I began work with a CEO performance coach. Prior to this, the most accelerated and important work done was in therapy as a founder by taking mental health more seriously. And with a yearning to grow more, faster, and in the right direction, starting the year with a coach seemed important to experiment with.

• Tangential benefit: I was curious to learn more about how coaching worked as I looked to be better at helping coaching TKS students
• Decision criteria for choosing my coach:
  1. Needed experience as a founder to know what exponential self growth looks like and dealing with high levels of uncertainties faced in startups
  2. Strong foundation in simplifying and prioritizing as is my weakness. I like complexity
  3. Coaching across multiple dimensions not just work and productivity, but also finances, physical fitness, social + emotional, and meditation
• Signed up for 18 months, following momentum cycles for an iterative process between:
  1. Assess - where you are, where you want to be, why certain goals, and how to get there
  2. Habituation - build into habit and regular practice to get rid of goals, using consistency to push progress
  3. Growth - build on top of skills and expand abilities to overcome obstacles + challenges
  4. Graduation - eliminate, continue, or double down
• We started weekly tactical meetings, and I did not know it at the time, but it would be the single best decision in 2020 as it's helped me push growth in all areas. Different lessons from weekly meetings:
  • Best practices in morning and evening routines with personalized advice
  • Chrono typing for circadian rhythm preference for optimal timing of activities in the day
  • Importance of setting and training daily habits
  • 10 year vision and mission setting so there's a road map
  • Personal guiding principles
  • Power of tracking and debugging barriers to daily habits, anchoring works as a great hack
  • Geo-boxing activities and events to different locations and work surfaces for spatial familiarization
  • Daily journaling with Best Self (time blocking, gratitude, learnings, and goal tracking)
  • Quarterly OKR setting
  • Financial budgeting and goal setting
  • Constantly questioning and iterating on Pareto's principle for getting 80% of results with 20% of effort
  • Honest feedback loops and third eye for personal insights on behavior
  • Blueprint for building pipeline and process for hiring
  • Uncoupling big goals by breaking down into smaller next steps, and shifting expectations into tiers as so not to get frustrated by a binary achieved or not achieved
  • Developing personal recipes for different scenarios, such as POMs in the morning to kickstart flow state or different
  • Personal mantra for centering
  • Settling down volatility and spikes in extremes and focusing on guardrails (ex. wind down)
  • Personalized workout routine and schedule for aligning on goal of making it a daily habit
  • Closing loops of obligation and observing when new ones are open
  • FutureMe emails are great way to set intentions
  • Ideal relationship structure and identifying individual gaps
  • Team and collaboration training for onboarding

Bonus: different resources and books for best practices for whatever topic was at hand.