Steady State. Six Months, One To One.
The load does not get lighter.
You get steadier.
Six months of one to one coaching for senior technical leaders. Steady State is an engineering term for a system that holds its condition under continuous load. That is the promise.
- Duration
- Six months
- Cadence
- 12 sessions, every two weeks
- Session length
- 60 minutes
- Format
- Remote, or in person in Zürich
- Language
- English
Proof
What six months actually produces
The same questions close every engagement. Read nine years of those answers together and one pattern dominates: people arrive with a goal, the goal gets met, and the thing they name at the end is upstream of it. One client came for help with his career and job applications. What he wrote at the end was that something more important had happened, which was his thinking opening up and becoming more relaxed in general. His wife noticed the change too.
Three things repeat across those answers. They notice earlier, catching the reaction while it is forming rather than explaining it afterwards. They get deliberate about what they take on, and let go of work they would previously have held. And the need to control everything loosens, which is usually what was making the load feel immovable.
What you get
12 one to one sessions
Sixty minutes, every two weeks, for six months. Remote or in person in Zürich. The session is where the distinction gets made.
Three hours of Essence Discovery
Dedicated workshop time, separate from the sessions, spent on what you are actually built from rather than what you assembled under pressure.
Structured practice in between
Specific observations and specific actions, tested inside your real work. You come back with evidence, not intentions.
What Steady State includes
What actually Happens
The arc is deliberate. Each movement rests on the one before it, and none of them can be rushed.
Six months in three movements
Months 1 to 2
Ground
Essence Discovery opens the engagement. We map the survival mechanism that got you here, the one that is now costing more than it returns, and we name the breakdown precisely. Nothing is fixed in this phase. The work is to see clearly what has been operating out of view.
Seeing the mechanism you have been running
Months 3 to 4
Practice
You take different action in the conversations that matter, with structured observation to tell you what happened rather than what you assumed happened. Breakdown still occurs. What changes is how quickly you recognize it and how you recover.
The new way of being becomes the default
Months 5 to 6
Embody
What required attention in month three now happens without it. We build the structures that hold it in place after the engagement ends, so the change survives contact with a hard quarter.
New actions, inside real leadership situations
The fortnight
Two weeks between sessions is the design, not the calendar
The session is where the distinction gets made. The fortnight is where your life tests it. A Monday board meeting, a difficult one to one, a decision you would normally take on reflex. That is the laboratory, and two weeks is long enough for it to produce a real result.
It is also why clients arrive at session seven with evidence rather than intentions. They are not reporting what they plan to try. They are reporting what happened when they did.
A single day can change how you see. Only repeated contact with your own life changes who you are being when nobody is watching.
What shifts
Not what you can do. Who you are being while you do it.
Most coaching adds capability. You already have capability. The shift here is upstream of it. By the end you have three things: a vision you commit to out loud, a way to test a hard decision against what actually matters, and a name for the pattern that keeps hijacking you.
Before
You manage your reaction after it has already happened.
Before
Presence is something you have to summon for the important meetings.
Before
Calm depends on the week being manageable.
After
You notice the reaction forming and have a choice about it.
After
Presence is where you operate from, including in the unimportant ones.
After
Calm holds through the week that is not.
Why it works
Four pillars, applied in a specific order
Emotional Intelligence
Emotion is data about what matters and what is missing. Read it accurately and it stops running the meeting from the back of the room.
Conscious Leadership
Leading from choice rather than from the position you were promoted into. Your team feels the difference before you can articulate it.
Ontological Inquiry
Working across language, emotion, and body, because that is where a way of being actually lives. Change one and the other two pull back. Change all three and it holds.
Mindfulness Practice
The trainable capacity to notice what is happening while it is happening. This is the mechanism behind the word clients keep using, which is calm.
in their words
Six months later, in their words
Every engagement ends with a completion interview. These are answers from clients who finished the full six months. They are unattributed by choice.
I’m able to be much more proactive today than I was before.
On what changed, after twelve sessions
I became more strict about what I do and don’t do, and I can let others do projects I would have previously held onto.
On what got put down
I choose more consciously what I take on.
On what changed
Who this is for
Senior technical leaders who are already performing well and want to sustain it without narrowing their life to do so.
People who have read the books, run the frameworks, and can feel that the next gain is not a technique.
Anyone willing to be observed accurately, including in the places where the observation stings.
Leaders who can protect one hour a fortnight for six months and mean it.
Who it is not for:
Anyone looking for a tactical fix to a single problem. A one-day intensive serves that far better.
Anyone in acute crisis, where therapy or clinical support is the right first call.
Anyone whose employer is sending them here to be corrected. This only works when you want it.
Who is guiding
David Perry
Executive and Leadership Coach, Zürich
30 years in data storage before coaching, most of it in Silicon Valley and then Zürich. He was the person they brought the hard problem to. He has coached since 2016 and trained as an ontological coach with Ontoco and the Newfield Institute.
Questions
Answered before you have to ask
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Therapy generally works backward, into where something came from and how to heal it. Coaching works forwards, into what you want to bring about and what is in the way of it now. The two are complementary, and some clients do both. If what surfaces belongs in therapy, I will say so plainly rather than coach around it.
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No. Vista View is complete in itself and is not a gateway to anything. Many people do one and never the other.
On the overlap people ask about: Vista View surfaces your essence in a single concentrated day. The Essence Discovery workshops here build the structures around it, over months, inside your working life. If you have done Vista View, that day is not repeated. We start from what it already surfaced and go further.
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Six months is the shortest span in which a way of being reliably changes and stays changed. Shorter engagements produce insight that fades under pressure. Longer ones tend to drift, because the structures should be carrying it by month six rather than the coaching.
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Month two is often where it feels least comfortable, because you can now see the mechanism clearly and cannot yet do much about it. That is the design, and I will name it when we are in it. If something genuinely is not working between us, we say so directly and decide what to do about it. That conversation is part of the work.
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Yes, and many do. I invoice the company directly and can provide whatever documentation your finance or people team needs. The coaching relationship remains yours regardless of who pays.
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Completely. If your company is funding the engagement, they can be told that sessions are taking place. They are never told what is said in them. Nothing is reported back, summarised, or discussed without your explicit agreement.
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Sessions are conducted in English. Most clients in Zürich work in English daily, and the precision this work requires is easier in the language you already think in at work.
How to start
Book a First Look
20 minutes, at no cost. We get introduced, look at what you are actually carrying, and decide together whether six months of this is the right answer. If it is not, I will tell you what is.
No pricing is published. Fit comes first, then the numbers.