Navigate Life and Career Choices with a Decision Coach for Executives
What is decision coaching, and how does it work?
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The decisions that built your career are not the same decisions required to navigate your life. What got you here won’t get you out!
When identity, ambition, family, timing, money, and meaning become entangled, even highly capable executives can feel stuck. Decision coaching helps you untangle complex career and life inflection points using a rigorous, science-backed framework built for uncertainty, trade-offs, and high-stakes change.
Ready for change? Book a 1:1 consultation for executives, physicians, founders, attorneys, and senior leaders navigating major transitions.
Why Personal and Career Decisions Feel Different
You've made thousands of consequential decisions. It feels like your whole life is about making them: closing the deal, making partner, scaling the company, operating on the patient (or choosing not to!), litigating that case. You wouldn’t have gotten to where you’re at if you didn’t make these sorts of decisions, on a daily basis!
So why does it feel like decisions that relate to you are so intractable?
I’ve got good news for you. The problem isn’t you.
It’s that the decisions executives face at personal inflection points are categorically different from the ones they make for others. In other words, there’s a fundamental, qualitative difference between solving a business decision and making a career decision that might affect your identity, your training, your family, your finances, your timing, and even your right to thrive.
Even worse: these kinds of decisions involve trade-offs between things that don't even share a common unit. How, for example, are you supposed to compare a $2 million compensation package with the cognitive freedom (and thorny uncertainty) of a portfolio career? How do you weigh your identity against getting rid of the Sunday scaries?
The variables aren't on the same scales, time horizons defy reliable forecasting, and the decision-maker is deeply enmeshed in the problem being analyzed itself.
And that is what we decision scientists call a “wicked problem”—it’s no wonder that you’re feeling decision paralysis!
Feeling stuck at an inflection point?
You don’t need to navigate a complex decision alone
What Is a Decision Coach for Executives?
A decision coach for executives is a thinking partner who can bring the science of decision making to seemingly intractable problems. Our work together isn't therapeutic exploration, talk therapy, or directive consulting. Instead, we unpick the wicked problem, breaking it down into its component parts, handling the uncertainty around each of those parts, and building a rigorous framework that clarifies what you actually value, what you actually know, and what genuinely follows from both.
Decision coaching helps you make this decision; it also gives you a framework for future decisions, so that the next wicked problem is just not so wicked.
Decision Making Coaching for Executives’ Complex Life and Career Choices
Decision coaching is built for the choices where the data runs out and judgment takes over. Specifically, this work helps you:
Separate signal from noise. Most consequential decisions have to do a lot. There’s a difference between how you take your latte in the morning, and a decision that is supposed to navigate the entangled questions of why, who, what, how, and when.
Surface the preferences that you haven’t yet articulated. What we say we want isn’t always what we actually want. In decision science speak: revealed preferences diverge sharply from stated ones. We figure out which is which
Broaden and stress-test the option set. The choices you're weighing may not be the choices actually available to you. We fill in that choice set until it accurately reflects your current choices.
Quantify the seemingly unquantifiable. Decision science offers formal methods for comparing across incommensurable values—meaning vs. money, identity vs. flexibility—as well as the upside and downside uncertainty that any consequential decision has to navigate.
Build a decision you can defend to others—and to your future self. Through decision coaching, you gain a process robust enough that you can stand behind it, irrespective of how the outcomes unfold.
When two roads diverge, Decision Coaching can make all the difference. Photo by Vladislav Babienko on Unsplash
Who Benefits from Decision Coaching for Executives
This work fits attorneys weighing partnership against in-house roles, finance professionals considering the move from operator to allocator, founders post-exit, and senior executives at the threshold of a pivot. It also fits physicians and surgeons navigating practice transitions—if you're in medicine, the decision coaching for healthcare professionals page addresses the specific dynamics of that field.
A Science-Backed Framework for Better Decisions
My decision coaching is built on multi-attribute utility theory, behavioral decision research, and the literature on decision-making under uncertainty. In practice, we break the decision down to its component parts. We:
Structure the problem correctly — What are you actually deciding? What are you, importantly, not deciding?
Elicit your actual preferences, today — What is this decision supposed to accomplish, for you, today?
Map the uncertainty — What is knowable? What isn’t? How do we know the best time to act anyway?
Incorporate the stakeholders — Who gets a say in this decision? Who has veto power? How do we take them into account
Build an action plan — A decision is only as good as the action that comes after it. We don’t stop at the decision; we build the steps you need to make it a reality.
The same science that underpins medical decision-making, public policy, capital allocation, and market analysis becomes a framework that has been personalized to you and your inflection points.
Not every difficult decision has a perfect answer. But there are better ways to navigate uncertainty than spinning in circles.
Why Work with Dr. Mark Shrime
Mark Shrime, MD, PhD, MPH, holds a doctorate in health policy and decision science from Harvard. As a practicing surgeon and decision scientist his academic work applies formal decision analysis to choices made under extreme uncertainty. His coaching practice brings that same rigor to executives facing the decisions that don't have right answers.
If you find yourself at an inflection, and the usual frameworks aren’t up to the task, that's a signal that the problem is more wicked than it looks—not that you're failing to solve it.
Let’s solve it together.
Facing a consequential decision?
You don’t have to navigate it alone. Work with a decision coach who knows how to guide you to a life you’re madly in love with again.
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