Bringing awareness into the workplace — into leadership, team dynamics, and the daily texture of professional life.
I work with leaders and individual contributors — mostly in software engineering — to bring awareness into the workplace. Workplace relationships and team dynamics are a rich arena for this work.
When another person's feelings aren't perceived as a threat to you, you're able to bring an open heart and compassion while still clearly owning your decisions and responsibilities. Even the most challenging conversations — performance reviews, cancelling projects, delivering bad news — can be seen as opportunities for service and genuine connection.
My clients aspire to be a presence that settles the collective workplace nervous system. They seek to compassionately touch on areas of confusion and tension in the organization to help bring the whole into alignment.
It's easy to get caught up in background stress, a sense of hurrying, or pushing through confusion or self-doubt while working at a computer. These emotional stressors hang out in the background and we end up drained without noticing.
Bringing awareness into computer work — software engineering, writing docs, responding to messages — allows you to notice these emotional stressors as they arise and digest them in real time. This makes room for more flow, ease, and focus on what's most important to you.
I've worked in software for a cumulative twelve years — as an IC, founder, manager, and product manager — at a tiny startup, mid-sized companies, and at Google. I understand the emotional dynamics of software companies and software engineering from the inside. You won't have to spell out the context or translate the jargon.
I coach people at all levels who want to lead with more presence, less reactivity, and greater clarity:
Many of my clients' companies subsidize their coaching. It's worth asking your employer — coaching is frequently covered under professional development or L&D budgets.
"Working with Brian has improved the health of my relationships with my teammates and given me the clarity I need to take action and lead. Brian brings a genuine curiosity to issues large and small that prompts me to examine them and get to their roots.
"Brian encourages me to be open to my full range of emotions and understand how they physically manifest themselves. I've grown better able to bring my humanity to work such that conflict can be productive, not something that mires me and my team in cycles of frustration and defensiveness.
"Because Brian is a software engineer himself, he has the background to understand the stresses and interpersonal challenges that are specific to software teams. I don't have to worry about whether I've effectively spelled out all the context or translated the jargon."
"Since I started working with Brian, it's been so much easier for me to work with my emotional energies in a productive way at work.
"Over the past couple of weeks I had to manage some really tough emotional situations at work that would have totally derailed me in the past. Thanks to the work I've done with Brian, I was able to navigate them with much more ease — and that led to some amazing outcomes. I couldn't believe it.
"I'm feeling much more peace and calm in my body. I can see how many of the high-stress situations I used to find myself in were self-inflicted, and I have confidence that I can avoid creating most of those situations now."