Something built your thinking.
John David Hoag has spent twenty-five years teaching capable people how their own thinking is built, and how to change it deliberately. Private sessions by telephone, with clients around the world.
The Work
Yours has a structure — how aims are built, how reactions run, how decisions click. Structure can be inspected and improved, deliberately. That is the work.
Every top athlete and business executive knows the value of mental conditioning and sharp focus. What is less often said is that the conditioning has a structure, and a structure can be inspected and adjusted rather than merely hoped for.
An aim can be badly built the way a sentence can be badly built, and no amount of drive rescues a badly built one. The construction can be examined directly: what you would see and hear if you had it, whether it is actually yours, and what the rest of your life pays for it.
Twenty-five years coaching corporate teams and individuals in best communication practice. Most of what goes wrong between capable people is structural rather than personal, and structure can be changed.
Sometimes a mind is running instructions written long ago, for conditions that no longer apply. They are not character. They are patterns, and a pattern has edges you can find.
The body acts on the account it is given of a situation, and it acts faster than any decision you might make about it. That is why steadiness under pressure is seldom a matter of trying harder. The account itself can be worked on.
The point is not a series of sessions. The point is that once you have the skills, you can apply them in any situation, without me in the room.
About
A professional trainer, coach and therapist in Neuro-Linguistic Programming, based in Seattle, Washington. Private sessions by telephone with clients around the world.
John has coached corporate teams and individuals in best communication practices for over twenty-five years. He held Director and Management level positions at Stanford University, Adobe Systems, AltaVista, The Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, and Women's Wire. He is a 1974 graduate of The American University in Washington, D.C., where he studied Interdisciplinary Communications: Film, Drama and Literature.
He works with both simple and complex matters. His style is welcoming and supportive as well as direct, and he holds to the highest standards of ethics and integrity. Sessions can be arranged on an hourly basis or on monthly or quarterly tracks.
You are invited to request a twenty minute phone consultation, at no charge, to describe what you want, ask questions, and judge for yourself whether this is the right work for you.
Clients
"John is incredibly gifted. He truly understands the deeper structure of our human experience. He has a rare ability to quickly pinpoint the unconscious blocks that keep his clients from being their best selves, and he knows exactly how to guide them to their next level of success. I have referred numerous coaching clients to him over the years."
"By the time we got to the third item on my list of changes I hoped to make, I could no longer remember why I had any of the items on my list. I could not even imagine that they were ever problems."
"John Hoag is a masterful guide who identified a forceful limitation I had held for years. He increased exponentially the effectiveness of communication between my husband and me, and we use our new skills as if they are second nature."
"I found this to be low stress but high impact work, different from psychodynamic therapy in not seeking to relive and expose my lowest lows, but focused on identifying and achieving my highest good."
"John is very insightful and has a lot of great tools for helping people get off it and move forward with whatever it is they need to do. I could not recommend him highly enough."
"My sessions with John opened new perspectives of the highest value for me. The changes are beneficial and stable."
All quotes are included with permission. Names are omitted for client confidentiality.
Articles
Learning about this work is useful. Experiencing it is another matter entirely. These three are the ones people come back to.
Twenty-two language patterns to handle with care. The closest thing there is to a manual for hearing what a sentence leaves out, and the most read piece on this site.
What a sentence takes for granted before it says anything at all. Advanced language patterns, written for serious students.
Twenty-nine language forms, 308 cards, as a drill you can run in your browser. Training programs send their students straight here.
Contact
Could you be using your brain to better advantage? A twenty minute phone consultation costs nothing and settles the question.