I am a coach. I work with people who are used to being the one with the answer and have arrived somewhere they did not quite plan for.
For twenty years my job was to have the answer. The interesting conversations were always the ones where nobody did.
I started in the early two thousands, in the part of the Indian services industry that was working out how to run global programmes from here. Tech Mahindra and Deloitte first, then PepsiCo, then Amazon as a business intelligence manager, then Novartis as a principal consultant and director of the Hyderabad consulting team. On paper that is a data and delivery career.
In practice it was several jobs. I engineered data and analysed it, ran delivery, held the client relationship and eventually led the consultants doing all of that for someone else. I lived in the United States and in England along the way, worked out of client offices for long stretches and then ran the same programmes from here.
Much of it was drawing the map before anyone had agreed there was a route, then sitting in the room where a leadership team decided whether to back it. For years I was in front of executives who were not my managers, on programmes I did not own, with teams that did not report to me. Very little of what I got done came from authority. It came from being trusted with the version of the situation nobody wanted to put in the deck.
The rest was translation. Someone several time zones away wanted a number by the end of the day and someone sitting in front of me had to build the thing that produced it. What made that work was almost never the process. It was whether people picked up the phone, and whether they believed I would tell them the truth about a date rather than the version they wanted to hear.
I was good at that, and being good at it is how the scope kept growing. By the end I was running functions rather than analyses, which meant the day was mostly conversations. Some of them were about the work. A surprising number of them were about the person having them.
The conversations I valued most were never on the agenda. Someone would stay behind after a review, or ask for twenty minutes that turned into an hour, and the thing they actually wanted to talk about was whether they still wanted the job they had spent six years getting. They rarely wanted advice. They wanted to say the thing out loud in front of someone who would not immediately do something about it.
I noticed I was better at that than I was at most of what my title covered, and that I wanted more of it than an operating role could reasonably contain. So I trained. I completed the training programme with Erickson Coaching International and I am now building toward the International Coaching Federation ACC credential, which asks for coaching hours beyond the training itself.
That means I am early in my formal practice. It also means the twenty years came first, which is the part that tends to matter in the room.
I trained with Erickson Coaching International and have completed the training hours.
I am currently building toward the ICF ACC credential, which requires coaching hours beyond the training itself. I do not hold it yet.
I am early in my formal coaching practice, and I have spent two decades inside the environments my clients are working in. Whether that combination is the right one for you is a reasonable thing to work out together in the first conversation.
I ask more questions than most people are used to, and I am comfortable leaving a silence alone for longer than is socially normal.
That is not a technique so much as a preference. Most people arrive with the first version of their answer already prepared, and the second version only turns up if nobody rushes to fill the gap.
If I think you are steering around something, I will say so once and then leave it with you.
What you do with it is genuinely your business. I am not going to keep returning to a subject you have decided is closed, and I am not going to pretend I did not notice.
I am not a neutral surface.
Two decades in delivery leaves you with opinions about reorganisations, promotion cycles, matrix reporting and what a leadership team is actually doing when it says it is aligned. When one of those opinions is useful I will tell you it is arriving, put it on the table as information, and hand the decision back. The decision was never mine to make.
The work is anchored in your work, and the rest of your life is allowed in the room.
The two are rarely separable at this stage of a career. Where something belongs with a therapist rather than a coach, I will say so, and I would rather say it early than let a coaching conversation do a job it is not qualified for.
I work on video, mostly with people in India and across European and US time zones. Sessions run an hour, every two or three weeks. I also take on organisational engagements, usually where someone already knows my work and wants it applied to their leadership team.
Alongside the coaching I advise the founders of an early stage property technology company on product strategy and their roadmap, which keeps me close to what building something from nothing actually asks of a person.
The purpose is to work out whether there is something worth coaching and whether you want to do it with me. Both answers are allowed to be no.