Nine years in practice. Still figuring things out.
I came to coaching from organizational development. Spent several years inside a mid-size company trying to help teams work better, and at some point realized the work I cared most about was happening one-on-one, in the conversations that didn't fit into the training programmes or the leadership frameworks. I left, got certified, and built a solo practice. That was nine years ago.
I work with 12 to 15 clients at a time. Mostly mid-level leaders moving into senior leadership for the first time, the ones where the job changes faster than their mental model of the job. A few founder clients. Solo practice, always has been. I decided early on that scaling meant either doing worse work or managing people, and I wasn't interested in either.
What this site is
Coaching Briefs is where I document the parts of running a coaching practice that don't show up in the coaching training. The admin. The systems. The tools. The templates I've built and refined over nine years and what I've changed and why.
A few years ago I started using AI seriously in my practice. Not AI coaching, not chatbots, not anything client-facing. I use it the way I use Notion: as infrastructure. To process session notes faster, to analyze feedback patterns across multiple clients, to draft the custom sections of working agreements, to prepare for sessions more thoroughly than I could on my own. I named my Claude setup Margaret, after a supervisor I had early in my career who was meticulous and direct and never wasted words. It felt right.
Most of the writing on AI for coaches is either breathlessly excited about AI coaching platforms or written by people who don't run a coaching practice. I write about what I actually use, at the level of detail that's actually useful.
What this site is not
- A course or a coaching programme
- A review site that recommends tools I don't use
- A platform for scaling your coaching business (a phrase I find faintly troubling)
- A guide to AI replacing the coaching relationship
The coaching relationship is irreducibly human. What AI is good at is the overhead that has nothing to do with that relationship and used to take up a lot of my Sundays.
Why I write here
Partly because I learn by writing, and putting a workflow into words makes me think harder about whether it actually works. Partly because when I started out I spent a lot of time looking for practical documentation from working coaches and mostly found either very generic advice or very polished case studies that omitted all the texture. I'm trying to write the thing I was looking for.
If something on here is useful to your practice, that's the point.