I received a message from a previous client. We have a contract from years back. He wants to set it aside and circumvent our current contract by changing the payment terms to bypass the agency structure that I have currently held. The catch isn't the trust. The catch is that the easiest path is the one I left.
This is what I now use AI for: decision making, on the high-stakes calls where I would, on my own, drift toward the path that costs the least to walk. AI for decision making, run on a daily cadence, framed against the ONE Thing for the next twelve months. The coach is not deciding. The coach is keeping me from deciding badly under pressure.
I listened for fourteen minutes on Monday. Most of it was the other party. The ask is simple. He wants the work done, the contractors paid, and the formal contract to step back so the relationship can be more flexible. In principle, fine. I mostly trust him. We have worked together for years; he has not egregiously shafted me on payments; the parts of his past behaviour that have been less than ideal are documented well enough on the public record that I can read them as character data when they surface, not surprise.
The work itself is exactly the kind of work I deliberately walked away from twelve months ago. Larger scope, more relationships, more management. I've already gone into why I left that work. I traded it for a leaner, more solitary practice. Two clients now, one enterprise and one nonprofit, a daily BIP, a coach. I could fit my work week in a small backpack and I am not in any hurry to undo that.
But I do not want to fumble this either. The contractors involved are people I used to manage and still genuinely respect. Their allegiance is to me. Their interests are with the other party. If I get this wrong, they lose income they need, I lose revenue I had planned around, and the other party gets to call it a clean break on their own terms. My legal standing is fine. My leverage, less so. He closes nine-figure deals for a living. I run a one-person practice. The asymmetry is real.
Cool, calm, informed. Three words I have written on the inside cover of the notebook that is open next to the laptop. They are the only acceptable register for this week, and critical in a successful negotiation, which I plan on closing inside of 30 days.
So before the bulletproof coffee was gone Tuesday morning, I opened the coach and laid the situation out in full. The original contract terms. The ask. The counterparty's likely opening. The contractors' positions. The mechanics to keep transparency clean. The price of getting it wrong. The price of getting it half-right.
The coach did what it is supposed to do. It did not tell me what to do. It asked me four questions in a row that I would not have asked myself with the same neutrality at 7 AM. One of them was: if you closed this on the most generous terms the other party could realistically offer, would the work itself drift you back into the practice you walked away from? That single question is the entire post.
I framed every option against the ONE Thing for the next twelve months. The ONE Thing is the test for drift. If the answer to "does this serve the ONE Thing?" is no, the deal is no, regardless of the dollar number on it. If the answer is yes, even partially, I can negotiate. The coach is fine at running this filter on me at 7 AM and is much better at it than I am when the counterparty is on the other end of a calendar invite I have not yet accepted.
One small skill update came out of the session. The coach skill in the vault (coach-one-thing) was good at the daily check-in but was not built for one-off, high-stakes decision filtering. I added a section so the next high-stakes call gets framed against the ONE Thing automatically, plus a "what would pull me off-vision" prompt the coach surfaces without my having to ask. This is the thin harness, fat skills move Garry Tan and a few thousand of his followers introduced me to a couple of weeks back. Most of the leverage lives in the skill, not in the prompt I happen to type that morning.
Then I closed the loop. Wrote down the next move, the conditions I will and will not agree to, the worst case I am willing to accept, and the conditions under which I walk and what that even means. Logged it back to the coach so tomorrow's session starts with that context already in place. The call I am taking later this week has scaffolding around it now instead of vibes.
The negotiation itself is going to be delicate. There is a version of the next two weeks where I do not navigate this well and end up back in the practice I left, with two contractors I respect making slightly less money than they would have or maybe having to go and find new work, and a counterparty calling it generous on the way out the door. There is a version where I do navigate it well, the contractors get paid what they are owed, the relationship resets cleanly, and my week shape stays my week shape.
I will keep you posted.
A note on how candidly I am writing this. I am aware I am writing about an active negotiation on a public surface. I read Google Search Console and Cloudflare analytics every morning. By the count of cold readers actually arriving here right now, two or three people will see this post in the next 48 hours. By the time it ranks for anything that matters, the negotiation will be done one way or the other. Building in public works because the lag between writing and being read is your friend, not your enemy.
Monthly Revenues $11,800 | Clients 2 | Prospects 1 (will book once closed)
Day 33 of 365.