I'm a really good creativity coach. When you work with me your projects come alive.
Coaching, producing, teaching — they're all the same thing. I find what's most alive and I tend it.
I work with people to bring out the most alive version of their project. I do this by working alongside you across a set of studio sessions — playing, asking questions, naming patterns, having you show me around what you make. Together we find interesting things to build.
It should be fun to work on the thing you're working on. When it's fun, it's more creative, easier to pick up, and it goes where it wants to go.
I work based on this principle — purposeful play in service of your project's forward momentum. The studio is a fun environment to work in. That's not a soft add-on. It's how things move.
Three sessions. Show me → drop in → build from there.
You bring what you've been working on. We look at it together. By the end we know what we're working on next.
We start working. You guide where you want to play. I offer suggestions, name patterns, add juice.
By now there's momentum. We know if this is a riffing relationship or a pedal-to-the-metal relationship.
If we click, we build a little world together for a while. Three months is where it gets potent — we settle in, the work compounds, month three is different from month one.
Monthly collaboration: $2,000 — weekly sessions, an ongoing creative partnership.
Single session: $500 — ~90 minutes, come with whatever's alive.
You want a creative companion. Someone to think with, play with, hang out in the work with. The sessions feel like being in a band.
You want to ship something real and you want someone holding the creative and relational quality while you build. The sessions feel like a studio.
You have an understanding of what you're building and you're going after it. You have resources to throw at it. You could use some design help — ways of thinking, ways of looking at the problem, working the messaging. A general sense that design, personality, and playfulness would help get your project or business in a better place.
You don't need somebody to come in and do everything for you. You've got a sense of it. But you could use some partnership on the design front — someone to help you see what you can't see, and to play with it.
I believe healthy founders create healthy realities. What you're made of goes into what you make — your relationship to yourself, to others, to the uncertainty of building something that doesn't exist yet. That's the material the project is built from.
I run a school with my partner Kristen called Play Into Being. It's a studio of practice for people making important projects. This site is the personal side — me, visible, teaching by doing it in public.
Talk to my bot — it asks a few questions and helps me tune to how we can best work together.
Or just email me: dave@choicingdown.com
"The form emerges when I stop managing how I'm perceived.
I don't need to know the form before I begin."