Practical AI workflows, templates, and honest tool reviews that handle the overhead, so your hours go to the work that matters. Written by someone who does this work.
I'm an executive coach. Nine years in. I didn't set out to become "the AI person" in my coaching circle. I was just drowning in notes and proposals and Sunday-afternoon admin, and I started experimenting out of pure survival.
Somewhere along the way, I got eight hours a week back. Colleagues started asking how. So I started writing it down. This is that.
It's a Sunday in March and I'm at my desk with a cup of green tea that stopped being warm about an hour ago. I have five sessions' worth of notes to write. My shorthand from Tue...
There's a paragraph in the middle of my coaching contract that lived there for almost four years before I actually read it carefully. I'd copied the bones of my original agreeme...
The worst first session I ever ran wasn't because the client was difficult. She was smart, articulate, genuinely motivated. The problem was me. I walked in knowing her name, her...
Last November I was onboarding a new client, a VP of product who'd been referred by someone I'd worked with two years ago. Good energy on the chemistry call. She signed the prop...
Six weeks into a promising engagement last year, my client texted me a photo of his resignation letter at 10:47 PM on a Sunday. Not a draft. The final version, already in an env...
Last March I had one of those weeks. Two clients wrapped their engagements within days of each other, a third paused to deal with a family situation, and suddenly my calendar ha...
A client wrote this on her end-of-engagement form last March: "I think you pushed me harder than I wanted to be pushed, and I'm grateful for it." I read it standing at my kitche...
I used free Calendly for three years. It worked fine. My clients booked, I showed up, nobody complained. Then one morning a client, a COO I'd been working with for about four mo...
I was at a coaching conference in Denver last fall, standing at one of those too-tall cocktail tables during a networking break, when a colleague I respect said something that s...
I coach eight clients this week. Eight sessions, eight completely different worlds. By Thursday afternoon I'm supposed to walk into a conversation about executive succession wit...
I have downloaded, seriously tested, and eventually abandoned more coaching apps than I care to admit. Not because they were bad, some of them were genuinely well-designed, but ...
I spent three months recording every coaching session with my clients' permission. Not because I thought I'd go back and listen to the recordings. I never do, and that's not the...
If you're a solo consultant and you're still spending 90 minutes writing a client proposal from scratch, that's a solvable problem. If you're summarizing research into a deck by...
I don't follow a script in sessions. Anyone who's been coaching for more than two years probably stopped using a rigid protocol around then, because the clients stopped fitting ...
I have a client I've been working with for three years. Her client file is 47 pages. Not because I'm obsessive about documentation, because the file has earned every page.
I was going to skip writing this one. There are already a hundred "prompts for coaches" articles online, and most of them are embarrassing. You know the type: "Act as a seasoned...
The first was ambitious. A full operating system: intake tracker, goal database, progress notes, resource library, weekly reflection prompts, a master dashboard with color-coded...
Three people in my peer supervision group had been using Fathom. This was maybe six months ago. I brought it up because two different coaches had asked me about it in the same w...
The first time I used Otter.ai seriously, I was on a discovery call with someone who spoke fast and thought out loud and kept interrupting herself to add a caveat. By the time w...
I gave Fireflies.ai three weeks of honest effort. This was last fall, right around the time I was testing every transcription tool I could find because the Sunday notes problem ...
I almost didn't write this one. I opened CoachAccountable for the first time about two years ago, spent ten minutes clicking around the interface, and closed the tab. It looked ...
I signed up for Paperbell on a Thursday afternoon in early 2023 because I was tired of the thing that tires most solo coaches eventually: the duct-tape stack. I had Calendly han...
I was two weeks into a trial of Simply.Coach when my newest client, a director of engineering who'd just been told she was on the short list for VP, sent me a message through th...
I found out about Practice.do shutting down the way most coaches did: a panicked Slack message from a colleague on a Tuesday afternoon. "Did you see the email from Practice?" I ...
A colleague of mine, a career coach with about six years of experience, called me last month to ask what I thought about HoneyBook for coaches. She'd been using it for almost a ...
A coach I've known for years sent me a screenshot last month. It was her Dubsado dashboard, and I counted eleven tabs across the top. Workflows, forms, schedulers, proposals, in...
A client emailed me last fall asking if I could send a video explaining how I wanted her to use the pre-session reflection form. She was new to coaching, had never worked with a...
No tools roundups. No AI hype. Just what's actually working in my coaching practice, written the way I'd explain it to a colleague.