A Coaching Conversation Practice
The Sounding Line.
Before instruments, sailors measured depth with a weighted rope: drop it over the side, feel where the bottom is, know what water you're actually in. That is what a real conversation does.
A Coaching Conversation Practice
Before instruments, sailors measured depth with a weighted rope: drop it over the side, feel where the bottom is, know what water you're actually in. That is what a real conversation does.
§ 01 · Why This Name
A sounding line tells you the truth about the water you're in. And sounding is also what a voice does.
The word runs through everything I make. The press I founded has an editorial lane named Soundings. The book I'm writing goes under and stays there a while. The poems take depth measurements of ordinary mornings. This practice is where the measuring happens out loud, with another person holding the other end of the line.
§ 02 · The Frame
There is a serious body of thought that treats conversation as the place where reality gets made, not merely described. Fernando Flores built it out of the philosophy of language; Chalmers Brothers and Vinay Kumar carried it into leadership in Language and the Pursuit of Leadership Excellence. The claim underneath ontological coaching is simple and enormous: we live in language. A declaration is not a comment on your life. It is an act that changes it. I do. I resign. I'm going to write the book. Nothing in the room moves when you say it, and everything in the world does.
A poet stakes his whole working life on that claim. Bringing words into existence, so that something exists that didn't before, is the only job I've ever had: in the poems, in the books I edit and publish, in the writers and creatives I coach, in the retreats I lead, and in every conversation I host on The Difficulty. The Sounding Line is that same act, turned toward your life.
§ 03 · The Practice
Not a course, not a program, not advice delivered on a schedule.
The Sounding Line is a sustained series of one-on-one conversations. We meet regularly over a season. You bring the question your life is actually asking; the work is to take its depth honestly, and then to say, out loud, what you find — because what gets spoken can be acted on, and what stays vague stays in charge.
I bring what I have: twenty years among writers and their manuscripts, seminary training in the disciplines of discernment, ICF-accredited coaching, and certification in the Enneagram — which I use the way a sounding weight is used, to find where things actually rest, not to file anyone under a number.
It is for people at a crossing: writers moving from stuck draft to real book, leaders whose first-half self has stopped working, makers deciding what the next decade is for.
§ 04 · The Talk
Chad's TEDxChattanooga talk, Breath, Surrender, and Your Courageous Conversation, is the practice in miniature: the breath that steadies you, the surrender that opens you, and the conversation you've been circling that will not leave you alone until you have it.
§ 05 · What It's Like to Work With Him
§ 06 · How It Works
A small number of people at a time — the practice depends on my being unhurried.
We begin with a single exploratory conversation, no cost and no obligation, so we can both hear whether this is the right work. From there, engagements run by the season.
§ 07 · Begin
Write a few honest lines about where you are. That's the whole application.