively nuanced, the exploration and development processes of the cohort coaches.[3] Nearly everyone gained valuable clarity as to whether and how coaching fits into their lives.

Most of this I chalk up to how this impressive cohort interacted with the unconventional design and implementation of the program.

My somewhat clumsy analogy is that TBCT had an ‘augmented reality’ effect on the cohort by substantially altering their emotional experience and developmental process of exploring coaching.

At the risk of forcing this analogy, just as your mind and body reacts to what’s in an augmented reality headset, what TBCT built upon the ‘baseline’ or ‘typical’ experience of trying coaching seems to have dramatically affected their beliefs, plans and actions.

The analogy breaks down, well, in several ways, but specifically in that augmented reality visuals are not real, they’re chimerical. Whereas, parts of our infrastructure tangibly touched the lives of our cohort coaches (Our in-person retreat and matchmaking of real paid clients are two examples).

Our approach to influencing the emotional experience and the process of exploring coaching took several forms:

We had 9 participating coaches. About a third of the cohort now plans to make a living as a coach. Folks in this segment of the cohort tell me that, without TBCT, they wouldn’t have made this career move, and / or their process of becoming a coach was sped up on the order of years.[4]

Another third will likely continue part-time alongside other jobs and projects. And a couple of people are less easily classified. Two people will likely infuse their work with what was in the program (e.g. management), and the other person dropped out midway through.

Here's a nice group photo of several of us at the TBCT retreat outside of Prague by the way! [Tee presents a slide with the group photo]

Enough about how things unfolded last year makes me not want to run exactly the same program, but it was a remarkable experience that has inspired me to plan on spinning out a set of offerings as a result of what we’ve discovered.

Participants in this planned set of offerings will hopefully feed into the next upcoming coaching training cohort. We’re currently in the process of planning what’s next!

Program Design – Choose your own Odyssey #2

Tee: “Okay, let’s open this up for questions. Anyone can feel free to jump in.”

1) You say: “hmm, ‘augmented reality’ for coaching. I’m curious to hear more about that. (read response directly below)

2) You decide to exit the fireside chat. [Thanks for reading! You can jump to another section, or reach out to Tee at tee@teebarnett.com with any questions, curiosities, feedback, etc. if you’d like!]

For the cohort of 9 coaches that we had, the program infrastructure, and accompanying high-touch support, made certain initial steps far easier than they otherwise tend to be for the lone coach starting out (such as attracting their first paid clients).

TBCT provided infrastructure that covered these initial steps so that, along the way, coaches could have the space and bandwidth to ask more profound questions of themselves, and get support in taking on deeper emotional challenges (cruxes). 

Our curriculum modules (classes) were more like collaborative learning and working groups, designed to be environments for the cohort coaches to enrich their relationships with themselves, their own practice, each other, and ultimately their own felt existence.

We were betting that this recipe of approach would be incredibly rewarding for their development as coaches.

TBCT unfolded to facilitate this ‘augmented’ or reweighted experience in roughly three phases:

Here’s what we provided and when it unfolded:

[Program timelines are displayed upon a projected/shared screen]

I’ll pick out two major pieces of the TBCT infrastructure that seemed to have had big effects on the emotional journey of these new coaches:

• The first would be the curriculum modules – I mentioned that the coaches could choose between around a dozen offered modules with titles like: 

“Coaching & Spirituality”

“Planning Developmental Arcs” and 

“Emotions & Embodiment” 

The coaches really emphasized to me personally and through testimonials how much these modules elevated the program. I couldn’t agree more. As you might imagine with the titles I mentioned, they were aiming to be really generative and expansive. But related to the emotional crux point, Emily designed the modules to be incredibly inviting, collaborative and responsive to the experience of individuals and the group. 

Yes, it was a space for learning and exploration, but I’m also told that it was one of the key places for coaches in this program to work on themselves together and forge the type of bonds that form the foundations of collaborative discovery. Praise for these modules from the coaches sounded like “magical,” “perspective-shifting” and “generative for years to come.” 

I’ve been told by some of the coaches that my desire to speak matter-of-factly about the modules is underselling them. Fun fact: these modules weren’t in the original plans for TBCT. We were lucky to have Emily deliver them.[6] 
 

• And the second piece of infrastructure that heavily affected the emotional journey of these coaches was matchmaking coaches from the client pipeline – I say this because providing clients early on to the cohort coaches punted several months of serious emotional and logistical legwork they would have otherwise been occupied with, and enabled them to focus on deeper considerations regarding their self-presentation and practice – considerations that require pretty heavy emotional and intellectual processing. 

 

[ Tee presents the landing page for TBCT matchmaking ]


What we provided to alter their experience of acquiring initial clients, in some ways, was more difficult for the cohort coaches. Earlier than otherwise, they competed with other coaches for a higher volume of incoming clients, which was tough for many of them. These clients were paying real money in expectation of real results, so you can imagine the set of pressures that can come with that.
The program fairly quickly, probably too quickly if I’m being honest, teleported people into the actual life of being a coach by initiating paid client work after only a couple of months.


I wouldn’t say the program caused cohort coaches to face everything that they needed to face, or resolve everything that they needed to resolve, but the combination of experiential immersion, high-touch support and potent curriculum modules seems to have positioned them to face these deeper questions far more effectively than they otherwise would have been able to on their own.

Most coaches attained enough clarity to make cleaner calls about what to do moving forward as a result.

Our Approach – Choose your own Odyssey #3

1) Audience member: “Why was so much emphasis put on affecting the emotional experience of becoming a coach? Isn’t it okay if people succeed or fail on their own merit in the real world?” (read response directly below)

2) Audience member : “I’d personally love to hear more about Emily’s experience in co-developing the program. Could we hear more about that? (Emily gives an overview of the Emily’s Experience sections.)

3) You ask: “What are some examples of significant things, including emotional cruxes, that your program prioritized helping participants to address?” (Jump to endnote [7] for the response)

This is touching on a closely-held set of theories we’ve had about all of this that probably differentiates our program from other programs, and even our notions of well-calibrated personal growth, from that of many others in the industry.  

We feel that how people come to be coaches ‘in the wild’ often skips fundamental steps, or neglects key developmental milestones, that ultimately lead to bad outcomes somewhere down the line.

The program design reflects our high-level methodological stance that it's important to grapple with thorny emotional issues relevant to the path of pursuing what you want and being how you want to be.

In other words, working through emotional and perceptual tangles is critical for your aspirations. 

That means not neglecting emotional issues as you pursue various missions in life. And in the other extreme, not getting caught up in endless and directionless emotional work.[8]

In this way, you could think of efforts to address these emotional cruxes as ‘prerequisites’ to moving or continuing forward because they carry existential implications for the journey ahead. 

A perennial example from coaching and therapy revolves around how okay it feels to help people in this way at all. As evidenced by questions that commonly arise like:

You could see how landing in different places with respect to these questions could radically affect the journey to becoming a coach.

It’s common for freelance coaches to unknowingly commit themselves to unbounded costs in trying to make a living at this.

