Meet the Coach
My name is Mike Posner. I’m a trained psychotherapist, a sales and leadership consultant, and a performance coach for founders, executives, and professional athletes. I have worked with hundreds of patients in private practice, trained and managed hundreds of salespeople in business, and worked with more than 30 founders, CEOs, and business executives over the course of my career. These experiences paired with my clinical and professional training have offered me a great laboratory from which I’ve been able to observe and uncover the patterns that both sabotage success as well as those that unlock it. My work functions at the crossroads of wellness, leadership, and performance psychology.
My Journey into Leadership & Executive Coaching
My background spans business, education, and mental health. With a graduate degree in clinical psychology, I began my career as a psychotherapist. As a clinician, I had an outpatient practice and worked across a variety of inpatient psychiatric and medical settings. I then entered the business world where I transitioned to sales and sales leadership before ultimately becoming an executive coach and leadership consultant.
As a salesperson, I was fortunate to find early success, finishing top 10 out of 500 salespeople in sales and revenue each of my first 6 months. This success afforded me the opportunity to move into leadership and contribute to the development of others, which was always the bigger motivator for me.
In the ambitious and results-oriented business world where consistent validation is in short supply, all the perilous features of self-doubt emerge. Invalidation coaxes the ego into action and brings defensiveness, disengagement, and disconnection to the surface, at which point individuals, teams, and companies can suffer, if not entirely self-destruct. This insidious truth about the nature of these environments is rampant, but also largely ignored. My training in the study of human behavior led me to believe that offering people access to their own resilience and resourcefulness and helping them to better connect with co-workers might be an underestimated but magic ingredient.
Thw perfect place to test this theory was in a sales environment where the results are shown in black and white. There is no ambiguity, you win or lose. With this strategy of helping employees cultivate a more adaptive psychology, my teams started winning. Consistently. Thus, skepticism and trepidation gave way to belief as other leaders were recognizing our success. Soon, I was training leaders on skills like nonviolent communication, learned optimism, cognitive restructuring, motivational interviewing, and distress tolerance, among others.
Within two years of my transition from psychology into sales and business, I was hired to head up sales for a small but ambitious direct to consumer health-tech company called Candid. The company was 8 people at the time and grew to 500 people within 2 years. The sales team accounted for about a fifth of that growth. My unconventional approach was again finding success and led me to new and different opportunities.
While still at Candid, my work began to grow and expand organically with former peers and co-workers asking me to come into their companies to run workshops with their executive teams or consult on their sales efforts. From there, I began running more immersive events including 4-day founder retreats for companies like TechStars. These experiences evolved into my work as a founder and executive coach. Given my nontraditional background, some days I am helping founders close multimillion-dollar fundraising rounds while others I’m helping them navigate the gutting transition out of their own companies. This has been my unscripted journey into this work, but every day I am grateful that it found me.