SPARC

Opening your page

Executive Coaching

Welcome, Dana

This page is yours. It holds what we talked about in our setup conversation: how coaching works, what a session looks like, how we will find a rhythm, and the two or three things worth doing before we begin.

Your portal is where things are waiting for you.

Enter Your Portal
Dr. Mathew Johnson, Ph.D., PCC

Dr. Mathew Johnson, Ph.D., PCC

Your Coach

Dana, I appreciated the conversation on Tuesday, particularly the part where you named the pull between what the role asks of you publicly and how you actually want to lead. That is worth returning to.

Nothing below needs to happen at once. Read what is useful, start the two profiles when you have a quiet half hour, and bring whatever comes up to our first session.

The Practice

What coaching is, and what it is not

Coaching is a professional relationship focused entirely on your goals and your development. It is non-directive, which means your coach does not tell you what to do. Through skilled questioning and structured reflection, the work helps you find your own answers, see the situation from angles you had not considered, and build change that holds.

Coaching is not therapy, consulting, mentoring, or advising. SPARC coaches do not diagnose, direct decisions, or provide legal or financial guidance. If something you bring falls outside the scope of coaching, your coach will say so directly and help you identify the right kind of support.

Most professional relationships you navigate carry political stakes, performance implications, or an organizational agenda. This one does not. Your coach is not evaluating your performance, not reporting upward, and not advancing an interest of their own. That is what makes the space usable. SPARC coaches practice under the ethical standards of the International Coaching Federation and the Academy of Executive Coaching.

The Session

What a typical hour looks like

Sessions run fifty minutes on Zoom. Each one follows a purposeful arc. It is less a straight line than a spiral that keeps deepening as the work accumulates.

  1. Creating space

    Establishing rapport, shared purpose, and a willingness to be challenged.

  2. Exploring context

    Checking in on what has happened since we last met, and framing a topic around what matters most right now.

  3. Defining focus

    Identifying the specific question or challenge that will anchor the conversation.

  4. Deepening awareness

    Asking hard questions, clarifying assumptions, and reflecting back what your coach sees and hears.

  5. Integration

    Where new perspective and possibility emerge, and feed back into the broader work.

Rhythm

Finding a cadence that fits your year

Coaching cadence is a working decision, not a fixed schedule, and it usually changes as the engagement matures. Three patterns are common.

  • Weekly. Useful early, during a transition, or when something is actively in motion and you want the shorter loop.
  • Every other week. The most common steady state. Enough room to act between sessions, close enough to keep continuity.
  • Monthly. Suits a maintenance phase, or a stretch of the year where the calendar simply will not bend.

We will start where it makes sense and adjust openly. You can book directly using the link below. If nothing on it works for you, email me and we will do our best to accommodate.

Book a Session

Where We Start

Your portal

Everything for our work together lives in one private space: the profiles I ask you to complete, any worksheets we use along the way, and every report I write for you. It stays available for the length of our engagement, so you are never hunting through email for something I sent you in March.

Signing in takes one step. Enter your email and I will send you a link that opens your portal. Your device remembers you for thirty days after that.

Enter Your Portal

Waiting for you now: two short profiles. Neither has right answers, and your first reaction is usually the most accurate, so there is no need to overthink any item. We will read them together in an early session.

The Grounding Profile

A short baseline of how you read your body's signals, the kind of awareness that supports regulating under pressure and staying present with the people around you. You take it now and revisit it later, so the movement becomes visible.

About 10 to 12 minutes.

The Foundations Profile

A read of your standing personality patterns across the five broad domains that shape how you lead. It forms part of the foundation the rest of your development builds on.

About 12 to 15 minutes.

Your responses stay confidential and are used only to inform our work together. You can read how we handle them on our Privacy and Policies page. If anything gets in the way, email me and I will be glad to help.

Further Along

Two more instruments, when the time is right

Assessment produces insight. Insight is the first necessary step. What turns a moment of awareness into sustained growth is a coaching relationship that knows how to make the data mean something over time, in the context of your institution and the pressures you are actually navigating. So we sequence these deliberately rather than front-loading everything.

CliftonStrengths

Once we have worked through the first two profiles, CliftonStrengths becomes a useful third lens. It names what you do naturally well, which matters most when you are deciding where to spend a finite amount of energy. I will send access when we get there.

The Leadership Circle Profile

Down the road, the LCP is the most developmentally substantial instrument we use. It maps creative competencies against reactive tendencies and shows how the two relate, which is what makes it useful in a way most 360 instruments are not. It asks for real readiness, so we take it up when you are ready for it.

Before We Begin

One piece of housekeeping

The coaching engagement agreement sets out what you can expect from me, what I ask of you, and how confidentiality works, including the specific circumstances where it has limits. It also covers session recording and the use of AI tools. Please read it and confirm at the bottom of the page.

Read and Confirm the Agreement

Where the stakes are real

I am glad we are doing this

If a question comes up between now and our first session, write to me directly. This page stays live for the length of our work together, so you can come back to it whenever it is useful.

Email Mathew