By that I mean, without taking stock of what unresolved internal things are pulling at them and affecting their decisions, aspiring coaches can will themselves forward in a way that’s not only compromised in the present day, but almost certainly sowing the seeds for significant issues to surface down the line.[9] Attempting to come to resolution on these internal cruxes at a later time can be far more expensive and less likely to be successful.

Another way I’ve seen this framed – neglecting cruxes can result in amassing emotional ‘technical debt’, or a layered accumulation of fraught emotional issues, that can be increasingly entrenched, knotty and costly to work through as time goes on.

We take the stance that this process of taking stock of relevant emotional cruxes, and continuously working through them along the way, is how practitioners become increasingly more functional and efficacious in embodying and pursuing what they want in life.[10] Pepper this process periodically with relevant and potent outside inspiration (e.g. our curriculum) for a near-complete recipe.

That’s not to say we have perfect clarity on which emotional cruxes to work through at all times, nor do we have all of the answers on how to resolve them. But we’re advocating for the importance of seriously attending to one’s interior state throughout the process of becoming a coach.

These beliefs are reflected in the design of TBCT and our methods of facilitating coaches in their development.

How Things Played Out – Choose your own Odyssey #4

1) You ask:  “Okay so, it seems that you think the program was relatively successful in inviting people to face the deeper challenges or ‘emotional cruxes’ of becoming a coach. What makes you feel like it went well? How did you track that? (read response directly below)

2) You ask: “Would you say more about what can happen when people try to push through a process, like becoming a coach, without addressing these ‘emotional cruxes’ as you call them“?” (Jump to endnote [11] for the response)

I came to this impression after observing a multitude of different snapshots of cohort coach experiences during the program,[12] notably the testimonials.

But we witnessed this firsthand repeatedly when supporting the coaches – coaching the coaches, as it were –  addressing these cruxes often contributed to the type of emotional resilience that’s necessary to sustain progress in this.

Both myself and Emily conducted one-to-one sessions with each member of the cohort at least once every two weeks.[13] These sessions typically focused on one or more emotional or intellectual cruxes related to coaching development.[14] 

In some cases, getting enough resolution on emotional cruxes allowed cohort coaches to execute on a new set of things that previously went unrealized, or seemed out of reach. In other cases, it was a perspectival shift that allowed them to find a more direct line to purpose. In others, it facilitated realizations that  actually coaching should occupy a different role in their lives than they originally hoped or expected. 
 

It’s interesting because our methodological choice to emphasize attending to each coach’s set of idiosyncratic cruxes colors my opinion about things that didn’t quite go according to plan.

Among the things that didn’t go according to plan with this pilot, our estimates for how client acquisition would unfold were off on the order of weeks to months. Some coaches didn’t reach the client load goals they’d set during the program.

We saw compelling demand for the matchmaking service (110 applications from May – December 2023),[15] but the protracted logistics of matchmaking clients with coaches meant that cohort coaches built client bases more slowly than anticipated.[16]

But the relative peace that cohort coaches seem to reflect on falling short of their quantitative goals strikes me as some indication of the high value the cohort coaches place on their TBCT experience.[17]

And if you’d have asked me prior to launching the program whether I’d find it problematic that several of the coaches didn’t meet their client acquisition and revenue goals, I’d have wondered whether something significant went wrong.

But reflecting on this now, while we did pick up perspective-shifting lessons in this, I’m grateful that we made the choice to emphasize the deeper aspects of becoming a coach, letting things unfold as they had, rather than pushing for numerical targets and adhering to project management deadlines.[18]

A few reasons why I say this: for one, I get the sense that the cohort coaches themselves saw both the immediate and long-term benefits of working through deep cruxes, in this case related to attracting and acquiring clients. While it may not have resulted in client numbers on timelines they’d hoped, the coaches seem to see the value in stronger medium- to long-term positioning.

Second, Emily and I were fortunate enough to learn about client acquisition on both the individual and macro levels. As this relates to things not going to plan, disentangling what seems to have happened for individual coaches within a system TBCT designed was an incredibly valuable learning experience.

For instance, in some cases, coaches missed targets because I misjudged timelines for how things would unfold. In other cases, coaches missed targets for reasons that were more about themselves than about the program. In some interesting cases, coaches’ struggles with how client acquisition worked within this specific TBCT system (proximity to familiar competitors) caused issues. Most of the time, there were multiple contributing factors.[19] Getting to the bottom of it all was challenging and fun.

And finally – I might have mentioned this earlier – our highest-level aim for cohort coaches was to accelerate the decision-making process regarding what role coaching would have in their lives. For about half of the cohort, hitting client acquisition numbers was often deprioritized relative to other things they cared about.[20]

To me, at least, given all of the moving parts happening simultaneously within TBCT, my overall sense is nonetheless still that supporting cohort coaches with emotional cruxes that surfaced in response to encountered adversity was the highest leverage tack we could have taken for their development.

I would say that getting a sense of how these quantifiable goals unfold in practice, and having a better sense of how I’d interpret it all in this context, there’s a fair amount I intend to do differently next time around.

Hopefully that’s an interesting window into how our approach came into contact with reality, and how our philosophy of approach influences our interpretations about what happened.

Learn More – Choose your own Odyssey #5

Tee: “Any questions from others? I’d like to make sure that anyone who wants to ask a question gets the chance.”

1) Audience member: “How was the experience for you, Tee, personally? I’d be curious to hear about what it was like to run something like this from your perspective.” (Listen to Tee’s verbal overview of the Tee’s Experience section)

2) Audience member: “What were the curriculum classes? (Or ‘modules’ as you called them)” Emily gives a verbal overview of the TBCT Curriculum Module Catalog) 

3) Tee Says: “Well it seems like there aren’t any more questions, so that’s a wrap! I’d like to thank all of you for joining us. It means a lot to us that you’d show up here to hear how the first cycle of TBCT went. On the screen, I’ll put up a few links in case you’d like to read in more detail!”  (read response directly below)

[Tee passes along a link to a report filled with results and reflections about TBCT] 

Most of what I spoke about covers the first part of the write up, but other sections might be interesting to you as well. You can see specific stats on the cohort in the TBCT by the numbers section, including some contextualizing notes that I have about the numbers.

The Tee’s Experience and Emily’s Experience sections are more informal windows into our respective personal experiences with the TBCT program.

There’s an Open Questions about coaching, the industry & craft section where we outline some of the juiciest open questions and richest areas of exploration related to what we do.

And finally, the rest of the write up includes takes that we feel different audiences may be interested to read. This includes:

Thanks for being a great audience. I appreciated getting to tell you all about it. Please reach out to me at tee@teebarnett.com if you’d like to chat more.

Background on Tee & TBCT

I’m Tee – you can learn much more about my work as a ‘personal strategist’ coach here. In June of 2023, we launched the first cycle of an experimental program to train life coaches called Tee Barnett Coaching Training (TBCT). A cohort of 9 participants participated in a coaching matchmaking service with paying clients and went through this 6-month program to get clarity on what role coaching could have in their lives.

Among other primary aims, we’d hoped to learn whether this sort of program was the way to scale a high-trust and high-quality network of coaches. A great future scenario is one where much of this network concentrates on working with individuals trying to do good in the world.

