Life Coaching Now Available Apparently

[update: edited pricing structure for clarification]

Over the last few months I’ve gotten a fair few responses to my work; sometimes it’s just appreciation, sometimes it’s critique or advice requests, and I’ve done my best to respond usefully where I can.

And after Manifest, I ended up with a few people with social anxiety or related issues who volunteered to be guinea pigs for the very specific kind of introspective skills training that I am trying to do. (Love you guys!)

So far, it’s been useful for me and, I believe, for them! I have three people who I’m meeting with reliably. But I need more. This is for a few reasons:

• As I discussed previously, I need to collect outcome data, which is hard to come by otherwise: there have been quite a few people who told me, unsolicited, that reading my stuff produced significant and lasting change for their social anxiety. Which is great! But I lack a denominator— the set of people who bounced off my work. And because these snippets come without context it’s difficult for me to tell the difference between (1) genuine lasting change by stated mechanism, (2) genuine lasting change for some other reason, (3) transient insight high from reading a (if I do say so myself) absolute banger of a piece of writing which doesn’t translate into behavioral improvement, and (4) transient but real improvement followed by regression. At least some of these comments claim to be from months after reading, which at least removes (3) and (4) as possibilities for those people; at Slutcon I saw either (1) or (4) and because of my lack of persistent relationship with those people I had no way of distinguishing “lasting change” from “fun weekend”. I’ve definitely seen at least one case of (2).

• For failure cases, I need to have more information about what caused the failure.

My theory of change around coaching is extremely concrete and specific. I suspect people who have trouble following my protocol are mostly running into one of the following issues, which can occur separately or together in any combination:

• they lack introspective access into their own anxious cognition. Many people do seem to perceive it as an unpleasant somatic fog instead of something with correct-in-its-frame logic. I think there are a lot of ways of training this introspective capacity (which goes under the name “mindfulness” in some traditions.) Need: improved introspective access, which I’m pretty sure is quite trainable, and which I have a number of ideas in how to train (post incoming).

• They notice that the anxious thoughts are not ones to identify with, but have trouble acting on this knowledge. Need: improved introspective access + improved rumination control (also a learnable skill; metacognitive therapy speaks of this, as do Michael Greenberg essays).

• They are in situations where culturally the territory is contested about what you can and should do and why, which makes it difficult to tell the difference between anxious and healthy cognition (see also: social-romantic anxiety). Need: improved introspective access + defensible principles + very specific skills training + knowledge of how different environments differ.

• They lack baseline social skills (comorbid autism is a common reason for this), and anxious modeling of other people is a method of coping with this lack of natural room-reading ability. You’ll know if this is you because people will, on a regular cadence, chew you out for somehow upsetting them. Need: concrete process-oriented social skills training, plus the other stuff. Resolving your social anxiety is going to be tricky if you frequently have people chewing you out for random things at irregular intervals.

Unfortunately I don’t have a strong model of how to train up baseline social skills for the autism case; by all means schedule a call, but know that here I will be noodling through an unsolved problem with you as opposed to executing on a model I feel confident in. But the others I can probably help with! I think a reasonable indicator for if you should reach out is if you felt seen by one of my essays, since that tells you at very least that I’m working from an accurate model of your problem as seen from the inside. (If, on the other hand, you read Abandon Hope and was like “wtf this is bullshit” then tbh i’m a bit surprised you’ve read this far.)

I predict having nonzero success, and I also think the failures will be informative in future writing. (Also, I’ll only write about any particular person’s experiences anonymized and with their permission. I am very likely to talk about the results from a particular approach I’m taking in general, without discussion of any particular person for whom it went well or poorly.)

I’m offering this at a sliding scale starting at (for now) 150 dollars an hour and ending (for now) at “free;” I’d like to make this accessible to people regardless of ability to pay, at least until my schedule gets crowded or I start really needing money. [Edit: given the number of responses I’ve received thus far, the “schedule gets crowded” clause is likely to kick in sooner instead of later.]

I believe I am quite knowledgeable on the topic of:

• Social anxiety

• Its almost-unstudied cousin, social-romantic anxiety

• Building a social and romantic life

• Partner dancing (and specifically getting through beginner hell as a lead)

I’m willing to talk about whatever, but outside my stated range I may or may not have actionable advice.

Note that I’m not a therapist and this isn’t therapy, and indeed I cannot actually treat social anxiety or anything else; this is, instead, training for a very specific set of introspective skills that I believe are load-bearing in resolving social anxiety and possibly other forms of anxiety. If you’re in acute distress I recommend seeing a therapist.

I’ll say this: any time I am asking you to do a thing I’m going to have an extremely clear mechanistic theory of change around that thing, which I will be willing to explain (and, if you like, defend) at length. I feel like “do this mysterious inner work thing because it will help somehow, trust me” is a weirdly common norm that has developed over time and I dislike it; I will never just ask you to trust the process. “Trust the process” is silly, anyone with a process and a worldview should be able to explain their theory of change and what specifically they are doing concretely, in terms a reasonable person would understand.

So reach out and I’ll shoot you a calendly link! (Also reach out if you just want to talk about your experiences with the protocol/social anxiety whether or not you need advice; I’m always fascinated to hear how people have done with it and in what contexts.)