I got into coaching the way most people arrive at the things that matter most to them: sideways.
I wasn't looking for a new career. I was at the high point of an old one… CSO at a global agency, 20,000 people, work that looked exactly like success from the outside. And then a traumatic brain injury in the Cascade Mountains rearranged my priorities in a way that a conference room never could have. Recovery is a particular kind of classroom. The curriculum is not optional, and the lessons don't wait for you to be ready.
What came out of that period was something I hadn't expected: a genuine reckoning with what I was actually good at, and what I actually wanted. Not the career version. The life version. And the more honest I was with myself, the more clearly I could see that the work I had always found most meaningful. In every role I'd held, from the Marine Corps to three ventures to global executive leadership, was the work of thinking alongside other people through what was real and difficult and worth figuring out.
I wanted to do that work on purpose.
So I pursued it. Studied neural plasticity, self-determination theory, neurolinguistics, cognitive behavioral therapy. Earned my certification from the Hudson Institute, and with thousands of hours of training and coaching, became ICF PCC credentialed. And built ThomasMarc & Co. around a simple conviction: that the most accomplished leaders are often the most isolated ones, and that the quality of thinking available to them matters enormously at the moments that matter most.
While leadership development as an industry often sells frameworks designed to fix what it assumes is broken in you, I have never been interested in that trade. The premise is wrong. In my experience, the people who seek real development are not broken. They are already operating at a high level. They are curious, capable, and carrying something that hasn't resolved yet: a decision they can't quite make, or one they've already made and need to think through with someone who will actually push back.
That's the work.
My clients most often come to work together because they've made a decision. Or because they can't.
That sounds like a small distinction. It isn't. Both situations share the same underlying condition: something significant is at stake, and the usual ways of navigating it aren't enough. Not because these leaders lack intelligence or experience. They have both in abundance. What's being asked of them is not a performance question. It's an identity question. Who am I becoming? What am I willing to risk? What does it cost me to stay where I am?
Those aren't questions you think your way through alone.
The work I do lives in that space. Between the decision made and the one that can't be made yet. And what I've found, consistently, is that the energy of this work is highest when both of us are fully committed to the inquiry. Not just the outcome. The inquiry itself.
Here's something I rarely say out loud, and probably should: this work is not purely service.
I don't experience it that way. When a realization lands, when something a leader has carried for years suddenly becomes visible to them, I feel it too. Not as a professional accomplishment. As something closer to shared recognition. There's a quality of presence in those moments that you can't manufacture and can't fake. Genuine transformation has a particular texture. You know when you're near it.
The people I get to work with have chosen to be in that room. They've already cleared the first bar, which is often the hardest one: the willingness to not know. To sit in the discomfort of becoming rather than the comfort of already having become. That's rare. It's also, for me, where the energy comes from.
I carry these people. That's not metaphor. The questions they're living with stay with me. The moments when something shifted stay with me. The courage it takes to do identity-level work… not performance work, not image management, not skills acquisition, but actual self-examination in the presence of another person… that stays with me too.
What I've learned is that the quality of this work is not determined by my preparation or my questions alone. It's determined by the commitment on both sides of the table. I bring everything I have. I need them to do the same. When that's true, when we are both fully in, something becomes possible that neither of us could access alone.
As for where this goes: I am more interested in what's happening at the intersection of human intelligence and AI adoption than almost anything else right now. Not because the technology is interesting (it is), but because the gap between what AI can do and what leaders can do with it is growing faster than most people are willing to acknowledge.
We are building intelligent systems faster than intelligent selves. I wrote that line a few years ago, and every year it seems more true. The organizations that will navigate this well are not the ones with the best tools. They're the ones with the highest quality of human intelligence running alongside those tools. Leaders who can think from first principles, sense patterns before they become problems, and build cultures where intelligence actually moves rather than pools at the top.
That's the work I'm building toward. It started in a hospital room in the Cascades. It lives now in every conversation I'm fortunate enough to be part of.
I still find it surprising… how much you can learn from someone else's becoming. How much I do, every time.