Why Work With Us | Refactor=EQ

We work on the person. The company follows.

Founders and senior operators tend to be coached as extensions of their companies: fix the leader so the metrics move. We start from the other end. You have a vision, for the company and for your life, and the gap between that vision and how you're actually experiencing your days is where the work is. When the person running the company is clearer about what they value and what they want, the company starts to look like it. So does the team, the culture, and the decisions that used to keep you up.

What gets stronger.

The questions people bring change with the stage of the company. What the work builds underneath them changes less. Over an engagement, this is what tends to get stronger:

Trusting the people around you with real weight, without handing over the company or hovering over every decision.
Being trusted back for how you deal with people, not for the title, so what you hear from your team is true.
Taking anxiety as information about what matters, instead of something to push down or pass on to everyone in the building.
Holding authority without going quiet inside it. The person running the company is often the loneliest person in it. The work makes that less true.
Noticing what's happening in a room while it's happening, the tension everyone can feel and no one has named, and saying something useful about it.
Staying yourself under pressure, so the version of you that shows up when things go wrong is closer to the one you'd choose.

The vision includes your life, so the work does too. There's no scorecard for any of this. You'll know, and so will the people around you.

You're matched to a coach. You don't have to guess.

You book with Refactor=EQ, we read your intake together, and you're matched to the coach whose work fits yours. Co-founders who both want coaching can each have their own. When someone else on your senior team wants coaching, we can take them too, so the company's vision and the people carrying it get worked on together instead of in separate rooms.

Depth most executive coaching doesn't have.

Every coach here is a licensed psychotherapist with a separate practice and decades of clinical work behind them. Our coaches teach and facilitate Interpersonal Dynamics at Stanford GSB, and have coached founders behind ventures collectively valued at over $50 billion, and investors collectively managing more than $300 billion in assets. That combination means we can go to the places most coaching politely avoids, the ones underneath the leadership question, and still keep the work aimed at what you're building. It also means we know how to work with the body's intelligence. Many of the people we coach have spent years living from the neck up. We help them access the rest of the intelligence their body holds, and build on it.

The method has sources. These are the ones we hold in the room, usually without announcing them. Choose one to see what it brings.

Youand the vision you're building

The Stanford course on how trust, feedback and influence actually work between two people. It is the frame most of our sessions run on.
Decades of research on what keeps close partnerships steady under strain. It applies to co-founders as much as to couples.
The longest-running study of adult life. Its finding: the quality of your close relationships predicts your health and happiness more than money or status does.
People change when there is somewhere steady enough to be unfinished. Much of the work is building that place.
The body registers pressure before the mind names it. We work with both.
How to lead a group without absorbing everyone else's anxiety, and why the calmest person in the room has the most influence.
Why insight alone rarely changes behavior, and what does.
Every coach here is a licensed psychotherapist. That training sits under all of it.

The reading list has the books we actually hand to clients.

We'll tell you what we see.

The people around you already know your patterns. Most of them will never take the risk of telling you. Our job is to reflect an accurate picture of where you are right now, to hold your vision as the thing we're working toward, and to help you bridge the gap between the two. Sometimes the vision isn't clear yet. Part of the work is finding it. There's no proprietary model with a name and a pyramid. The room, an honest read, and someone who knows how to hold what comes up. That's the work.

Relationships that compound.

We leave the length of the engagement open on purpose. Most clients stay with us for years, because the benefit compounds. Billing is quarterly. There's no end date built in. The work continues as long as there's value.

The lines we hold.

Refactor=EQ is coaching. Our therapy practices, Diana Chu and Gina Engracia, LMFT, are legally and operationally separate. They don't share records with Refactor=EQ, and a client of one is not automatically a client of the other. If what you need is therapy, we'll tell you, and we can usually make the referral.

What you bring to your coach stays with your coach. On complex cases we may consult one another, always holding confidentiality. Your name and company will never be shared without your consent.

Why work with us.