You're probably not looking for a coach because everything is working perfectly. Something has become difficult, stuck, repetitive or simply no longer fits.
Before you hire someone to help you fix it, there is a more basic question worth asking:
Are you working on the right problem?
By Leo Cunningham — About Leo
If you've already decided you'd rather talk than read, you can book a private conversation with me here
Take a moment and imagine you live in a house where there’s a terrible draught coming in under the front door. Fuel bills keep rising and the family is always complaining of the cold, so you replace it. Then one of the windows goes the same way. Alright, then you fix that too. A few tiles come off the roof. The boiler shuts down in the middle of winter. A pipe freezes and bursts. Then, just as you think you're getting on top of things, somebody tells you you've got rising damp.
None of these problems are imaginary and they all need dealing with. After a while you actually become quite good at house maintenance. But the repairs just seem to keep coming one after the other.
You can actually become very good at repairing the wrong house. Good coaching can question the house as well as help with the repairs. Private Direction is built expressly around that wider question: whether the house itself still makes sense.
A good coach can help you prioritise the jobs, make decisions, stop procrastinating, keep you accountable and get the work done. I’ve been that guy.
Sometimes, that’s exactly what you need. But how much context did you give this predicament? Did you actually ever ask, Is this really the house you want to live in? Is it in the right place? Does it still suit the life you want now?
Or have you become so occupied with keeping the whole thing standing that you have stopped asking whether it still makes sense?
This is not really about houses.
- It is about the role you keep trying to improve.
- The boss you keep learning to manage.
- The hours you keep reorganising.
- The routine you keep rebuilding.
- The motivation you keep trying to recover.
- The relationship you keep patching.
- The version of yourself you keep trying to make function a little better.
Again, none of those things are trivial. Sometimes the right answer really is to fix the roof, replace the boiler and stay exactly where you are.
But repeated repairs can also hide a larger question.
Are these repairs serving a life you still want, or are they helping you tolerate one you may have outgrown?
Private Direction comes from a different place.
It does not assume that the house is right and the job is simply to repair it more efficiently. Or that the house should be rebuilt from scratch into something modern and gleaming.
Containment might well be the wider issue. So it steps back with you and looks at the whole thing from several vantage points outside your current position and framework. A proper sitrep.
The house. The location. What it costs to maintain. What it makes possible. What it prevents. What you’re carrying. Who you’ve become inside it. What still belongs to you and what you’re maintaining because, well, you've always maintained it.
You may not have a maintenance cycle problem.
You may have a direction problem. And that requires context.
The distinction matters because capable people are very good at execution. Give us a problem, a deadline and a reason and we crack on with the job.
The danger is that our competence feels comfortable and reassuring, but it can keep you busy inside a frame, narrowing your perception of what’s actually worth your time.
Private Direction is designed to work on the wider context. Physically, intellectually and emotionally - not because it’s therapy but because you need to feel genuinely right about your direction.
Not by telling you to sell the house.
Not by assuming that staying is a weakness or leaving is courage.
And not by suggesting that coaching isn’t required where it can actually be the right tool for the job.
Coaching can help you improve your performance inside a current arrangement, and good coaching may question that arrangement too.
Private Direction begins deliberately with the wider context. If the cycle you are in, the environment you inhabit or the targets you are setting may not fit you now — or you do not have time even to consider that — this is where the work starts.
Private Direction is built for that second situation. It comes out of my thirty-five years inside persuasion, behavioural strategy and planning — reading people, systems and the gap between how things look and how they really are. It brings that together with coaching and mentoring experience, lateral thinking, movement, perspective and real-world testing.
That sounds like a lot of engineering, but in practice the purpose is simple:
Private direction widens the context with new perspectives and improves your independent judgement so you can plot a course with greater self-assurance.
So if you’re considering a coach or a mentor at this time, it may be worth stepping to one side for a moment or two and ask:
Is this still the right house I want to live in?
Take the exercises with you
If you would rather work through this privately, download the companion workbook. It sets out the three practical exercises with space to write and reflect. Start with the one that sounds most like you. You do not need to complete all three or send your notes to anyone.
