Yotam Schachter

I work with organizational leaders, especially in tech, biotech, and professional services, who understand that excellent results emerge from excellent team/organizational cultures.

A lot of my clients feel like they’ve been given contradictory mandates: “Act boldly AND be cautious,” “meet your team’s goals AND have an enterprise mindset,” “do the thing that works AND find a new thing that’s even better.” Without the right tools, it’s exhausting and disorienting.

A team I worked with at Google recently was dealing with this kind of challenge, and I taught them one of my favorite tools, Polarity Management. When two things are both good or both important, but feel like they’re in tension, Polarity Management is the art of leaning one way in one moment, leaning the other way in the next, and ultimately finding the best of both.

One thing I love about teaching polarities is the way it helps people empathize with themselves. When the model lands, people can say “Oh THAT’S why this has been so difficult.” They stop giving themselves a hard time for failing to achieve the impossible, and they’re immediately more empowered to achieve what is possible. As a human that also struggles with wanting two things that feel impossible to have together – like x and y – I believe that having someone in the room that can fully appreciate how truly hard polarities are is essential to the alchemy of the transformation this team made.

When I work with teams like this, in the back of my mind, I’m always thinking about “thriving brain” and “survival brain,” our ability to be creative, nuanced, and collaborative on the one hand and our temptation to be reactive, simplistic, and single-minded on the other. Survival brain pulls us off balance into the worst of each side of a polarity map, but seeing the whole map helps us float back into thriving. The best part of my job is helping leaders and teams shift out of that survival-brain threat response into an embodied, courageous confidence. Great things are possible from there.

Increasingly, I’m helping leaders and teams with AI-Assisted Collaboration: How can we use these powerful new tools to foster the best of who we are together?

One-on-one I primarily use Growth Edge Interviewing and Internal Family Systems coaching, both of which can be infused with a lot of somatic awareness. I’m always curious what’s making the hard things hard, and how we can bring the full resources of body, mind, and spirit toward making them easier.

I like to be flexible about pacing and format. In a great coaching relationship, the needs shift over time, so finding the right rhythm is part of the fun.

For groups, I tend to facilitate workshops about polarities, adaptive leadership, and powerful conversations. The questions I’m always asking are “What’s the conversation this team needs to be having?” and “What greatness is already here, waiting to be unleashed?”

I make an effort to stay on top of the latest capacities of LLMs and AI Agents, helping clients implement those to accelerate their work and their development as leaders.

I spent a long time thinking I was going to become a rabbi, and I visited a lot of other careers on the way toward that goal, including mathematician, investment analyst, massage therapist, and sales operations supervisor. I left rabbinics behind specifically, but kept the sense of big history and the curiosity about how we become our best selves together. My work today is inspired by each of those explorations as well as Adaptive Leadership, Integral Theory, Shadow Work, IFS, Immunity to Change, complexity theory, mindfulness, and somatics.

As these influences come together today, I show up with enormous respect for the forces shaping each client system – be that an organization, a team, or an individual – and the potential that emerges when those forces can come into alignment.

I provide coaching, training, and group facilitation.

I write a lot of our internal faculty guides, taking pride in my ability to document facilitator best practices without unduly constraining my colleagues’ responsiveness to the moment.

I also teach open-enrollment classes about coaching, self-coaching, and shifting into thriving brain.

My wife and six-year-old son are both autistic, which profoundly shapes our family life. We homeschool him, and my wife is active in building neurodiversity acceptance. My son has taught me to love Minecraft, and we spend hours together building ‘mods’ for the game. I read books on physics, biology, and cognitive science, as well as science fiction and fantasy novels and historical biographies.

I’m not a therapist and I’m not a strategy consultant, but if you draw a line from one to the other, I’m most of what you’ll find in between.