Spiritual Direction & Leadership Coaching
Attentive conversation for people trying to make sense of a hard road, a changing life, or the responsibility of leadership.
There are seasons when we need more than advice.
We need a place to think out loud. To pay attention. To ask better questions. To notice what we have been too busy, too close, or too invested to see.
Jarrod works with individuals in two related but distinct ways: spiritual direction and leadership coaching. Both are grounded in careful listening, honest questions, discernment, and sustained attention to the person behind the problem. But they serve different purposes.
Spiritual Direction
An ancient practice of listening, for people trying to make sense of a hard road.
Spiritual direction is one of the oldest practices of the Christian tradition. It is the work of two people meeting regularly, often over months or years, to pay attention to what God is doing in one life.
It is not therapy, and it is not coaching. A director does not diagnose and does not prescribe. The director listens, asks the honest question, and helps you notice what you might otherwise miss.
Jarrod has been formed by this practice as both a receiver and a giver of direction. He works with a small number of people each year, in person when possible and over video when not.
If you are trying to make sense of a hard season, a lingering question, or a faith that is changing shape, spiritual direction offers a place to pay attention to what is happening beneath the surface—and perhaps to what God is doing within it.
You might be looking for spiritual direction if...
You are in the middle of a hard season and cannot yet name what it is asking of you: grief, illness, vocational upheaval, or the slow undoing of a life you thought you were going to have.
Your faith is changing shape, and you are not sure whether what is happening is a loss, a growth, or both at once.
You are trying to make a serious decision—about work, calling, family, or where to spend your life—and want to think it through with someone who takes both the practical and spiritual dimensions seriously.
You have been faithful for a long time and are wondering what the next stretch of the road is supposed to look like.
You are living with a serious diagnosis, or you love someone who is, and you are trying to figure out what it means to keep faith while carrying that weight. Jarrod is a liver transplant recipient and knows this territory from the inside.
You are between traditions or between churches, and you want a place to think honestly about God without being sold on an answer.
Leadership Coaching
For people carrying responsibility who need a place to think clearly about what comes next.
Leadership can be strangely lonely.
Executives, senior leaders, pastors, and others entrusted with significant responsibility spend much of their lives helping other people solve problems. They are expected to make decisions, manage conflict, interpret changing environments, develop people, cast vision, and know what to do next.
But leaders also need somewhere to think.
Jarrod's approach to coaching shares some of the attentiveness of spiritual direction, but coaching has a different aim. It is more active and more directly focused on leadership, decisions, challenges, and movement.
The goal is not for a coach to run your organization from the passenger seat or simply tell you what to do. Good coaching creates enough space to see the situation more clearly, uncover assumptions, identify possibilities, and decide how you want to move forward.
For leaders who desire it, Jarrod's theological and spiritual background can also become part of the conversation. Leadership is never merely about technique. Questions about ambition, identity, vocation, success, failure, power, relationships, and the kind of person you are becoming often sit just beneath the practical problems leaders bring into the room.
You might be looking for coaching if...
You carry significant leadership responsibility and need a confidential place to think out loud with someone outside your organization.
You are navigating a transition, organizational change, conflict, growth, or a difficult decision.
You know where you want your organization or ministry to go but are struggling to translate vision into action.
You have become successful at what you do but are beginning to ask whether the way you have been leading is sustainable.
You are stepping into greater responsibility and want to grow into it without losing yourself in the process.
You are a pastor or ministry leader navigating the unusual intersection of organizational leadership, vocation, theology, institutional politics, and care for people.
You do not simply want another leadership technique. You want to become more attentive to the kind of leader—and the kind of person—you are becoming..
Which One Is Right for Me?
The boundary is not always obvious at first.
Spiritual direction begins with attention: What is happening in my life with God? What is stirring in me? What is this season asking of me?
Leadership coaching begins more often with movement: What am I facing? What am I trying to accomplish? What is getting in the way? What kind of leadership does this moment require?
Sometimes a conversation that begins with a leadership problem reveals a deeper question of vocation. Sometimes spiritual discernment has practical consequences for work and leadership.
The practices can share a quality of conversation without becoming the same thing.
If you are not certain which kind of conversation you need, that is fine. You do not have to diagnose yourself before reaching out.
The first conversation can simply be about where you are, what you are carrying, and what kind of work together might be most helpful.