TBCT by the numbers

This section contains stats from quantitative tracking of the cohort coaches’ performance and progression from June – December of 2023.[21] See the Interpreting the numbers section for commentary and contextualizing information.

– Section Table of Contents – 

All Stats

Cohort Progress

Cohort Activity

Cohort Coach Performance

Aggregated and averaged across all cohort coaches from June – December 2023[26]


Matchmaking numbers 

6-7 coaches – Tee feels confident will be coaches at least part-time and / or incorporate coaching into their future work (e.g. senior-level management of others at a grantmaking foundation)

Interpreting the numbers

What’s next

By Tee Barnett

The TBCT Curriculum Module Catalog

Authored by Emily Crotteau with light edits from Tee

Here’s a thread of testimonials from the cohort coaches that mention the curriculum module (Same thread on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn)

Emily’s Experience

By Emily Crotteau

For those who navigated here via Choose your own Odyssey #2, you’ll have the opportunity to jump back to the fireside chat after each subsection in Emily’s Experience.
 

– Goals for the program– 

When Tee originally looped me in to helping with the program, it was primarily as a behind-the-scenes support person for him. I didn't have a role, a title, or a plan for getting to know the participants.

As that changed, over those early weeks and months into what was effectively a high-touch, full-time position, neither Tee nor myself could have been more surprised. For me, the program proved to be an unlooked-for portal into a space where a lot of my latent hopes and wishes for creating and participating in a reciprocally self-improving community could be realized. It consistently felt less like working, more like freely giving ideas, inspiration, and capacities I already had on hand and hadn't realized could be put to such good use. I credit this to Tee's design of the program and the eagerness of the participants to immerse themselves in the skills, considerations, ethos, and active practice of coaching. What I was able to offer the program was as much a function of how everyone else showed up as my own starting position.

Because of this unique organically "found" situation, I experienced the program as an opportunity to organize and offer a lot of resources for facilitating growth and learning — ultimately through the curriculum design and modules, as well as 1-1 meetings with participants. A lot of these "course materials" had the benefit of being able to be self-applied — as individuals faced challenges throughout the program – and also brought into coaching sessions as tools. This flexibility and redundancy allowed any new learning to be explored from the inside view ("how does this help me?") and in a coaching context ("how can this be adapted to my client's unique situation?"). There were enough concrete components and external measures of progress that I trusted people's transformational work to stay grounded in practical results, so I was able to focus my contributions on what is timely and useful: what are the individual and shared needs coming up in the program, and how can my teaching and 1-1 meetings facilitate the best outcomes I see on the table? It is extremely unusual to be able to offer this degree of fine-tuning, and I was so pleased and so impressed to see how well people took to it. Coaching is fundamentally about interacting skillfully and constructively with the deep dimensionality of human existence, and I felt the program was able to help people connect with and lean into their own deep dimensionality and that of others.

[ Continue the fireside chat by jumping back to Program Design – Choose your own Odyssey #2 ]

– Goals for the curriculum – 

In the same spirit of my overall involvement in the program, the curriculum I ended up running felt like it emerged from the melting pot of needs, interests, and desires that everyone brought to the program. Originally, the plan was for each participant to have their own curriculum that they pursued in parallel, but it quickly became clear that there were enough overlaps between these personal curricula that it would enhance the overall program to offer its own classes (called "modules") to help meet these shared needs. I drafted an initial 15 module ideas, each attempting to plant a flag somewhere on the map of "coaching-related topics" where I suspected we’d find a lot of learning opportunities based on what I already knew about the participants. These ranged from the directly practical "Structuring a Session" to the more ethically and epistemically nuanced "Coaching and Spirituality". I expected modules would only take a relatively small amount of participants' overall time, but the sign-ups were so enthusiastic that we ended up running 12 out of the 15 modules total, and they became one of the important hearth fires at the heart of the program.

What happened in the modules? Ultimately, they were about grappling with the realities of being a person, of interacting with another person, of trying to do so in a beneficial way. We covered important arcs in the history of psychology, frameworks for communication and human development, methods of introspection, and ways coaching can bridge to other domains like bodywork or meditation. In different ways depending on the topic at hand, a central purpose of the modules was to provide participants with resources to help them contextualize their individual journeys of becoming coaches within the long and multi-stranded history of people growing in their capacity to care for one another — a perennial theme! This brought an educational aspect and rigor to the design of the modules that many found unexpectedly intellectually stimulating, but which I think is an important part of being able to take ourselves seriously as coaches.

In addition to this, many of the modules were designed to interface directly with participant's evolving coaching practices, either as a source of reference examples and things to troubleshoot, or as a platform for trying out techniques. This added to the level of integration, cross-talk, and multi-layered support that the program was attempting to offer.

Engagement with the modules was completely optional, but the majority of participants attended five or more, many on top of already busy schedules. I think this reflects a level of hunger, interest, and desire for depth that the program was initially not anticipating, but which we were fortunate to have the flexibility to respond to meet. One cost of this flexibility was that my summer schedule became thoroughly consumed with running, planning, and following up on modules, a more chaotic and just-in-time delivery than might have been ideal. With that experience behind me, and all of the concrete content from the modules themselves, I feel like there's a huge wealth of partially-worked material that could be transformed into a better-paced, more comprehensive, and more well-sign-posted coaching course program. I imagine this already and hope it's able to happen.

[ Continue the fireside chat by jumping back to Program Design – Choose your own Odyssey #2 ]

– What was hard – 

Are we doing enough? Are they asking too much? Is it ok to give this much? These were questions that regularly overshadowed Tee and my conversations throughout the program. In truth, we didn't know. Our experience as coaches had given us both a thorough sense of how much is possible when people are invited into a space that supports their capacity to change. We'd made this invitation, but there is a difference between holding a transformational space for someone in a 2-hour coaching session and holding one for a group over the course of six months. For us it was a trial of energy management, integrity, and clear communication.

We pushed people. We missed opportunities to push people. We held concerns, listened and responded. We dropped balls, lost threads. It was an extremely human and humanizing process. Participants struggled, from challenges arising in the program and their lives beyond, and while we'd anticipated struggling, of course we couldn't anticipate all the specific forms the struggles would take or the specifics of timing. We had bad weeks. We had extraordinary weeks, meetings that left us glowing, left us wanting to keep doing more of this and better versions for the rest of our lives. Sometimes it felt like too much, too high-touch for the ambiguity of participants’ commitments and life plans. Sometimes it felt like I’d finally discovered what I wanted to be doing for the rest of my life.

What are the ethics of transformation-focused relationships? What are the ethics of investing in people? Ultimately relationships involve energy exchange, even when financially mediated. This comes up in coaching, but the pattern of bounding energy exchange in coaching relationships is more well-established than the pattern within a program like this. I consider all of the participants friends. I hope to hear from them all over the months and years to come and hope we can continue to enrich each other's lives. Realistically, though, I would not be surprised if that didn't happen. I expect some people to choose different paths, or for communication to naturally fall off. It's hard to feel these things simultaneously, hard to separate the long-term and short-term dimensions of mutual meaning-making. Teachers and parents, I imagine, feel similarly.

