I recently started coaching several friends of mine. I try to help them lead happier and more productive lives. Through doing so, I've become significantly more coaching pilled.

I was previously quite skeptical of coaching. A friend of mine once told me he had 4 coaches. I did not see why this was useful or necessary. I was wrong. I now want many coaches. Here is why:

Having a thought partner who cares is helpful. Having a competent third party who cares about your growth and wellbeing to discuss matters with can often be much better than pondering alone. Even if you are highly introspective, others will prompt you in ways different to how you would prompt yourself.

Having regular coaching sessions forces regular reflection and provides accountability. I naturally spend too much time thinking about the things I find more inherently fun, and too little time thinking about things I rationally claim to be important, but that I find far less fun. Having coaching in those specific domains would force me to spend my time more closely in accordance with my stated goals. This is both through the time dedicated to the regular sessions, and because each session will generate action items to address before the next session.

Expertise is incredibly spiky. Even if you are highly generally competent, expertise is incredibly spiky across domains. I have goals in domains I don't consider myself to currently be an expert in. In some of these, I expect I'm actually significantly worse than average compared to the entire population. Clearly these are domains in which I would especially benefit from having some amount of coaching.

Even in domains in which you are an expert, others often have different perspectives. I am an AI power user. I was initially skeptical that speaking to someone who did "AI uplift" consultations would be helpful for me. But it was, as the set of things he had tried was just different to the set of things I had tried.

Most natural coaches (like your line manager at work) cannot help you with everything, and so you need multiple coaches. Many natural mentors you have are not incentivised to help you with everything. I cannot take my life problems to my manager at work. More subtly, it's hard to talk to my manager at work about career growth that looks like maybe eventually leaving the organisation and going elsewhere, or doing something very different to what I'm currently doing.

But I want to figure things out myself! I quite enjoy the process of problem solving and improving my life myself. I was worried that coaching would remove this source of joy from my life, as coaches would just tell me solutions. I now think that good coaching looks more like helping you figure out the solutions yourself, in ways that are counterfactually faster than you otherwise would; it is rarely true that a coach of yours can give you a solution immediately. Solutions are often both highly personal, and also require significant iteration based on empirical data.

If you enjoyed this piece you might also enjoy this similar piece by Ben Kuhn on how unreasonably useful one-on-one meetings can be.

Thanks to Dewi Erwan, Jeevan Fernando, Peter Hartree, Jake Mendel and Elinor Oren for discussions that led to this set of perspectives on coaching. Thanks to Elinor for suggesting I post this previously private note.