Find Your Coach

With over 20 years as a credentialed high school counselor, I have spent my career watching bright, capable students whose grades don’t reflect how smart they actually are. That gap between potential and performance is exhausting for students and for the families supporting them. It is what led me to found Focused Student Coaching in the San Jose Bay Area — to do the work that counseling alone doesn’t have time for.

I work with teens and college students to find what actually works for their brain — not the one-size-fits-all approach they have been handed in school. My starting point is always their strengths, and we use those strengths to build the skills they are still growing.

The work looks different for every student, but it always moves in the same direction — toward greater independence. Some weeks that means planning out assignments and study blocks. Some weeks it means figuring out why mornings are impossible or how to stop losing two hours to YouTube. The skills we build in session cover the practical stuff — time management, task initiation, organization — and the inner work that makes those skills actually stick. That includes something harder to teach but just as important: the self-awareness and confidence to know how their brain works and how to work with it.

We meet weekly, and I provide text check-ins between sessions to support accountability and keep habits and routines from falling apart between meetings.

I serve as an accountability partner, not an authority figure. My job is to support them in identifying what they want to change and following through on it — week by week, in ways that fit their life.