Somewhat relatedly Ben Kuhn has an excellent blog post on doing one-on-ones with close friends/partners.
I have been doing them for a few years now and they have been very helpful. As of now, we have a 90-minute weekly session where we coach each other in turns; at various points, we did all of the techniques mentioned by OP but the core focus has always been on an extensive weekly review and planning.
There are problems with doing coaching/therapy-like stuff with friends: you might mess up relationships a bit; people might not be skilled enough to make the practice useful. On the other hand, these reviews can improve your friendship and are basically free (it is free as it doesn’t cost anything, and is sorta free as you probably want to hang out with your friend either way). In our case, the weekly reviews made us closer friends (which is enough to justify it); and are generally highly valued by both of us as productivity/mental health aid.
I can imagine working with a coach leading to additional gains [via learning new techniques, getting pumped by trying something new, &c] but the current setup feels like at least an 80⁄20 option. One reservation I have about posting this is that my partner is an outlier in how much he cares about his productivity.
Another option that’s common in the Civil Service is a group of 6 peers with similar jobs. Each month, two people bring a challenge they’re facing to the group for discussion. Their peers ask questions, give advice, and share their own perspectives. This works especially well if you want industry-specific advice and you can start a group with other people in your same industry.
Thanks so much for bringing this up (also, I agree that Kuhn’s post is excellent). In particular, I appreciated his emphasis on the importance of caring a lot about the coachee and their progress.
This does indeed sound like a solid 80⁄20 option. In fact, Henning Bartsch (co-author of this post) and Paul Rohde (who is now one of the best coaches I know) started their journey by doing peer coaching after Paul had tried professional coaching and are still doing it five years later.
With that said, a trained coach can have substantial object-level expertise (e.g., how to do deliberate practice, eliciting dysfunctional beliefs, and setting good goals) and process-level expertise (e.g., asking good questions, giving the right emotional support, and motivate people to take action).
One concrete opportunity for you to level up your 80⁄20 solution might be for one or both of you to experiment with professional coaching for 2-3 months and then integrate what you learn in your one-on-ones. Alternatively, you can also consider checking out this post on an algorithm for giving advice. It was before I knew much about coaching and certainly highly imperfect but perhaps it’s useful.
Somewhat relatedly Ben Kuhn has an excellent blog post on doing one-on-ones with close friends/partners.
I have been doing them for a few years now and they have been very helpful. As of now, we have a 90-minute weekly session where we coach each other in turns; at various points, we did all of the techniques mentioned by OP but the core focus has always been on an extensive weekly review and planning.
There are problems with doing coaching/therapy-like stuff with friends: you might mess up relationships a bit; people might not be skilled enough to make the practice useful. On the other hand, these reviews can improve your friendship and are basically free (it is free as it doesn’t cost anything, and is sorta free as you probably want to hang out with your friend either way). In our case, the weekly reviews made us closer friends (which is enough to justify it); and are generally highly valued by both of us as productivity/mental health aid.
I can imagine working with a coach leading to additional gains [via learning new techniques, getting pumped by trying something new, &c] but the current setup feels like at least an 80⁄20 option. One reservation I have about posting this is that my partner is an outlier in how much he cares about his productivity.
Another option that’s common in the Civil Service is a group of 6 peers with similar jobs. Each month, two people bring a challenge they’re facing to the group for discussion. Their peers ask questions, give advice, and share their own perspectives. This works especially well if you want industry-specific advice and you can start a group with other people in your same industry.
Thanks for bringing this up; I heard (and tried) something like that under a name of a mastermind group.
Interesting. What kind of effects are people experiencing as a consequence of this? Also, what’s the typical duration?
People use them for a couple of years and generally speak highly of them.
Solid. What about the duration of each session? Is it one hour?
Hi Misha!
Thanks so much for bringing this up (also, I agree that Kuhn’s post is excellent). In particular, I appreciated his emphasis on the importance of caring a lot about the coachee and their progress.
This does indeed sound like a solid 80⁄20 option. In fact, Henning Bartsch (co-author of this post) and Paul Rohde (who is now one of the best coaches I know) started their journey by doing peer coaching after Paul had tried professional coaching and are still doing it five years later.
With that said, a trained coach can have substantial object-level expertise (e.g., how to do deliberate practice, eliciting dysfunctional beliefs, and setting good goals) and process-level expertise (e.g., asking good questions, giving the right emotional support, and motivate people to take action).
One concrete opportunity for you to level up your 80⁄20 solution might be for one or both of you to experiment with professional coaching for 2-3 months and then integrate what you learn in your one-on-ones. Alternatively, you can also consider checking out this post on an algorithm for giving advice. It was before I knew much about coaching and certainly highly imperfect but perhaps it’s useful.
Thanks! This all makes sense to me.