Positive Design Coaching
Positive Design Coaching is a human-centered coaching process designed to help individuals, leaders, athletes, and organizations create meaningful and sustainable pathways toward their desired future.
Rooted in Positive Psychology and Design Thinking, the process begins by clarifying what matters most to you—your values, goals, relationships, strengths, and vision for the future. From there, we engage in a generative process of reflection, exploration, experimentation, and refinement to help transform insight into intentional action.
While Positive Design Coaching often uses backward-design planning techniques, the process is not simply about creating a plan. It is about learning, adapting, and growing as new information, opportunities, and challenges emerge. Together, we co-construct a personalized success map that supports well-being, performance, purpose, and continued development.
The goal is simple: to help you create a life you love while developing the habits, relationships, and systems that support long-term flourishing.
How Is Coaching Different from Psychotherapy?
Although coaching and psychotherapy share some common skills and approaches, they serve different purposes.
Psychotherapy is designed to assess and treat emotional, behavioral, relational, and other mental health concerns that may be interfering with well-being, functioning, or quality of life. Coaching, by contrast, is generally future-oriented and focused on personal growth, performance, leadership, goal attainment, and intentional life design.
Positive Design Coaching is intended for individuals who are functioning well but want support in clarifying a vision, developing meaningful goals, strengthening habits, navigating transitions, or creating greater alignment between their values and actions.
In some cases, coaching and psychotherapy may complement one another. During an initial consultation, we can discuss which service is most appropriate for your needs and goals.
Choosing Your Best Path!
Positive Design Coaching begins by helping you clarify what matters most. Together, we identify a desired future, define meaningful goals, and create a practical path forward. Using backwards design principles, we start with where you want to be and work backward to identify the habits, decisions, and actions most likely to help you get there.
Stephen Covey (1989) describes this idea clearly in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People:
“To begin with the end in mind means to start with a clear understanding of your destination. It means to better understand where you’re going so that you better understand where you are now so that the steps you take are in the right direction.”
Balancing Daily!
Lasting growth requires more than achievement. It requires the ability to adapt, recover, and maintain balance amid life’s changing demands.
In Positive Design Coaching, balance is not about reaching a perfect state. It is an active, ongoing process of developing habits and practices that support self-fullness—caring for yourself in ways that allow you to show up more fully in your relationships, responsibilities, and purpose.
This kind of balance helps protect against living at either extreme: selfishness, where attention is focused primarily on oneself, or selflessness, where personal needs are consistently sacrificed for others. Self-fullness represents a healthier middle ground—caring for yourself in ways that support well-being while remaining meaningfully connected and available to others.
Living the Design Forward!
Once you have clarified your vision, developed a plan, and established supportive habits, the work becomes living it out consistently.
Positive Design Coaching emphasizes intentional action, continual learning, and healthy adaptation as you pursue meaningful goals and experiences.
“The life we design becomes real through the choices we practice, the habits we build, and the purpose we live forward.”
— Dr. David M. Harris, LCSW