On the practice of being uninteresting
A short field note on what becomes possible when we stop performing being interesting all the time.
When I started coaching, I worried I wasn’t interesting enough. I thought the work was about saying the cleverest possible thing at the cleverest possible time. That if a client left without a quote-worthy takeaway, I had failed them.
It took me about a year to realize the opposite is true.
The room before the room
The most useful thing I can offer most weeks is not a sharp question. It’s a slower room. A room where the client can stop performing — for me, for themselves, for whoever they were going to call after.
The work is not to become someone new. It is to stop rehearsing someone you’re not.
That sentence has been on the wall of the studio for two years now. I wrote it on a sticky note in 2024 and never moved it.
What I’m trying
This season I’m experimenting with starting every session in silence for sixty seconds. Just sitting. Not as a meditation — as a marker. A way to say: we are no longer in the meeting before this one.
It feels small. Most things that matter do.
— A.