Most of the founders I work with have already done a significant amount of work on themselves. They've had coaches. Some have been in therapy. They've read widely, built habits, and understood their own patterns with real sophistication.
The gap they arrive with isn't insight. It's that the insight hasn't changed anything durable. They know what's happening. They keep doing it anyway. The override keeps running. The pressure keeps costing what it costs.
That's not a failure of the tools they've used so much as a sign those tools were working on a different problem than the one they actually have.
Over time, I've developed clear disagreements with how mainstream coaching frames what's wrong and what fixes it. These aren't abstract positions. They're the practical distinctions that determine whether the work helps or, in some cases, quietly makes things worse.
Mindset is not the primary lever.
The dominant model in coaching treats thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes as the main things to change. Get the thinking right and the behavior follows. Find the limiting belief, reframe it, build new patterns.
The problem isn't that thinking doesn't matter. It does. The problem is the sequence this model assumes.
What I observe consistently is that internal state shapes the story more than the story shapes the state. When someone is depleted and running close to the edge of their capacity, their thinking gets more negative, more rigid, more catastrophic. That's not a thinking problem. It's a state problem. The thinking is downstream of it.
Mindset work applied to a state problem produces one of two things: temporary relief that doesn't hold, or compliance, where the person learns to think the right thoughts while the underlying conditions stay unchanged. Neither is durable. Neither address what's driving the pattern.
When the state changes, the thinking usually follows without being directly targeted.
Regulation is not useful if it's being used to tolerate more.
Nervous system regulation has entered mainstream coaching in a meaningful way. Breathwork, somatic tools, polyvagal-informed practices, these are legitimate and often useful. I use them personally and professionally.
But there's a version of this work I won't do, and it's worth naming directly.
When regulation is used to help someone tolerate a life, a role, or a pace of work that is degrading them, the goal becomes calming someone down enough to keep going. That's not neutral. It's optimizing a person for endurance inside conditions that shouldn't be endured.
This pattern is more common than people acknowledge. The executive who learns to regulate so they can keep working eighty-hour weeks is not better off for having learned that skill. The founder who gets calmer under pressure so they can keep deferring every real question about what they want, same thing.
Regulation is useful when it restores enough internal support for a person to see clearly and choose deliberately. Not tolerance. Discernment.
Trying harder is not the answer when effort is already the problem.
Standard coaching advice, more habits, stronger discipline, better accountability, is designed for people who have internal capacity available and aren't using it effectively.
The people I work with are almost universally the opposite. They're over-efforting. They have been for a long time. Their problem isn't insufficient effort. It's that they've been running on override long enough that the instrument itself, their judgment, their range, their capacity to respond rather than react, has started to narrow.
Telling someone who is already pushing too hard to push harder doesn't close the gap. It increases instability. It adds more load to a system that's already past what it can hold well.
The work is usually subtraction, not addition. Finding where self-override has become the default operating mode and restoring enough capacity that deliberate choice becomes possible again.
I'm not neutral about what you're optimizing for.
Most coaching is explicitly or implicitly neutral about a client's goals. The client wants something, the coach helps them get it. Whether those goals are worth having, whether the structure of the client's life is one they'd choose freely, whether the role they're working so hard to perform actually fits who they are, these are generally considered outside the scope of the work.
I don't operate that way.
If the work is being used to help someone perform more effectively inside a life or structure that is eroding them, I'll name it. Not to redirect their goals or tell them what to want. But because I won't use my skills to help someone become more capable of tolerating something they'd leave if they had enough internal support to see it clearly.
In practice, this means being willing to ask inconvenient questions. Not to destabilize, but to make sure the work is serving the person and not just their ability to keep going.
Endurance is not a virtue by itself.
Coaching culture has a complicated relationship with grit. Resilience, perseverance, the ability to push through, these are celebrated almost unconditionally as markers of strength.
I disagree with the unconditional part.
Endurance without choice is a warning sign. When someone keeps going because they genuinely want to, because they've weighed the cost and decided it's worth it, that's a form of strength. When someone keeps going because stopping feels unavailable, because obligation or identity or fear has closed off other options, that's a different thing entirely.
My work aims to restore the capacity to decide what pressure is worth carrying. Not to reduce drive or soften ambition, but to make the endurance a choice rather than a default.
The distinction matters because endurance without choice eventually costs more than it produces. And the people who pay the highest price are usually the ones who were most convinced they were fine.
These disagreements aren't positions I hold abstractly. They're the practical foundation of how the work runs. They determine what I'll say in a session, what I won't collude with, where I'll push back, and what I'm trying to restore.
If they resonate, it's probably because you've already noticed the places where the standard approaches haven't held.
