title: "How Coaching Helped Me Tune Into My Inner Voice" date: 2026-02-02 author: David Sanker
There's a particular kind of quiet that descends on a kitchen at midnight. The refrigerator hums. The rest of the house is asleep. And you're standing there, not because you're hungry, but because something is turning over in your mind and you don't quite know what to do with it.
I've spent a lot of late nights in that kitchen. Some of them wrestling with a contract that didn't sit right. Some of them sketching out code for a legal automation tool that probably had no business existing yet. Some of them just sitting with a discomfort I couldn't name.
For a long time, I thought that discomfort was noise. Something to push through, analyze away, or simply ignore until morning. Coaching taught me it was data.
TL;DR
- Coaching revealed the importance of interpreting emotions and instincts as real information.
- Active listening turned inward fosters clearer decision-making and genuine personal growth.
- Structured reflection — not just external feedback — is what sharpens your inner voice over time.
Key Facts
- Coaching promotes self-reflection by surfacing assumptions that quietly constrain how we think and choose.
- Active listening applied internally — not just toward others — helps align emotion with action.
- Structured reflection, like a standing Friday afternoon review, creates space for strategic rather than reactive thinking.
- Identifying bias during coaching opens pathways to creative potential that analytical frameworks tend to overlook.
Confronting the Blind Spots I Didn't Know I Had
I came to coaching the way a lot of lawyers approach most things: cautiously, with healthy skepticism, and a mental notepad ready to poke holes in the methodology.
What I didn't expect was to have holes poked in me.
Early in the process, a coach asked me a question I've since returned to many times: "What assumptions are you making that might not be true?"
It sounds simple. It isn't. I sat with it for a long moment and realized I had quietly, systematically, been dismissing my own creative instincts. Somewhere along the way — law school, probably — I had filed myself under "analytical" and closed the drawer on everything else. I told myself that rigor and imagination were different skill sets, and I had chosen one.
That's a bias. It's the kind that doesn't feel like a bias because it's dressed up as self-knowledge.
For lawyers especially, there's a tendency to assume that complexity demands complexity — that an intricate problem requires an intricate solution. Coaching showed me that this assumption often gets in the way. Some of the most elegant legal arguments I've ever constructed were also the simplest ones. The same turned out to be true in code.
The feedback loop in coaching doesn't work the way I expected, either. It's not someone telling you what you're doing wrong. It's more like a mirror held up at an angle you've never seen before. When I was deep in building out a contract automation tool — trying to reconcile the technical architecture with existing data protection frameworks — I initially missed a user experience problem that had been nagging at me quietly the whole time. My coaching practice had trained me to pay attention to that nagging. I went back and found it. The instinct had been right. I just hadn't been listening.
Listening to Yourself the Way You'd Listen to Someone Else
Active listening is something lawyers learn early. You learn to hear not just what someone says, but what they're trying to say — the hesitation before an answer, the word choice that reveals the real concern underneath. We're trained to do this for clients, for witnesses, for opposing counsel.
We're rarely trained to do it for ourselves.
The shift I made, with coaching, was to bring the same quality of attention to my own internal dialogue. When I was evaluating how new AI regulation would interact with a development project I cared about, I started doing something that felt almost strange at first: I resisted the immediate analytical reflex. Instead, I held the concern in my mind for a moment longer. I mentally walked through every tension I was sensing before I started categorizing and solving.
It sounds like slowing down. It actually sped things up, because I stopped wasting energy defending conclusions I'd reached too quickly.
In negotiation, this matters enormously. You cannot effectively advocate for a position you haven't honestly examined. Understanding your own priorities — not just the ones you're supposed to have, but the ones you actually have — is what allows you to recognize a good outcome when it appears, rather than holding out for one that exists only in your head.
The Friday Afternoon Pause
At some point in building both a law practice and a software company simultaneously, with a family and a coaching practice woven in between, I had to get honest about something: I was moving too fast to learn from what I was doing.
I started blocking Friday afternoons. Not for client work. Not for code reviews. Just for looking back at the week.
