Showing up for coaching started long before the session

Before Unfogged existed, I spent a year working with a coach I liked. The sessions helped. The difficult part happened in between them.

Clarity never arrived when it was convenient. It would hit while I was walking on the beach, driving somewhere, or lying in bed because something still wouldn't leave me alone. So I'd write it down. I wasn't trying to journal. I was trying not to lose whatever had just clicked before it disappeared again.

Eventually I landed on Insight Timer. It's mostly a meditation app with a journaling feature, but it worked because it left me alone. No prompts. No follow-up questions. I wrote what I needed to write and closed it.

The problem came afterwards.

Nobody could read it

My coach knew I was writing. He was completely open to whatever I wanted to bring into the room. He just wasn't going to read everything I'd written between sessions.

At first that bothered me. Then I realized what I was asking. He had forty-five minutes with me every week, and reading pages of late-night thoughts before every session wasn't preparation — it was unpaid work.

Since then I've spoken to a lot of coaches, and nearly all of them describe the same thing. Emails. Shared documents. Voice notes. People trying to make the most of the time between sessions. It isn't that coaches don't care. It's that the time doesn't exist.

That was hard for me to accept, because if someone is investing their time in me, I want to show up having done my part. I thought I was being a good client. Looking back, I'd handed him homework.

So I still had all this thinking happening between sessions, but nowhere for it to go.

Then I found ChatGPT

At first it felt like exactly what I'd been looking for. I could paste in whatever I'd written and it would stay with me for as long as I wanted.

The problem wasn't the quality of the answers. The problem was they never really ended. Every response opened another perspective, another question, another path worth exploring. Sometimes that's exactly what I wanted. Most of the time, I just wanted to know what mattered.

That's when I realized I'd been solving the wrong problem.

The writing wasn't the work

Working out what deserved to be carried into the coaching session was.

Before every session I'd have pages of notes, and every one of them had felt important when I'd written it. I'd usually bring whatever was most recent or loudest. Looking back, those aren't the same thing as what mattered most.

Reading everything again didn't help. I was still the same person, with the same blind spots, looking at the same words.

What I wanted turned out to be simple

I didn't need something that would keep talking to me. I needed something that could work from everything I'd already written, point to the one thing I was least likely to see on my own, and then stop. Not summarize it. Not coach me. Just help me arrive prepared.

I looked for it and I couldn't find it, so I built it. That became Unfogged.

Today it works on one piece of writing and gives you one brief. If there isn't enough there to say something honest, it says nothing. That isn't a limitation I discovered later. It's one of the reasons I built it that way.

I'm testing whether that changes what people bring into conversations with their coaches. Not whether they understand themselves a little better, but whether they arrive ready to do the work that only another human can do with them.

Looking back, I don't think I was ever looking for a better journal. My coach was investing forty-five minutes in me every week. I just wanted to arrive having invested in myself first.