Welcome to Agbundance.

I hired Wade as an executive coach during the hardest professional stretch of my career. I want to be specific about what made him different, because I think it is the thing people should know before they work with him.

I came to him having already made my decision. I was not looking for help deciding whether to stay in a difficult situation. I was looking for the tools to stay. Wade took that at face value. He did not spend six months arguing with my premise or steering me toward the conclusion he would have picked for himself. He accepted my constraint and worked inside it, which is much harder than telling someone to quit.

What that looked like in practice: he would walk me right up to the hardest conversation, get me ready for it, and then let me go handle it. Every time. He taught me to bring problems forward as solutions instead of complaints, and to tell the difference between what I actually knew and what I was only feeling. I use both of those every single week, years on.

He is also honest in a way that lands rather than stings. He recently asked me a question about my own judgment that I had been avoiding for four years, and he asked it gently enough that I could actually hear it.

If you are a leader carrying something heavy, Wade is who I would send you to.