I was a life coach who could not read a line of code

The most technical thing I did in a typical week was reschedule a Zoom call.

I was a certified life coach. My job was to sit with someone, ask the question underneath the question they had actually asked, and then stay quiet long enough for the real answer to arrive. I was good at it. I could not have told you what an API was, and if you had shown me a terminal window I would have assumed something was broken.

Then I started noticing a pattern in the coaching. People were not stuck because they lacked ambition. They were stuck because their week was full of work that should not have needed a human at all. Copying numbers between two systems. Re-typing an order that already existed in an email. Chasing the same status update every Tuesday because there was nowhere to look it up.

I kept hearing one sentence in different accents: I do not have time to work on the business because I am buried in the business.

The question I could not put down

If the problem was not motivation, then coaching was the wrong tool. You cannot mindset your way out of eleven manual steps. Somebody has to remove the steps.

So I started learning. Badly, and in the wrong order, the way you do when nobody is setting your curriculum. I broke things. I paid for tools I did not need. I lost an embarrassing number of evenings to problems that turned out to be a missing comma.

What I did not expect

How much of the coaching came with me.

Most software fails long before anyone writes code. It fails in the conversation where somebody describes what they want and nobody asks why. A client says they need a dashboard. The coaching instinct says: what decision are you trying to make? Nine times out of ten they do not need a dashboard. They need one number, on a Monday, in an email.

That instinct has saved my clients more money than any technical skill I have picked up since.

This blog is the record of working that out in public. It will not be a highlight reel.