Alisa Cohn wanted her own apartment at four and chose journalism at Boston University partly to satisfy her parents' practicality concerns. She learned to structure her thinking through writing and developed an ability to understand what motivates people, skills she now uses coaching others to find their own path.
Chapters
I would just say briefly, when I was— the lore in my family is that when I was 4 years old, I wanted my own apartment. So take that for what it is. I think I was always, you know, independent, wanted to chart my own course. And when I was an undergrad, I was a journalism major. And I was a journalism major because my parents didn't want me to do English because it wasn't practical, but journalism was so-called practical. And so I think I learned a lot about like how to structure my thinking. You know, you and I both have written it over the topic of writing. And I think it's such an important skill to be able to structure your thinking and put words onto paper and really, you know, learn how to be a writer and a thinker. And I think that kind of informed so much of what I did, what I've done in my whole career. And I was at Boston University, which was, you know, a huge school. So even figuring out how to navigate inside of there was, you know, another, another, I think, challenging aspect, but ultimately very fruitful in sort of figuring out how do you figure out what makes people tick? How do you figure out how to find your own way? And then ultimately, for me as a coach, how do I help others find their own ways?