For the months of the program, we came together as a community. In my life, long-term transformational community has been a deep and enduring goal, and I inevitably threaded that wish into my involvement with the program — even though the time-boundedness of the structure we'd built meant that there would be a natural dissolution point at the end. Looking back on it a few months out, I feel so curious and so grabbed by the question of what a longer-term implementation of a community fostering a similar spirit could look like. I feel like I got to taste it here and also to feel viscerally how much work and thoughtfulness a more sustainable version would take. For me then, I’d say the most challenging theme of the program was this tension — between what I already trust myself to offer and create in a local coaching setting and some version of transformational, even visionary, community that could plausibly last.

[ Continue the fireside chat by jumping back to Program Design – Choose your own Odyssey #2 ]

Open questions about coaching, the industry & craft

Co-authored by Tee & Emily

Additional takes for various audiences

These additional sections are meant to be of interest to specific audiences. Most of what’s written is a product of learnings, experiences and impressions from the first TBCT cohort in 2023.

Takes for prospective and current coaches

This section includes thoughts related to being an individual practitioner and the landscape of coaching. Interested readers can hopefully bring generalized forms of this to bear on themselves and their own circumstances.

Takes for Program designers of similar ilk

Takes for Funders, patrons & the community-conscious

By Tee

Takes for self-improvers, clients, & those serious about self-development

By Tee Barnett

The mixture of thoughts for this audience can be described as my takes that have been strengthened by my experience training coaches at TBCT.

Tee’s Experience

Leading this section with juicier things that could hopefully serve as inspiration for others. You can find gratitude and acknowledgements further down.

Cohort Feedback for TBCT

Section Table of Contents

What could have been better

By Tee Barnett

My distilled thoughts on what I believe could have been better are already woven throughout the report, such as misjudging client commitment and revenue timelines, but below is an additional non-exhaustive list comprised of feedback that I consider important to document and think through for future iterations of TBCT:[40]

Cohort Testimonials for TBCT

Names are displayed prior to testimonials for ease of navigation and recognition. Names ordered in alphabetical order by first name.


– Anna Weldon, Director of Internal Operations at Open Philanthropy Project

“ It is clear that TBCT is a passion project, and Emily and Tee brought immense amounts of care and investment to their work. They brought together a diverse and brilliant cohort of coaches and gave us scaffolded support to practice our craft. Tee and Emily's approach was deeply invested, focused on getting and giving feedback, flexible to the individual, and thoughtful.

I personally benefited greatly from the program. Getting an opportunity to dig into theory and technique, conversations as a group and in our 1:1's, and having time on the calendar to dedicate to this aspect of my work were all incredibly helpful to my growth.

I sincerely hope there are more cohorts and that other people have the opportunity to learn from other coaches, focus on their craft, and connect with Tee and Emily and their wisdom. "

– Harri Besceli

" TBCT made it much easier for me to get set up as a coach. Being able to source potential clients through the programme made it much easier to get started, as well as providing a learning environment where we could get stuck straight in.

One of my favourite aspects of the programme was being part of a cohort - being with a group of people on a similar journey to myself. I found the cohort very supportive, and a great opportunity for learning from other people, and I expect that I would have both learnt a lot less and enjoyed myself a lot less without the cohort.
 

I also found Tee and Emily incredibly supportive, and found there to be a great balance of providing both default structure and room for crafting one's own journey.
 

Coaching is an industry/ practice which people can be critical of, for both good reasons and bad. I really liked that the programme engaged with a lot of the more complex questions around coaching head-on. I both found this pretty refreshing, and helped me develop a much more nuanced conception of what coaching, or what good coaching, is.
 

The programme involved a pretty deep level of personal exploration and got me thinking deeply on questions like: What do I stand for? What is it to support someone else? What is it to be the best version of oneself? I both found this both challenging and rewarding. In a sense, asked a lot more from me and gave a lot more to me than probably any other programme I've been part of. "

– Harry Taussig

" If you want to become a coach, that shit's hard.

I couldn't have done this alone. I couldn't have done this, and trust that it would feel aligned, without people I trusted as much as Tee and Emily — people who deeply care, and have a similar worldview to me.

I couldn't have done this without a team of collaborators and friends doing it along my side.

There's a ton of fears that come up for everyone in the process to becoming a coach, or even just becoming self-employed, marketing yourself, or selling your presence for an hourly rate. All very vulnerable things to do.

I could have gotten stuck at 10+. different places. Making my website, having my first session with a paid client, having first sessions with friends, imposter syndrome etc.

But instead of being alone, I saw a bunch of other coaches in training going through and sharing about the exact same problems, and I had the support of Tee and Emily who have both been through it and seen a lot more shit than me.

And so all the fear was still there, and I was able to move through all of it to feel good about aiming for coaching full time now, and feeling good about that.

------

The biggest thing is that the structure and the logistics of the program as solid as hell. Tee and Emily tell you and help you figure out how to present yourself, how to get your first clients, etc. The centralizing marketing is huge for overcoming the fear of working with your first paid client. People know your a coach in training, and you only need internal marketing competing with the 8 other coaches in training instead of the whole entire world.

Emily's curriculum and modules were perspective-shifting and have seriously changed how I view myself, my relationships, and the world. Especially around emotions and embodiment.

------

This shit is hard. Most people in this program went through a depressive episode, including me. Good luck trying to do this alone. Emily is super compassionate and coached me through a lot of my pain and shit that I came up, as coaching others opened me up to my own problems, trauma, pain, whatever you want to call it.

If you're in the EA / rationalist space, there's not a better bet. People are hungry for this shit because it's important and needed, especially with how fucked up both our culture and our subculture is.

-------

It's not perfect, but there's a ton of love, support, direction, leadership, and effort being put in here. Radically changed my life for the better, and I feel stabilized and excited on my path to self-employment and coaching. "

– Jana Meixnerová

" TBCT was an invaluable experience for both my nascent coaching practice and my personal development. The intensive program methodically combined a state-of-art coaching, psychology curriculum, and an intimate learning environment, with an experiential deep dive into coaching under close to real-world market conditions. Growing up to the challenge meant I had to get over my insecurities, learn the basics of the craft and start applying them in a relatively short amount of time. This was not easy but I was wonderfully supported by Emily Crotteau, Tee Barnett, and the rest of the cohort.

Emily is a brilliant thinker and scholar with a depth and breath of knowledge rare to find among coaches (or elsewhere for that matter). She designed and led the spectacular TBCT curriculum modules whose cross- and inter-disciplinary scope reached far beyond the standard coaching theory. These modules, as well as Emily's takes and worldviews, greatly expanded my knowledge on many diverse topics and, perhaps most importantly, aided my own personal self-inquiry. Beyond her impressive scholastic aptitude, Emily is a highly sensitive and compassionate coach and body worker. The coaching sessions with her have reached into the depths of my Heart and soul.
 

