Deep coaching for people who are very good at what they do
and are stuck on something else.
One-on-one work with individuals, executives, and founders. Year-long partnerships with senior leadership teams.
Based in San Diego, working by phone and video with clients across the country.
Most people arrive here having already tried the obvious things.
You’ve had the same conversation with the same person four times. The decision has been clear for months and you still haven’t made it. You’re doing the thing you’re best at and it has stopped feeling like anything.
These get treated as problems of time, or communication, or focus. They’re usually not.
They’re symptoms of how you’re operating underneath — which is harder to see from the inside than anything else you deal with.
That’s the level I work at.
Two ways to work together
Long-term individual coaching for people who want to change something fundamental about how they operate — not add another technique to the pile.
Some of the people I work with this way are executives and founders. Others have built a life that looks right from the outside and doesn’t feel right from the inside. What they have in common is that they’re done managing it. This is the work I care about most.
This is expensive and I take few clients, so if price is the deciding factor, I’m not the right coach.
People also tend to come to me about one specific thing. It rarely stays contained to that thing. That’s worth knowing going in.
One person at a time
The same work, at organizational scale. Sometimes a CEO recognizes that the leadership team has become a group of strong individuals rather than a team. Decisions slow down, the same issues resurface, and nobody can quite name why.
I partner with five to eight senior leaders across a full year. Individually and together.
The individual work is what makes the team work possible; you can’t align a group of people who haven’t each done their own reckoning first.
I take a maximum of two of these partnerships a year. That’s not scarcity marketing — it’s what the work requires.
An entire senior team
Hi, I’m Denise Yamada
Most people who reach out to me are good at what they do. That’s usually the problem. They’ve gotten this far on being capable, and capable isn’t what this asks for. It’s a strange, disorienting place to be, and most people in it don’t say so out loud.
Before I coached, I spent 23 years in broadcast journalism: as a correspondent and co-host for Good Morning America, and as a primary anchor in markets before and after. Along the way, I won seven Emmy Awards.
What that career taught me was how to sit across from people who were the best in the world at something, and to hear what they weren’t saying. The version an audience sees and the person in the chair are rarely the same person. I learned not to be impressed by the first one.
I’m a Professional Certified Coach through the International Coaching Federation, and I lead the San Diego cohort of Accomplishment Coaching’s ICF-accredited training program. That means I’m the coach who trains the coaches.
“…her approach was far more profound.”
“Prior to working with Denise, I was certain that executive coaching programs were merely predictable goal planning exercises wrapped in platitudes about how to succeed in business. By end of my first session, it was clear that her approach was far more profound. Her program was structured but not constrained, our conversations were unscripted and authentic, and the exercises were introspective and purposeful. Denise’s executive coaching helped evolve my perspectives and provided me with a framework to understand who I am and how I am – professionally and personally. My time spent working with Denise was invaluable and I am grateful for the opportunity to have worked with her.”
— Jared Mathey, Executive VP, INDUS
Start with a conversation
No preparation required. We’ll talk about what’s actually going on, and by the end you’ll know whether this is worth continuing.