I’ve sat in both chairs: the one where the buck stops, and the one where the truth comes out.
For twenty years I’ve been an operator. Multi-unit quick-service restaurants. A fuel station. A commercial real estate portfolio with tenants, roofs, and renewals. Payroll every two weeks, whether or not I felt like a leader that morning. I know what a business does to the person holding it — because mine did it to me.
That’s what sent me back to school in my forties. I trained as a therapist, and for the past six years I’ve practiced as a Registered Psychotherapist (Manitoba, Canada), working with high performers whose inner lives were quietly running — and sometimes ruining — their outer ones. Along the way I wrote the From Chaos to Calm series, four books on anger, anxiety, and the work of leading yourself first.
Coaching is where those two lives meet. I work with founders and executives using an Internal Family Systems–informed approach: practical, direct, and aimed at the pattern underneath the performance. No incense. No hustle-porn. Just the most leveraged work you can do — on the one asset every part of your business depends on.
I live in Manitoba, Canada with my family, and work with clients across the United States and Canada by video.
Coaching is not psychotherapy, counselling, or mental-health treatment, and no therapist–client relationship is created. Scott Johannson is a Registered Psychotherapist in Manitoba, Canada; he does not practice psychotherapy in the United States. If you are in crisis, call or text 988 (US) or 9-8-8 (Canada).