This is the part of the post where I expect some readers to roll their eyes, and I understand why. In a world that rewards output, sitting quietly with your own thoughts can feel indulgent. But the retrospective has become one of the most strategically valuable things I do.
During one such session, I noticed a pattern I genuinely hadn't seen in the moment: on a complex privacy compliance project, I had been consistently resolving tensions between ethical considerations and technical efficiency in favor of efficiency. Every single time. I had good reasons in each instance. But the pattern told a different story — one about where my defaults lived and what I was quietly optimizing for.
Seeing that pattern changed how I approached the next project. That's not something a more efficient work schedule would have given me.
Journaling helps. Mind maps help, especially when I'm trying to see how legal frameworks and technical systems interact — which is often, given what I spend my days doing. The tool matters less than the intention: to externalize what's inside, so you can actually look at it.
Emotions Aren't the Opposite of Analysis
This took me longer to accept than I'd like to admit.
In legal practice, you learn to be suspicious of feelings. Evidence matters. Logic matters. How you feel about the facts is largely irrelevant. I carried this framework into most of my professional life, and it served me reasonably well — until it didn't.
Coaching reframed emotions for me not as distractions from clear thinking, but as early-warning systems. They surface before the analysis has caught up. During contract negotiations, I started paying attention to moments of unexplained discomfort — a clause that felt off before I could articulate why, a term that produced a low-level unease I initially dismissed. More often than not, when I followed the discomfort rather than setting it aside, I found something worth examining more carefully.
This isn't about letting feelings drive decisions. It's about letting them inform the questions you ask. There's a difference.
The practical version of this looks like: "I'm feeling resistance here. What's that about?" Sometimes the answer is that the clause really is problematic. Sometimes the answer is that I'm tired and irritable. Emotional intelligence, as I've come to understand it, is the ability to tell the difference.
What I Actually Do Differently Now
- I stop periodically and ask what assumptions I'm currently operating under — especially when I feel certain.
- I schedule reflection time and protect it, not as a reward but as a working tool.
- When I feel something I can't immediately explain, I slow down rather than push past it.
- I practice the same quality of listening with myself that I try to bring to a difficult client conversation.
- I use journals and mind maps not to record decisions, but to think through them.
FAQ
Q: How can coaching help me discover biases in my decision-making? A: Coaching works largely by asking the questions you haven't thought to ask yourself. Prompts like "What assumptions are you making that might not be true?" create enough space to examine beliefs you've been treating as facts. Over time, this becomes a habit of mind rather than just a coached exercise.
Q: What does active listening have to do with personal growth? A: Most of us learn to listen outward — to other people, to data, to feedback. Active listening turned inward means paying attention to your own hesitations, instincts, and emotional responses with the same rigor. It tends to reveal misalignments between what you say you value and what you're actually doing.
Q: Why carve out structured reflection time when there's always more to do? A: Because busyness and learning aren't the same thing. Without reflection, you can work for years and accumulate activity without accumulating wisdom. The Friday afternoon pause isn't about slowing down — it's about understanding where you've been so you can be more intentional about where you're heading.
Closing
I am a lawyer who builds software. I'm an engineer who litigates. I coach people while still figuring things out myself. These aren't contradictions — they're the same impulse expressed in different languages. The common thread is that each of these practices has taught me to pay closer attention: to the contract, to the system, to the person across from me, and eventually, to myself.
The inner voice isn't mystical. It's just the part of your mind that has noticed something before you found the words for it. Coaching didn't give me a new voice. It helped me get quiet enough to hear the one that was already there.
What would you hear, if you gave yourself a moment of that kind of quiet?
AI Summary
Key facts: - Structured reflection, practiced consistently each Friday, surfaces patterns in decision-making that real-time work obscures. - Coaching surfaces hidden assumptions that constrain both creative and analytical thinking. - Treating emotional cues as data — rather than noise — improves the quality of professional judgment.
Related topics: self-reflection, decision-making strategies, coaching techniques, personal growth, internal dialogue, active listening, bias identification, structured reflection.