About Strother

Hi, I’m Strother (rhymes with Father).

I’m an entrepreneurial coach and I’m a Unicorn, dammit.

Welcome to the obligatory “About Me” section of the site.

I’ve spent a lot of my life hopping from one job to the next. One career path to another. One soul-sucking-slog through the employee route after another. (Just check out my LinkedIn Page for proof.)

While some of these jobs have of course been fulfilling and wonderful, I just couldn’t pin down that intangible and elusive job that would “check all the boxes”. I’d be super creative but living in a group house with 8 other terribly creative and terribly undernourished DC transplants. I’d be touring around the country directing musicals and acting in children’s shows but have no “home base” to call my own. I’d be working as a Director for large spas with many people “under my command” but feeling like a cog trapped in a poorly functioning machine whose main job was to keep the machine from breaking…not making sure it became a better machine. I’d be making great money in a Real Estate Research position in a fancy corporate building but truly understanding what it meant to hate your life.

I’ve also had lots of jobs that checked none of the boxes…

I’m looking at you Segway tour guide summer.

After one false start after another I found coaching.

I don’t want you to think though that this was some magical “attend a workshop and find your purpose” kind of thing either. Oh no. Although I did in fact attend the workshop (designed specifically around finding your purpose) I thought coaching was a load of crap.

I still think that a lot of coaching is – in fact – a load of crap. (More on that however in the “About Coaching” section of the website. Back to the bio!)

After tons of personal/business/career development books, multiple workshops, attempts at journaling (this is my handwriting) and hours of trying to “just do it already” I was frustrated.

A pervasive and underlying frustrated that I didn’t even really recognize. I was making decent money. I had a decent job. I lived a decent life. Decent “should” be fine.

Decent was not fine.

Decent was decent and when you’re a Unicorn, decent isn’t an option.

Becoming a Coach

I was drawn to my training program through chance and happenstance (which may or may not actually exist) and before I really knew what I was doing found myself agreeing to pay nearly half of my yearly salary for a year-long training program. (If that sentence made your stomach flip, don’t worry, it did mine too when I wrote it. What the hell was I thinking?!)

That’s the thing, I wasn’t really thinking. Sometimes you have to make moves based on a gut feeling and not logic, which is something I don’t normally do. So naturally I was terrified. It turns out this “analysis paralysis” was one of the biggest things in my way.

My life motto had become:

“Ready…

Aim…

Aim again…

Ask someone else what they think of that aim…

Check back in on the original aim to see if it still made sense to aim that way…

Aim…

Put the bow down to take a break because my arm is tired…

Go grab lunch…

Aim…

Debate trying another target altogether…

Aim…

Quit shooting all together because this is stupid.”

Turns out you will seldom hit the target this way. If you even know what the target was in the first place. Sometimes I’d just be randomly shooting hoping that I’d hit something because if I just “kept working hard” eventually that target was gonna light up.

One of my best friends has a saying about me.

“Whatever you touch turns to gold…it might turn to shit first, but it will eventually turn to gold.”

My logical processing and analyzing was forcing me to turn everything to shit first before I could just let go and let it turn to gold. My pattern had become: over analyze everything, freak out till the situation gets completely intolerable (read I’m broke and worried I’ll have to start busking if I don’t get my shit together), let go (finally) and just do the damn thing and then the heavens part and things go well.

How about we skip that middle part?

So that’s what was/is in my way. It’s always going to be something I have to be conscious of but now that I’ve been through so much training (grueling) I can at least be aware of the choice I’m making. I’m choosing to be ridiculous about how many people need to approve my business card before I print it or I’m choosing to just send them in and see how it shakes out. I’ve finally started taking the steps to live my life intentionally and I want you to give it a shot too.

So what get’s in your way? Wanna get rid of it? Tired of getting stuck? Tired of being kinda-sorta? Me too. Let’s work together.

(PS: I didn’t really know what was in my way for months of training so it’s fine if you don’t know. We’ll figure it out.)

TL:DR – I’ve done a lot of different jobs, did decently in all of them but felt it wasn’t enough. Coaching helped me break out of that (kicking and screaming because I thought it was stupid) and made me really go after the things I want. I can help you do that too without any of the unnecessary fluff. I specialize in helping people move from a place of letting life happen to them (reactionary) to creating the life and career they want (purposeful).