Showing up for my coaching

I approached it the way I'd approach anything in business. What I wanted was a way to show up better for my coaching. The catch-ups were good, but a lot came up between sessions and by the time I sat down again some of it was gone. If I could make it easier for my coach, I'd get more out of the hour. That felt worth doing.

So I wrote when clarity hit, which was never on a schedule, because clarity doesn't work that way. It arrives all at once and usually somewhere inconvenient. I'd be walking on the beach, or in bed at eleven at night with something still turning over. Insight Journal is an app built for exactly that — you write, it saves, that's all — and it was the only thing I found that let me dump everything out without pulling me into a loop.

The best part was that it didn't talk back. There were no follow-up questions and nothing telling me I'd had a breakthrough. I came in, wrote what I wanted, and left. The thread held between sessions, which was the whole point of doing it.

My coach was open to all of it and he never made me feel like I was overdoing it. He just wouldn't read what I wrote between sessions.

That was on me

Expecting him to read everything I wrote between sessions was unrealistic. He had an hour a week and he was always going to spend it on what I said in the room, which is what he should have done. Reading a week of somebody's late-night writing is unpaid work done cold. He'd have arrived with a hundred fragments and no way to tell which one mattered.

So I moved to ChatGPT, which would go through all of it at any hour, for as long as I wanted. In one sense it worked. My awareness went up and I could see things I'd been circling for months. I'd put in an entry and get back a reframe that was genuinely useful, then another one, then a third that complicated the second.

ChatGPT isn't the problem here. It does what it's built to do. The trouble is that it does it every time, so every entry turns into a rabbit hole whether I've got the energy for one or not. Sometimes I want to go deep. Most of the time I want one true thing and my evening back.

I'd go in with something I needed to decide and come out with more awareness and no more resolution.

Preparing for coaching was harder than the coaching

Before a session I'd sit down with a week of notes and try to work out what mattered. That's the actual job, and it's harder than the writing. There'd be fifteen entries, all of which felt important when I wrote them, and nothing to tell me which one to bring. So I'd pick the loudest, which was usually just the most recent.

Rereading doesn't fix that. I'm the same person who wrote it, with the same blind spot, looking at my own words. What I couldn't see in March I still can't see in April. A prompt telling me to reflect harder only asks the question I already failed to answer.

Look at what actually gets built in this space and it's all on the writing end. Faster capture, voice input, starter prompts, streaks. I understand why, because capture is easy to measure and more of it is obviously better.

The other end doesn't work like that. More isn't better. Past a point it becomes rumination with a nicer interface, and I spent a while there.

What I wanted and couldn't buy

I wanted something that would come back to the week without me having to organise it first. It would tell me what I wasn't seeing rather than reorganising what I'd already written down. Then it would stop, so I could go into the session and do the work instead of taking another lap.

That last part is commercially awkward. A system that says one true thing and closes is a system you use less, and almost everything about how these products get funded pushes the other way. Once you've built for engagement, you can't add restraint back in as a setting.

So the off switch isn't a feature I added late. It's what I went looking for, and when nobody was selling it, it became the thing the rest of Unfogged got built around. What exists today works on one piece of writing and gives you a brief — one page, once. It won't speak if there isn't enough in what you wrote to say anything honest, which is a real limitation and also the point.

Whether it actually changes what people do, not just what they understand, is what I'm testing now, with coaches and with people who write the way I used to. I'll write about what comes back, including the parts that don't work.