Aaron's Status

5:16 am

That’s fine, though. Sometimes you just have to drive down to Providence and go to the Roger Williams Park Zoo and eat too much macaroni and cheese and ride a carousel with your son, and what better way to spend a Friday, really?

My newfound mission statement has been swirling in my head, banging up against other thoughts, occasionally chipping some paint off of previous ideas I had for how to market my practice, and that’s a good thing.

It feels really good to say it, because it gives everything else a sense of meaning, and I think it is the closest I’ve come to a broader reason why I would want to actually do this.

To recap, why do I actually want to do this? Coaching, that is?

• It is satisfying. Helping people feels good already, but helping people to help themselves feels even better, and being appreciated for adding value individually is the best.

• I’m good at it. People have come to me for guidance throughout my professional career and they’ve always left satisfied. Since studying the ICF brand of coaching skills, I’ve only gotten better.

• Building my own way of being and creating value, as an entrepreneur, gives me immense, almost immeasurable freedom. I’m still figuring out how to use it.

• Here’s the new one: coaching curious, empathetic engineering managers is activism. My client selection process and my work creating leverage and impact for those selected individuals is a very real shot across the bow of the ladder-climbing, OKR-chasing, optics-obsessed managers I hate.

That’s the key right there. I’ve worked for a few awful people. I love the idea that my work makes theirs harder to do, by squeezing them out. I believe that curious, empathetic managers are more effective and more well-liked, and in the end, that wins.

I’m realizing now that for just a moment, I had put a line like “the world doesn’t need more bad managers” on my website, but later took it down.

I took it down because it felt too negative… But I think, in that moment, I knew exactly what I was doing. I just hadn’t connected all the dots yet.