"I should exercise but I don't."

Why not? The answer determines what kind of help you need. If you're in pain, you need a physio. If it's tied to something deeper, you need a therapist. If you're getting in your own way - you know what to do but can't seem to prioritize yourself - that's where coaching has the most value.

A foundational idea in coaching is that the person is naturally capable, resourceful, and whole. As a coach, I believe this about everyone. As a manager, I know this is not true for some people, but if I come by default with that mindset, it's definitely true of more people than you might think. There's real value in being seen this way by another human. For most people, that matters; it's part of what makes coaching effective.

In Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, Lori Gottlieb writes about unconditional positive regard in the context of therapy - holding space for someone as they are. In coaching, I think of it a bit differently. It's about representing the client’s best self. Holding that vision of who they can be, even when they can't see it themselves. One of the joys for me of working with people over a longer period is how concrete my understanding of their best selves becomes.

As a coach or manager, the best compliment I get is when someone tells me they have an inner Cate. What does the inner Cate do? Normally it sets boundaries, is direct about things, and sets them up for success. It represents belief in their best selves and the willingness to advocate to get there. My best coaches are also installed in my head, and I carry with me both the kind of questions they would ask me, but also their belief that I'm capable of meeting the challenges in front of me.

Believing in someone is different from never challenging someone. Often, it's the opposite. Believing in someone means challenging them more.

Never being challenged is how people go off the rails - we see this with the rich and powerful regularly. I always think wow, so much money, and no-one with enough of a mutually caring and respecting relationship to pull them up, and say, "my friend - no". Humans need community, and community is not sycophantic. It's alarming to see otherwise normal people head in the same direction with the help of AI. There is meaning to positive regard from another human - but what is the meaning when it comes from a machine?

Having left the structure of an organisation, I've been thinking a lot about how to create the structure I need to be effective. Building workflows with Claude to scaffold how I work - a social media analytics tool, time tracking. I was showing these to a friend, and she pointed out that I was effectively training Claude to coach me and asked the bigger question - can Claude replace coaching?

Working for a company, I met with my coach 2x a month. Now it's only once. I also often used to bring to her my general state of overwhelm and she'd help me sort through it. Practically, I have replaced that one session a month. I bring my overwhelm to Claude instead; it takes me through it step by step, until I'm on track again. But the call that remains, once a month? That still feels very necessary. I come with the messier things, and the places where it's not enough to have my own ideas reflected back to me from a machine, but where I want another human. I want to feel seen and understood. I need the human weight of the confidence they have in me.

So can Claude be a coach? Claude is good for problems where you have more need of structure and validation than challenge, where you can ground it in data, and where you have your own point of view and judgement.

"How do I do better at social media?" is vague and will get you vague answers. "Given this data, how do I build on what works?" is specific - and gets useful output. "I'm overwhelmed by the existential" is too open-ended for Claude. "I'm overwhelmed by this task" - Claude can help with that.

I've been thinking a lot about coaching and accessibility more broadly. As a coach, every person is unique, but there are common journeys that people go through. 1:1 coaching doesn't scale and it's expensive. But what if you could extract those common journeys - like shared components - and create a structure for people to go through them with lighter-touch support? That's the foundational idea behind DRI Your Career.

Jean Hsu and I are excited to announce our new course on navigating the AI shift. We agonised about this - are we good enough at this stuff yet? What do we have to share? But when we approached it as coaches helping people navigate a transition, that was the unlock and it all came together. I'm so excited for it. Excited to offer a level of support that feels missing, and excited to see people's journeys - and what they build. The first cohort starts in May, and you can sign up here 🦝

What I'm doing

• Preparing for our second cohort of DRI Your Career, starting April 15 - I wrote about what we learned from the first cohort. We sold out last time and won't run it again until July, so if you've been thinking about it, we'd love to have you.
• We are also running the first cohort of the EM Survival Guide which I'm really excited about - I love getting to know engineering managers who are so committed to supporting their teams.
• Continuing to be a fractional CTO; a lot of my effort this past month has been focused on replatforming - both terrifying and exciting. Some of the strategic work is similar to what I used to do in my last job; some of the day to day stuff are things I never had to deal with before. Either way - I'm learning! I wrote more about that at cate.blog.
• Studying! I'm enrolled in LSE's MBA Essentials Program. Some weeks have been more interesting than others - influence was great, demand and supply graphs less so. I got my first assignment back with an A - that's something that hasn't happened in a while 😆 Now onto strategy (my fave).
• Prepping for my talk at ELC Conference in Prague this month - "What's My Job Again? Developing Self-Management". Excited to return to Prague, where I haven't been in forever, and to join this event for the first time.
• Joined The Curious Mindset for an absolutely lovely webinar. I really appreciated Steve Maxwell's write up reflecting on how burnout has shown up for him, and what he learned from it in retrospect.

What I've been reading

Burnout by Emily and Amelia Nagoski. I love this book - I read it when it came out and bought copies for every woman I knew. A few weeks ago I realized my nervous system needed healing and this was the book I turned to. It reframed some things, reminded me of others. Overall I feel so much better for reading it - and endlessly grateful to the Nagoski sisters for writing it.

Anthropic's AI displacement research - Anthropic's new measure of AI labor market impact finds the workers most exposed to displacement are older, female, more educated, and higher-paid. The patriarchy: there's an app for that. No systematic increase in unemployment yet, but hiring of younger workers into exposed occupations has started to slow. I found the combination of theoretical capability with actual usage data particularly interesting.

OpenAI on Harness Engineering's multi-agent workflows - Some of these multi-agent workflow write-ups are basically reinventing engineering management from first principles, except with agents instead of humans.

"That Slack discussion that aligned the team on an architectural pattern? If it isn't discoverable to the agent, it's illegible in the same way it would be unknown to a new hire joining three months later."

Mat Duggan on AI coding tool ethics - A wonderfully honest piece about the guilt of finding AI coding tools genuinely useful.

"Relieved, and then immediately guilty about the relief, and then annoyed at myself for feeling guilty about something that is, by any rational measure, a completely reasonable thing to do."

It's easy to opt out of something that doesn't work. The ethical question gets a lot harder when the tool is actually good. His EVE Online friend's take on code craftsmanship is on point:

"You know what the difference is between you and me? I know I'm a mercenary. You thought you were an artist. We're both guys who type for money."

Edward Bernays and the origin of PR - The kind of information that both infuriates and illuminates, and lives rent free in your head for weeks after you learn it. The PR industry was invented by Sigmund Freud's nephew, who worked on WWI propaganda then rebranded the techniques as "public relations." He staged a fake feminist protest to sell cigarettes and paid 5,000 doctors to declare bacon and eggs healthy. The PR industry was built on the explicit premise that people are too irrational to make their own decisions and need to be manipulated. This is the foundation capitalism runs on 😡

HBR: When Using AI Leads to Brain Fry - Using AI to cut routine tasks leads to 15% lower burnout. Doing too much at once leads to cognitive overload. This matches my own experience: breaking through where-do-I-start paralysis and tightening feedback loops - good. Vibe coding everything at once - jittery and unproductive. I'll keep trying to choose genuine progress over activity!

HBR: Why Should Anyone Be Led by You? - Four qualities of inspirational leaders: reveal a weakness, read situations well, practice "tough empathy," and lean into what makes you different. A provocative question from the MBA essentials. I think I have an answer to the question of why someone would want to be led by me (thanks in part to many kind comments I got leaving DDG) - but not the confidence to write it down!

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