Executive Coaching
Time to make a dent in the world

Overview for Podcast Hosts

Helping Leaders Grow their Impact

Eric is an executive coach who draws on twenty years of experience in the tech industry to help leaders be more effective by helping them clarify their priorities, and consciously focus their efforts where they can have the most impact. He loves to identify and challenge mindsets and/or habits that are holding clients back from their next level of leadership. Before becoming a coach, Eric spent ten years as an engineer and product manager across several startups, before joining Google and eventually leading business strategy and operations for the Google Search Ads product team as Chief of Staff for six years as it grew past $100B in revenue.

His key advice to focus on what’s in your control, which is your behavior and your actions. In particular, you can only control your next action, since the past has already happened, and the future unfolds one moment at a time. So how do your actions today, right now, contribute to the future that you want? Once you are clear on what’s most important to you, and you recognize the power you have to choose where you focus your time and attention, you become both more effective and more satisfied. Eric published his first book, You Have A Choice: Beyond Hard Work to Meaningful Impact, in November 2023 to share what he’s learned in his career and his coaching with a wider audience.

Eric’s personal journey to develop this perspective started from being at a startup that went bankrupt due to bad leadership, getting fired from another startup a few years later, then burning himself out trying to earn a promotion at his next job at Google. Once he let go of the expectations of others, and realized only he was responsible for his actions, he went on to design the life he wanted, where he does meaningful and inspiring work at the times he chooses, he spends quality time with his family, and still has time for his own pursuits to create impact in alignment with his values.

Potential discussion topics:

  • Common leadership challenges such as delegation, influence, presence, etc.

  • Mindsets that drive effectiveness, such as focusing on what’s in your control, and running experiments to learn more about what will work for you in a given situation.

  • Blockers of change, particularly the habits and mindsets that brought previous success.

  • Exploring burnout, and releasing oneself from overwhelming expectations

  • Career pivots, as Eric’s career progressed from being a physics PhD student, to a software engineer at startups for years, to running business strategy and operations at Google for ten years, before becoming self-employed as an executive coach in 2019.

A few selected podcast appearances (with more in a Spotify playlist):

Additional references and information: