"An experiment I love to do to is: I just smile at people. And the reactions you get when you smile at strangers are hilarious. Like, maybe one in ten people will just smile back. The rest look behind them. They're like, 'Are you smiling at somebody else?' They look really uncomfortable. They look away. They don't know what to do — just somebody smiling at them. And it cracks me up." — <a href= "https://www.linkedin.com/in/brittanykmacdonald/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Brittany Macdonald</a>

13: Whittney Beard

The Master Coach Collection is a series of conversations between Gideon Culman — a Master Certified Coach based in Washington, DC — and fellow coaches who hold the MCC credential from the International Coaching Federation, the profession's highest distinction.

Each conversation begins with the same question: who, when you were growing up, first truly saw and heard you? From there, the conversation moves to who these coaches are, what drew them to this work, how it has shaped them, and what it has cost them. Across many conversations, the questions stay the same. The answers never do.

What you're hearing is not a series of professional profiles. It is a sustained inquiry into a particular kind of human being — someone who has spent years, sometimes decades, becoming present enough to hold space for another person's transformation, and who has been irreversibly changed by doing so. You hear about the people who first made them feel seen. You hear about the losses that came with growing into who they are. You hear about the dark moments of doubt, and the reasons they kept going anyway.

This series is for people who have worked with a coach and wondered what exists behind that quality of attention. It is for coaches who want to understand themselves by hearing themselves reflected in ninety different lives. And it is for anyone who has sensed that being genuinely seen by another person is one of the rarest and most powerful things available to us — and wanted to understand why.