Tee is a fantastic coach and a kind, supportive mentor. I've greatly appreciated his conscientiousness and rigor, the structure and organization he breathed into the program, and how clearly he communicated his expectations and held us all to a high standard. Tee's openness and vulnerability with the cohort at all times was truly remarkable as he shared with us his smooth and elegant coaching moves, his experiences, his humor, and his business acumen insights. Coaching sessions with Tee were deeply transformational for me and an essential aspect of my developmental journey as a coach.

The cohort stood out to me as incredibly diverse, with the aspiring coaches hauling from all walks of life and bringing different talents, motivations and visions, yet everyone was brilliant and showed up with authenticity, determination, and grit. This enabled us to learn from each other and form an ecosystem of coaches where each of us was encouraged to find our own unique coaching style and target audience. I formed new unexpected friendships and collaborations that I look forward to nurturing going into the future.

Overall, the TBCT program challenged and supported me in my professional and spiritual quest to realize my vocation, helped me understand what it really meant to be a coach, and accelerated my journey beyond what I thought was possible.

What I appreciated most of all, however, were the purity of intention and love with which Tee and Emily infused the program: Embodying the transformational and healing powers, proactively envisioning and building a better world for our communities, genuinely doing good and alleviating suffering right where it originates deep inside the human soul, those were all at the core of our conversations. I think there is immense potential for TBCT bringing more integrated developmental practices and more wholeness into the EA community, which can often be overly mind-focused, disembodied, and efficiency/hustle-oriented. I look forward to supporting TBCT going forward! "

– Milan Patel
 

" The TBCT programme has been simply transformational for my life, worldview and coaching practice.
 

On many different levels and across a rich array of domains, Tee Barnett and Emily Crotteau have led this programme with grace, excellence and love. I am astounded by the scale and quality of what has been achieved in just the 6 months of the pilot program; TBCT was an Odyssey into the development of ourselves and coaching crafts at the deepest and richest levels.
 

The TBCT programme surpassed all of my initial conceptions of what coaching is, what is possible within it, and what it means to embark on a journey to becoming a deeply skilled coach. A journey into the self and Theory of Mind. The heart of this excellence was an incredibly mind-expanding and spiritually nourishing learning curriculum led by Emily. Her breadth and depth of knowledge related to development spanned domains such as psychology, sociology, philosophy, psychotherapy, spirituality, epistemology, rationality, phenomenology, plus so much more that is simply inadequate for the recognisable 'neat domain containers'. TBCT possesed a quality of creativity, rigour and passion similar to what I’d imagine a Stoic school of Philosophy would have, with a Major in 'Applied Wisdom of Coaching'. TBCT has left a lasting impression of immense profoundness and respect.
 

Tee and Emily are masterful coaching trainers. They guided us with the poise, love and capability that any skilled craftsman has, plus added dimensions of meta-modelling and playing many roles: Despite competing interests and multidimensional challenges to deliver TBCT, they had this phenomenal capability to 'hold many containers'. For each of us on the cohort, Tee and Emily deeply recognised each of our unique circumstances, 'meeting us where we were at', in our journey’s Odyssey, and then empowered us to meaningfully show up, embrace the depths of our experience, and grow through it. It was a superheroic feat for two people. Together as coaching trainers, Emily and Tee brought together many elements like skilful composers bringing together a symphonic masterpiece. It was beautiful to experience.
 

As trainers, Emily and Tee truly went above and beyond for the cohort. Their presence wasn’t overwhelming, nor was it distant. It was gentle but strong, like a deeply reassuring current of wisdom and energy that could be continuously felt. This was my source of inspiration and encouragement to fully immerse myself in the programme; to embrace this journey’s Odyssey of learning the craft of skillful coaching. They are world-class exemplars of how to lead and support others on a rich and visceral development journey. Tee and Emily have set an extremely high bar for other serious coaching and development programmes out there. It has simply left me in awe of what they have achieved.
 

As individuals, Emily and Tee are both master coaches and deeply kind humans. The sorts that go about their business with utmost humility given their astonishing brilliance. Their sharpness of mind, embodiment of virtue, and repertoire of coaching modalities were phenomenal to witness. I have never met two individuals with such depth: In empathy, intellectual rigour, perceptiveness, playfulness, love and generosity. It's hard to describe in words to do it justice. I simply regard them in very high esteem, for these virtues and their manifestations through TBCT.
 

Tee, Emily, you have my deepest gratitude, admiration and support. What you have done in pioneering TBCT, and what you are planning to grow the programme is a visionary and noble quest. I have first-hand experienced how deeply you have supported each of us to grow, and I am excited for many more future cohorts, to experience and benefit from this visceral bounty too. I see an intensely bright future for you both and for TBCT. I wish you all the best!

In summary, it’s fair to conclude that Tee and Emily are those rare kinds of luminaries that you would be lucky to encounter once in a lifetime. I feel extremely grateful to have learnt from them both and for sharing this journey with them.
 

Because of TBCT, I feel emotionally, spiritually, and cognitively enriched, and more beyond what intellectualisation can do justice. TBCT has imparted an immense bounty of wisdom, revealed a plethora of phenomena underneath the surface of our perceptions, and shown the possibilities that beauty and love provide in our shared lived experiences. TBCT has deepened my respect for skilled advisors, mentors and practitioners healing and developing others. TBCT has directly illuminated a path within me, to deeply support others in meaningful ways. Thank you for this very rare and special experience, that has left a deeply positive and lasting impression in my life, and the many others I hope to help. "

– Natalia Dashan
 

" Talking about Tee’s coaching program with the people in my life has been pleasantly difficult. The way that the program made an effort to build on the best of disparate social and teaching arrangements meant that it was difficult to describe in ways that represented what it was; people often didn’t have a reference frame for something like it being able to exist. Tee and Emily wanted to make something new and wonderful, and they each have a resume filled with many life experiences, such that when they are building something new, it actually is new. And that meant that most conversations about TBCT went like this: “I’m in this pilot program. It’s an experiment and it’s very wonderful. There is nothing quite like it.” It doesn’t feel like going out on a limb to say that it was one of the most formative intellectual and social experiences of my life.
 

If I make a bold statement like that, it would be natural for the next question to be, “What made it like that?” Several things. One is the genuine friendship between Tee and Emily, and the ways they are able to work together. One is their genuine care for people’s development – meeting people where they’re at isn’t a goal for them, but rather is a prerequisite under which they build more things. Thus the place that most people end up, if they are lucky, is the place where they start. One is a genuine respect for the ways that people learn and grow, and genuine commitment to building a program with both the structure and flexibility to provide support even as the participants learn and bring their own experiences and outside learning into the program. Instead of having people “phase out” as they develop, there was built-in intention to accommodate this advancement and give further guidance for the participant.
 

Those seeking a technical challenge would not be underwhelmed by TBCT. Those who care about spiritual well-being or a grand picture would also not be underwhelmed. No question seems to be too technically minute or too expansive to be considered with care, and understanding about how the large ripples down and the small ripples up has been in the priority lens of Tee and Emily for many years.
 

I’d conducted PhD-level work at the Yale and Harvard psychology departments, with a serious eye toward staying in academia, and I found this work to be intense and rigorous.
 

