A man coaching women?

I know this work from the inside out. For years, I was a people-pleaser and I was good at it. I was the giver, the easy-going one who never needed much. The nice guy. Unfortunately, I didn't know who I was when no one needed anything from me. That was my identity, and getting honest about it was hard because I had to see the reason I was doing it. It kept me safe and gave me a feeling of worth and value.

I do this work specifically with women because I grew up watching my mother live with a difficult man for 54 years. She spent most of those years giving up pieces of herself to keep the marriage going, and I watched what that cost her.

When I first started coaching, I thought I could help men like my father, and I worked at it for a while. But sadly I learned that men like that rarely want to change. So I turned to coaching the women living with them, the ones doing all the work, carrying the relationship, and sacrificing themselves.

I'm here to help you figure out what you actually want, why you've been settling for less, and what it would take to create the life you want.

My approach isn't therapy and it isn't advice. It's a process of learning to understand your own emotional landscape, why you feel what you feel, what those feelings are protecting, and how to stop being run by them.

"Doug has this silly little rule he calls Rule Number One: you're number one, take care of yourself first, love yourself first. It sounded selfish at first. Then I began to realize that most of the problems in my relationship were happening because I wasn't taking care of myself." — Mary, coaching client

Most clients come in thinking the problem is their relationship, but what they find is that the real work is with themselves, not in a blame-yourself way, but in a this-is-actually-where-your-power-is way. I'll help you build an honest relationship with yourself, so you can trust your own choices.

If you want to see how I actually approach this, I've written out the ten principles behind the work.