Looking for Christian executive coaching? What to ask before you hire anyone.

The instinct that brought you here is right

Wanting a hard decision examined under something higher than your own wanting is a mature instinct rather than a naive one. It’s the recognition that your preferences aren’t a reliable authority over your life, and that the part of you doing the deciding is the same part that has been wrong before, confidently.

So the instinct is right. The question is only where to take it. Take it first to the people who already know you: a pastor, elders who know your name, a spouse, a friend who has watched you decide things for ten years and can tell you what you’re like when you’re about to talk yourself into something. That’s where most weighty decisions in history got made, and it’s still where most of them should get made.

When free counsel runs out, and when it hasn’t

There are honest cases where paying someone makes sense.

• The people who know you well don’t know your industry. Their love is real and it has no traction on the specifics. They can tell you who you are; they can’t tell you what that role will cost you in that company.
• Your pastor is carrying two hundred people and can give you twenty minutes. That isn’t a failure of care. It’s arithmetic.
• The decision is technical enough that wisdom alone doesn’t reach it. Equity terms, a partnership structure, a relocation with second-order effects that take an hour just to lay out.

If none of those are true, close this page and go talk to your people.

The one test to apply to anyone selling faith-based help, including me

Is Scripture normative here, or is it decorative?

Decorative looks like this: prayer to open, a verse in the materials, a values exercise in the middle. And then the conclusion arrives, and the conclusion is whatever you walked in with, now with a warmer feeling attached to it.

I want to be fair, because the people doing this are mostly sincere, and often genuinely helpful in the ordinary ways a thoughtful outside voice is helpful. But look at the engine underneath. The working assumption is that the answers are already inside you and the job is retrieval. The Scripture sits on top of that engine; it doesn’t drive it. If you believe the answers are already inside you, that method is coherent and you should go use it without apology. I don’t believe it. That’s a claim about human nature, and I think it’s wrong.

What changes when Scripture is normative

Two things follow, and they run in opposite directions, which is why almost nobody holds both.

The first: where God has actually spoken on a matter, the honest thing is to say so plainly, rather than asking how it sits with you. Asking someone to discover for themselves something God has already stated is a kind of flattery, and it wastes the thing they came for.

The second: most decisions aren’t like that. Most career decisions are genuinely open. Two good options, two roles where a person could serve faithfully. There’s no verse settling whether you take the operating role or stay where you are, and anyone who produces one is doing something dishonest with the text.

Both failures are real. Pretending everything is a precept puts a human judgment in God’s chair. Pretending nothing is leaves you alone with your preferences at exactly the moment you asked not to be.

In precept, a courier. In liberty, a counselor. Never an oracle.

In precept: where God has spoken, I’m carrying a message I didn’t write and can’t soften. That’s a courier’s job, and it doesn’t require me to be impressive.

In liberty: where the matter is open, I give you counsel and the reasoning behind it, argued as well as I can argue it. You weigh it. You decide. You own it.

Never an oracle: nobody sitting across from you has private access to God’s will for your life. If anyone tells you what God is saying specifically about your job offer, leave the room.

The work is stewardship, and it’s smaller than you think

You aren’t authoring meaning from scratch. You’re stewarding one decision inside a will that has already been revealed in its main lines.

Most people carrying a decision like this are carrying the wrong weight. They’ve been trying to determine whether the decision is meaningful, and that was never theirs to determine. The work actually in front of them is smaller than that, and harder.

Where I’m the wrong person

• This isn’t soul-cure. Identity reconstruction and repentance belong to Scripture, the Spirit, and a local church with real elders who know you. I expect the people I work with to be under a local body. If you aren’t, that’s the more urgent matter, and it isn’t one I can solve for you.
• This isn’t clinical care. Depression, an anxiety disorder, trauma, addiction: those are a different profession, and no amount of good thinking about a job offer will touch them.
• If you want someone with no stated position, I’m not it. I’ll tell you where I stand, and some people find that intrusive.

Common questions

Is this coaching?

No, and I decline the word deliberately rather than out of any dismissal of the profession. The coaching premise, in most of its forms, is that the answers are already inside you. That’s a claim about human nature I don’t hold. There are able and honest people coaching well for clients who do hold it. I’m declining the premise, not sneering at the people.

What if I want a straight answer about what God wants me to do?

Where God has spoken, you get a straight answer, without hedging. Where he hasn’t, you get counsel and the reasons behind it, and the decision is yours to make and yours to own. What you won’t get from me is a claimed word from God about your career.

Do I have to be a Christian for this to work?

No. I won’t pretend to a neutrality I don’t have, and I won’t press it on you either. You should know where I’m standing so you can weigh what I say.