I had also worked at the Harvard Business school, and had taken the internally beloved Interpersonal Dynamics course at the Yale School of Management. With these intellectually important experiences and standards in mind, I continued my search for psychology experts as I navigated my professional and social circles.

The work of Tee Barnett and Emily Crotteau does not merely meet the standards of my previous work experiences – they surpass it. Their constant observation and learning means that they will continue to be hard for any entity to keep up with! I am very confident when I say that Tee and Emily are truly world class. "

– Pavitthra Pandurangan
 

" Neither Tee or Emily flinch from complexity, confusion, or conflict. They are even-keeled, thoughtful, and highly compassionate, which makes them excellent as leaders. They are also wonderful as teachers and guides. Throughout the program I had the distinct feeling of being in good hands.
 

Emily is highly knowledgable about coaching, and is amongst the greatest thinkers I’ve met in my life. She weaves together strands from therapy, development, spirituality, philosophy, phenomenology, somatic therapy & bodywork, societal dynamics, and science with ease. I walk away from every class and conversation with her with novel insight and whole new angles. Without exaggeration, interacting with her is mind expanding.
 

Tee is a great executor as well as coach. He is well-planned and thorough, in addition to be flexible as unforeseen situations arise. He conveys intentions and expectations with clarity and in advance. He brings a high level of rigor to coaching, which is bar-raising in the best way. His emphasis on creating feedback loops for learning has certainly accelerated my own development.
 

Tee and Emily managed to attract an incredible group of people, all ripe with coaching potential and full of interest for the subject. The quality of the cohort was one of the most enriching parts of being in TBCT.
 

The past few months in TBCT were intense and deeply rewarding. It plunged me into the world of coaching with a speed, depth and rigor that I imagine is rare amongst coaching programs. I was encouraged to form my own style of coaching and a custom curriculum. Both were tall orders for a complete beginner, but I am better off for it. TBCT is a true coaching accelerator: I accomplished in a matter of months what could have taken two years.
 

My personal development was also greatly affected by being part of this program. The theory and techniques I learned through classes, books, and conversations (not to mention the coaching sessions themselves) empowered me to develop parts of myself that no previous technique could reach. I also have better conversations and relationships as a direct result of learning to be a coach.

I hope TBCT continues to raise the bar on coaching and unleash untapped or misdirected human potential. It is impossible to experience this program and not be imprinted with the incredible transformative power of a *great* coach. "

– Signe Savén, Coach & PhD student in philosophy @ Lund University
 

" Applying for TBTC turned out to be one of the best things I did in 2023. I believe that it would have taken me at least a couple of years to level up to the extent that the program helped me achieve in about six months (and some things might never have happened without it). The experience of coaching different people, the program modules and the external programs played a major part in this, as did the relationships with the other cohort coaches that developed throughout the program and the constant support from Tee and Emily.

The program helped me become a much better coach, not by overloading me with input (e.g. coaching tools and readings etc., though it provided plenty of those), but by helping me become a better me. Emily’s modules played a key part in my development by providing me with a few key insights that I took with me and allowed to transform my world. Her one-on-one support helped me navigate through the program and through a difficult personal time. I’m impressed with the width of her knowledge and skills, and she is one of few people that I would call wise. She has helped open up a whole new world to me and encouraged me to take steps on paths I didn’t think I would walk on. Tee’s feedback and his way of engaging with me throughout the program has also played a key part in my development. I learned a lot from a bit of friction that arose between us because we dared to address it and Tee continued to push me through it even though it was uncomfortable. I have deep faith in his communication skills and I’ve come to trust him to be honest with me, which has made me more comfortable to experiment, and this has helped me to learn more quickly. I’m impressed with Tee’s ability to see the best in me and my work and grateful for all the work he has been doing to help me bring forth more of it. My fellow cohort coaches also played a key part in the development I went through, whether it was in terms of pointing out something important, sending something my way that I really needed at that time, showing up for an exploratory adventure or letting me give them my gifts. Most importantly, they showed up to co-create a retreat experience that was transformative and that could not have happened without them. For that, I will be forever grateful.
 

TBCT offers something rare. It’s an interesting mixture of structure and freedom, of intention and adventure, of science and spirituality. To my understanding, the first version of the program was intended to be a trellis for coaches in training, and it’s fair to say that it was. But it was more than that. It was a playground where it was safe and fun to play and learn in ways that impact the world positively. And it was a community of people who supported each other’s growth and cared for each other’s well-being, and who wanted to help others. I feel blessed to have been a part of the first cohort and I hope that the program continues to grow and evolve so that it can play an even larger role in increasing the well-being of this world. "

Acknowledgements

You can find my in-depth gratitude for participating contributors to the program in the Tee's Experience section. 

My sincere thanks to those who took the time to leave comments and give me their impressions of this piece. I'm still struck by their generosity in doing that. 

Thank you's include alphabetically by first name: Adam Tury, Amber Damn, Anna Weldon, Charlie Rogers-Smith, Elliot Billingsley, Damon Pourtahmaseb-Sasi, Harry Taussig, Ivan Burduk, Isabella Baquerizo (illustrations!), Johnson Hsieh, Kaj Sotala, Kerry Vaughan, Milan Patel, Natalia Dashan, Olof Fägerstam, Paul Rhode, Pavitthra Pandurangan, Rajeev Ram, Sebastian Schmidt (noted philosophical reservations), Sicong Shen, Signe Saven, Tyler Alterman

(If I've missed anyone, please do let me know!) 
 

  1. ^

    We went with “Choose your own Odyssey” instead of “adventure” because each section could jump off the page by meaningfully affecting your real life. Our program also often invoked the language of “odyssey” to depict the type of journeys of development and personal growth that all of us embark(ed) on

  2. ^

     More of my personal reflections on my experience of the program in the Tee’s Experience section

  3. ^

     When I refer to the group of participating cohort coaches, it’s safe to say that I’m not always claiming that each of them had the same experience, or always shared the same sentiment. In most cases, I’ll specify the rough amount of coaches I’m speaking about. Otherwise, you can assume more general statements about the cohort are referring to most or nearly all participants, not always accounting for outliers.

  4. ^

     These designations aren’t clear-cut because there are several pathways to becoming a coach, where the intensity of commitment and final decision can be staked to how things seem to go when trying it out (i.e. leaning into good feedback). Therefore, cleanly categorizing where people stand on this is tricky.

    To my knowledge, there was only one instance where a person had their heart set on being a coach full-time, but was disappointed when ultimately ending up not seeing how that could work out for them. I've confirmed with this coach that they don't hold the program primarily responsible for this, however.

     

  5. ^

     Natalia Dashan, one of the cohort coaches, wrote up her own account of what each of the modules were like that she attended.

  6. ^

     Her partner James Dama also delivered a handful of module sessions, and I’m told played an important role in the formulation of the modules by Emily. Tee also participated in running module sessions.

