F A Q ' s

What’s the difference between coaching and therapy?
Therapy looks at your past to explain and understand your present. It tends to focus on discovering and fixing what’s “dysfunctional”.

Coaching explores who you are now - your goals, strengths, values - and uses these as the springboard for building your future. It’s a process of experiential learning, focused awareness and action.

Coaching and therapy serve different purposes and objectives, and each has it’s valuable role to play. Clients often say that coaching is what you do after therapy.

What are some of the benefits of working with a coach?
See Why Work with a Coach?

What are Visionary Upstarts? And why did you become a coach?
Visionary upstarts choose to transcend their circumstances and established conventions, to create new and better lives, workplaces, organizations and communities. My experience as a leader in organizations large and small—as a manager, consultant, board president—tells me that we urgently need to harness and feed the creative power of all the visionary upstarts. It’s what I became a coach to do. For more information about Michael click here.

What types of clients do you work with?
I work with both individuals and companies. The majority of my clients are entrepreneurs and self-directed professionals in the IT and creative fields:

• Solo-entrepreneurs, start-ups and consultants who want to deploy their time and resources more effectively, and welcome the challenges, accountability and truth-telling that a coach provides.
• Employees who are or wish to be proactive about their careers. They often want to make a major career transition, or work smarter and be more successful in their current position.

How do we work together?
I work with clients all over the world by telephone, and in person or by phone with individuals and companies in San Francisco and the Bay Area. If you’re local and prefer face to face meetings, we can meet at my office in Hayes Valley.

My coaching services are dynamic, flexible and customized to your particular needs and style. Meetings can be 30 or 50 minutes on a weekly, bi-weekly or monthly basis. Generally the best results are achieved through consistent, regular meetings.

What happens?
We create a plan and a program to achieve your objectives. We agree on weekly goals and tasks for which I’ll hold you accountable at our next meeting. We’ll discuss your actions, progress, learning and celebrate your achievements and successes. We’ll also look at what didn’t progress, and explore why.

For more information about my services click here.
For more information about coaching, click here.

How do we get started?
Call or email me to schedule an initial conversation (free of charge) where we’ll discuss your goals and priorities, your current situation and where you want to go. If we decide to work together, we’ll start off with a two hour Discovery Session to design your program and objectives, and create the foundation for future work. Going forward we’ll meet according to your schedule to ensure action, accountability, achievement and success.

For more information, to schedule a complementary sample session or any other inquiry, please fill out the contact form or call Michael at 1-415-839-6250.