After ten years as a consulting partner with Booz Allen & Hamilton providing analytics and recommendations to "Top 100" CEO clients, I migrated full time to my life calling: coaching the boss. No more overseeing young MBAs doing studies and analysis. No more powerpoint presentations to large senior leadership teams, no more facilitating or writing drafts of strategic plans. Instead, intimacy with the CEO, being a safe sounding board, actively listening, asking tough questions others won't or don't know to ask, introducing frameworks to help the boss "self-discover" assumptions, beliefs, analogies that need to change and information that they need to obtain before a decision. About the business. About personal life. About deep-seated desires and fears. And then my observing a transformation of thinking, of feeling, of action and outcomes. I have been told that I have a gift: the ability to listen, read people's inner thoughts, help articulate something otherwise confounding in simple terms, provide alternative ways to think about a challenge. While there are dozens of tools and frameworks that are instrumental, it is a privilege (sometimes daunting) to be trusted with access to the heart, to the core, to the center of a leader in the hope of revelation of truth and clarity. And with the gift as with my 50 years of piano playing, investing 10,000 hours and paying attention is the key to the never-attained level of desired mastery. And while I will never stop learning from my peers, from my clients, from reading, this is now what I do. It is more than that -- it is who I am. Brought up to share, I have helped create workshops for non-profit CEOs, interviewed with a student audience sitting CEOs about what shaped them to be able and want to lead, post blogs based on real world experiences, publish a book about the early shaping years of 35 CEOs, share my learning with peer coaches (including a good friend a lot like me, but born in and working in Shanghai).In a new chapter starting in 2019, my world included board membership on Burke Neurological Research Institute, teaching Positive Intelligence to clients and friends and team membership on pro bono work by HBS Community Partners in Northern California and New York.