  7. ^

     Tee: Oh yeah, I can appreciate how my description could be a bit abstract. As examples, in some cases that meant grappling with: 
     
    • Coaches can understandably get caught up in various ways outlined in the Open questions about coaching, the industry & craft section 

    • Complexity and conflictedness underlying “can I actually help anyone this way?” and / or “who am I to presume helping people in this way?” Also “how do I feel morally about being paid to help people with real problems while I’m still not very good at this?”

    • Knotty moral questions related to trying to make a living by providing this level of intimate care (e.g. "how can I make a steady income without having people consistently depend on me?" or "how do I not let the desire for income cloud my judgements about their care (duration)?") 

    • Whether coaching / therapy fulfills a vital role in society, and what it means about society if it does

    • Conceptions, models and ethics around ‘change’ and ‘growth’. (e.g. "am I simply playing off of people's insecurities in order to have them pay me for something so that they can 'get better'?") 

    • Settling their own lives and emotional states enough to be able to hold space and help others (e.g. "it's hard to consistently show up for somebody else when I have different things affecting me in my own life.") 

     

    [ Resume the fireside chat ] 

     

  8. ^

     That’s not to say self-discovery outside of the mission / work isn’t worthwhile. That kind of inner work is quite valuable too. But purpose can serve as an enduring touchstone to inform and modulate inner work. Without it, appropriately scoping inner work is a big challenge.

  9. ^

     A concrete example of this is the spiritually taxing experience of working with others based on a model of change / growth that you only half-heartedly, unexaminedly, or don’t any longer,  believe to be true or moral (e.g. a productivity coach that specializes in building elaborate technical systems no longer believing that technical systems are the main ‘hinge’ or intervention point for improving productivity)

  10. ^

     In many cases, personal growth insights attained along a mission-focused path also generalize to other domains of experience. For example, Nonviolent Communication (NVC)-informed improvements to one’s communication in management that can be useful for personal relationships.

  11. ^

     You might not be surprised to hear that the process of figuring out how to present oneself as a person who provides this type of care as a practitioner can lead to perceptual tangles of all sorts. It touches on how and what you think about so many things. To name a few: your identity, your capabilities, how the world works, how change and growth is supposed to work, etc.

    As shorthand, I’ve been calling these tangles “emotional cruxes” though cognition and other things play an important role.

    Along the journey of becoming a coach, unaddressed emotional cruxes can make it quite difficult to even make initial progress. Nearly all of our coaches found that authoring a few paragraph bio about themselves and their offering was an emotionally fraught endeavor.

    In not-so-bad circumstances, neglecting emotional cruxes leads to delays in getting set up. In the worst of circumstances, people never make it, or commit long-term to personas that don’t sit well with themselves and / or those they aspire to serve.

    A quick example – under pressure to make a living, coaches can stake too much of their offering to concepts and competencies that they have as they currently understand them. (e.g. various conceptions of ‘put-togetherness,’ or particular approaches to productivity and efficiency). Defining the offering too narrowly can make it difficult to evolve. In extreme cases, people are stumping for things they no longer believe in largely because so much of their livelihood is staked to it.

    What happens when you have an experience that fundamentally changes your understanding of what it means to be productive? How about a realization that productivity, as you previously understood it, isn’t the way to being the way you want to be?

    These are some of the ways that internal emotional cruxes can compromise aspiring coaches in the short-, medium- and long-term.

    [Resume the fireside chat]
     

  12. ^

     We also got snapshots of the cohort coaches’ experience via feedback surveys about the program from coaches, feedback about coaches from clients, client outcomes, exit calls, rich testimonials and the final presentations. Nearly all of the coaches closed out the program by delivering a final presentation that we called a “celebration of odyssey”, which included their account of what it was like for them to move through the program, what they take from it, and what effects it had on their lives.

  13. ^

     As will be documented many times throughout this report, Emily was integral to making this program happen. There’s perhaps no better display than the parts of the testimonials with nothing but glowing things to say about Emily and her efforts.

  14. ^

     The curriculum modules also encouraged the surfacing of emotional cruxes and attempted to provide tools and a setting for working through them. 

    Actual example of crux brought by a cohort coach: “I’m scared to ask my clients for an hourly rate increase and I feel conflicted about if/how to do that. Because of what little confidence I had in being able to coach others in the beginning, I only asked for the bare minimum hourly rate ($50/hr.). After a couple of months, I’ve since realized that this rate is unsustainable and that my coaching is worth much more.”

  15. ^

     With the primary wave of applications coming on August 1 of 2023, it meant that actually most client commitments were taking place in late August, September, and even October.

    This had the effect of ramping up the volume of sessions for most coaches during the final third of the program, rather than the middle third. Some coaches felt that they were finally well-positioned with client acquisition just as the program was winding down.

  16. ^

     Logistical complexity that extended the client decision-making process included the exchange of introductory emails, setting up introductory calls with multiple coaches, and decision-making time between coaches, and informing coaches who were not chosen (where applicable).

    It could also have been very well be the case that the matchmaking pool was less committal than a prospective client reaching out to a single coach individually.  

  17. ^

    In most cases, cohort coaches missed their client and revenue targets by ~30 – 50%.

    These could be seen as big misses. The gap between our expectations and what actually happened in this space is large enough to take a very close look at, especially when setting expectations next time around. 

    On the other hand, I probably don't need to expound very much in the inexact science of getting new freelance coaches up-and-running with paid clients. 

  18. ^

     Though I’d wager the level of quantitative tracking and emphasis on multiple forms of reflection and guided feedback was on par with some therapist training programs

  19. ^

     On brand with how TBCT prizes getting clarity on what happened no matter the outcome, explanations for client acquisition outcomes ranged from being a function of how the pipeline was designed, how coaches and clients reacted to the design of the pipeline, circumstances and dynamics between the coaches and prospective clients, and purely coach-side emotional cruxes that needed to be worked through.

    A quick example – the competition dynamics engendered by the matchmaking service were quite activating for some cohort coaches, but others spiraled pretty quickly if they were not chosen by clients. A fine-grained interaction is required to get a viable interpretation as to why each of the coaches reacted so differently.

  20. ^

     In addition, cohort coaches establishing foundational aspects of their practice hamstrung client acquisition efforts. Disclarity in what’s being offered and how it could be offered was responsible for some number of hangups in execution. Some coaches crafted optimistic client acquisition targets for the purposes of training and getting in session repetitions, while at the same time puzzling over deeper questions related to their practice. For one or two coaches, setting loose targets while still entertaining this career path as a whole contributed to lower numbers.

  21. ^

     All numbers in this section were reported and verified by the coaches themselves. These numbers are best interpreted as nearby approximations. Reporting can be tricky due to the shifting status of clients, reliance on coaches’ record keeping, etc. The original plan was to have a centralized system that tracked these metrics automatically on Coda, but it proved inconvenient for many of the coaches to use and the coaches were encouraged to use whichever means of tracking their practice felt most effective for them.

  22. ^

     Here is the presentation worksheet outlining what coaches were to present in their Celebrations of Odyssey

  23. ^

     Program timelines are the second image in the Program Design section

  24. ^

     Not to be confused with currently coaching full-time. Due to clashing definitions surrounding what ‘full-time’ means for coaching, this designation seems more accurate.

  25. ^

     4-5 sessions was emphasized by the program as a natural check-in point for the coach and client to collaboratively assess how the coaching relationship is going. This was not mandated or enforced by TBCT as a requirement. Coaches that did this reported that it added quite a bit of clarity, including exchanging feedback, potential for course correction, opportunities for bringing the relationship to an elegant close (offering referrals to other coaches), reinforcing what had gone well, setting up future sessions were things to move forward, etc.

  26. ^

     These numbers omit one cohort member who exited the program midway through who had ~6 clients by that point. For some quantitative answers, clients wrote in a range (e.g. “the coaching is worth $150 – $200/hr.”). When this occurred for simplicity, Tee took the midpoint of the range.

  27. ^

     From January 2023 – January 2024

  28. ^

     Averaged across all reporting coaches

  29. ^

     In more academic language, TBCT was set up to be a learning project that hovered between "multi-method eclecticism" and "postmodern interpretivism" while striving for "cooperative ecological inquiry.” We definitely included elements of empirical positivism, but mostly as guardrails or signals for interpretation. Terms from Bill Torbort’s description of social scientific paradigms published in Torbort’s Listening to the Dark.

  30. ^

     In some cases leaving the door open for an eventual transition to full-time coaching

  31. ^

     https://www.teebarnett.com/tbct

  32. ^

     In one case, from part-time to full-time. And in another case, from potentially full-time to very little part-time work as a coach.

  33. ^

     Some coaches are still deciding what to do in this regard

  34. ^

     A great example of this was the cohort coaches' use of the Session Rating Scale (SRS), originally developed by Scott Miller as a quantitative scale for client feedback in therapy. Rather than taking at face-value the scores representing the quality of each session delivered, Tee advised the coaches to treat the scoring as quantitative signals that could be qualitatively addressed (based on Miller’s recommendations). Receiving a lower than expected score along one of the axes is a great opportunity for the coach to potentially course correct, including the option to directly address the feedback with the client in the next session. (Miller also advocates for using the SRS in this way).

  35. ^

     The target was roughly 30 - 40 surveys. It was hard to say what the totals ought to have been in the first cycle of a program like this, but 2/3 of the cohort (6 coaches) having coached 5 clients past 4 sessions = 30 surveys. Add in a few surveys for the other 1/3 of coaches to = ~40. Coaches collectively reported that ~33 clients completed more than four sessions, though only 25 filled in a long-form survey upon doing so.

    There are interesting potential takeaways related to the shortfall in completed long-form surveys related to things like cohort coaches' reluctance to distribute surveys and the difficulty of getting clients to complete them. 

  36. ^

     Some have gone admirably further than our program did in trying to discern in a more academic, empirical, positivist sense what doses of which forms of feedback lead to the most rapid upskilling. I’d recommend The Cycle of Excellence as a great example of this. 

    TBCT was trying to get a sense of how it goes when aspiring coaches are embedded in a whole multi-component feedback apparatus.

  37. ^

     Why not all? In short, because there are some developmental arcs that clients won’t understand, or telling them about the arc can be disruptive to their growth. A classic example is when high-achievers strive to excel in non-achievement/restful activities.

  38. ^

    Great post cautioning against offering free services in the community. 

    From what I could tell, the article leaves out my position on when it can be good to support free services – where I do think that temporary funding or subsidization could help get projects off the ground. More importantly, I think this is a great way to nurture talented individuals. 

    There's ample precedent from the for-profit for this. It's exceedingly hard for certain would-be valuable companies to be immediately profitable from the very beginning, some need to invest in expensive fixed capital assets, etc. 

  39. ^

     See endnote 28 “Listening to the Dark”

  40. ^

      Most of the points below are derived from individual exit calls that Tee conducted with nearly every coach. Some points are derived from other sources of feedback.

hrosspet @ 2024-04-09T09:19 (+3)

disclaimer: I've read in full only "Takes for Self-improvers, clients, people ‘bought into’ self-development" which I'm mostly interested in, skimmed the rest

Thanks for the writeup! I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on how I should figure out the value of getting coaching.

My current approach is to do a lot of self-coaching myself and only when I feel like I'm stuck for a longer period or feel overwhelmed I reach out to a coach/therapist. Then, I use the sessions not only to figure out the object-level problem, but also I try to learn how to become a better self-coach by reflecting on the sessions on a meta-level (so that I don't need them anymore).

There is of course an opportunity cost - I could just get coaching sessions regularly, regardless of whether I'm stuck, or not, and focus on my thing - engineering/parenting/founding/... But if I'm gonna save the time/effort by not learning to coach myself and instead outsource the coaching skills to others, am I not gonna need them in the future?

There is of course always the benefit of having another person check on my thinking and hear their perspective, but that doesn't need to be a coach, it can be a domain expert, if my self-coaching skills are good enough.

To sum this up, what am I likely missing with this approach?

Tee @ 2024-04-25T08:08 (+3)

Glad it was helpful! Happy to see that you utilized the 'playlist'-type function of this to kick off these thoughts

This sounds like a nice process you've carved out for yourself. Always pleased to see when people are at such an advanced position in being conscientious about their growth. 

Similar to what it sounds like your process is, my sense is that the best frequency for working with most coaches/therapists follows an 'organic cadence' that's tied to particular phases and occasions. It seems like, in most cases, consistent indefinite sessions are more likely to stray from addressing things that are (a)live

Things I'd suggest that could be helpful to think about: 

– There's a meta-skill to knowing when to bring in certain people to lean on / get inspired by in different situations. Viewing that as an ongoing learning project to reflect on could be good. (It could imply that you want to strengthen aspects of your network in case you want to call upon them, for example) 
– This project of knowing when to bring certain people in can be enhanced by more information about use cases associated with different people and frequencies. Maybe self-coaching is great for certain territories of your experience, but consistent founder-coaching while you're in phases of creation, scaling up, management, etc. are almost always useful. A lot of this is tied to seasonality and phases in my mind. Bringing in a coach 'to thrive' in winter, when you're likely to be more introspective, etc., could be better than doing so in the summer, when you might want to be having experiences in the outside world to bring back for yourself later. 
– I don't want to assume things about your process, but self-coaching/-therapy is tricky even for coaches and therapists. If you want to get really good at this, it's likely some time refining that toolkit (*focusing explicitly on getting better at self-coaching*) would be a good investment of time and resources
– Getting coaching/therapy when you feel stuck is a reliable signal of need and/or comes with a higher likelihood of getting value from individual (sets of) sessions. The downsides are that you can lose momentum getting stuck, you could get stuck for longer than it needed to be, some people struggle to ask for help in low-powered states. Consistent coaching aimed at the medium- to long-term can 'head off' certain tangles/hangups. More on this here

Hope that was helpful! Curious how what I mentioned landed for you

Tee @ 2024-04-08T15:56 (+1)

EA Forum note: I've cleared with the Forum team that I can offer free 20-minute calls as a 'thank you' for the first 10 people that leave thoughtful and engaging private or public comments. These short calls can be mini-sessions, coaching AMA, a catchup, or used any other way you'd like!