Ninety days · one-to-one coaching with Wei Houng

Ninety days to get
through the wall you
keep running away from.

There’s something in your life or your business that you’ve tried to change more than once and couldn’t. Call it the wall. You know what’s on the other side of it, and you know you want it. Every time you get close, going through feels worse than turning around, so you turn around. Most people do that for the rest of their lives. This is for when you’re done turning around.

$30,000 for the full ninety days, an entire season

Paid at the start, or two payments of $16,000. Twenty-one days in, if it’s not for you, every dollar goes back to you.

Ask if there’s an open spot →

This starts with a conversation with Wei.
Nothing is charged before you’ve both said yes.

Twelve weekly sessions
Support between them
Nothing else sold to you along the way

Who this is for

Doing well by every measure other people can see

Revenue, headcount, the house, the title. And underneath all of it, a private question that doesn’t go away no matter how good the numbers get.

“You’d be surprised how many people have clearly made it as society defined it, on paper and in public. Then they step into my office, and what comes out is: I don’t know if this is what I want. The world tells me I have no reason to be unhappy. So why do I feel like I’m dying inside?”

Wei Houng

Mostly founders, and people running a division, a practice, or a family business. The ones who can describe their wall precisely, have described it to a therapist, a peer group or a spouse, and then hit it again anyway.

It usually looks like one of these.

You hired the right person. They’re good at the job. You still check everything before it goes out, and you’ve stopped telling yourself that’s temporary.
You delegated something. It came back at eighty percent of what you asked for, so you took the responsibility back without thinking twice. That was two years ago. It’s still on your plate.
You’ve known for years that your prices are too low. You’ve rewritten your price list twice. You never sent either version to a single client.
Revenue is up, and the more the business grows, the harder it gets to step away from it. There’s nobody you can say that to. Everyone you know would hear it as good news.

Four different situations, one thing in common. In each one, you know exactly what you want to happen. To stop checking their work. To hand the job back and leave it there. To send the new prices. To take a real vacation while the business runs without you. You know roughly what it would take to get there. But so far, staying put has felt safer than doing it.

Here’s a test. Have you already solved this before? Not tried to solve it. Actually solved it, felt the relief, and then watched it come back a few months later, looking slightly different.

If that’s a yes, then you only fixed what you were doing. But didn’t fix what was making you do it.

If one ninety-minute session would fix it, book the session. That’s $1,500, on a different page, and it counts toward the season if you come back for one. This page is for the problems a single session can find but can’t finish.

Why the books didn’t work

You already know what the problem is. But knowing hasn’t fixed it.

You already understand what you’re doing and why it’s a problem. That’s the frustrating part. You understand it completely, and you keep doing it, and every book you’ve read has helped you understand it better without changing what you do.

“Insight isn’t enough. Your unconscious mind doesn’t care what you know. It cares about what’s keeping you alive.”

Wei Houng

The thing you keep doing is not a character flaw. It’s a strategy. By strategy we mean a habit you picked up a long time ago because it protected you then. It has since become a liability, and some part of you still believes you need it to stay safe. You can’t argue yourself out of it, because you never chose it. It has now become a nurtured reflex.

A strategy that old doesn’t get replaced by simply deciding to change. It gets replaced by proof and new internal negotiations. The proof is new experiences that show the old strategy isn’t needed anymore. The negotiation is with the part of you that built it, so it agrees to take that proof and let it change what you believe.

“Think of what nature does to smooth out rocks. They take their time, one day at a time, one week at a time, same motion over and over again. And eventually the rock gets smoother. Nature is patient. And that patience compounds.”

Wei Houng

Why twelve weeks

Some things shouldn’t be brought up unless there’s time to deal with them

The fastest way to help somebody who’s stuck is to find the root cause and deal with that. A sick plant isn’t sick in the leaves. It’s sick in the roots. Here is how the pieces fit. The wall is the thing you can’t change. Underneath the wall is the strategy, the old habit that keeps you turning around. Underneath the strategy is the root cause. Wrapped around the root cause are the old emotions that encapsulate it and lock it in place, and you can’t reach it until they come off. You can’t negotiate with the part of you that built the strategy while charged-up emotions are shouting over the conversation, so the emotions come off first.

But the root cause isn’t sitting there out in the open. It’s locked in place by old emotions, and you have to deal with those emotions one at a time to reach it. Dealing with an emotion means talking through where it started and what it was protecting you from, until it stops running you. Which emotion comes first is different for everyone. For one person it’s anger. For another it’s guilt, or sadness, or an emotion they’ve never had a name for. There’s no standard order and no standard person.

What’s the same for everybody is this. Once you deal with one emotion, whatever was underneath it is now out in the open. And it’s out in the open whether or not there’s time left in the session to deal with it.

Wei learned that the hard way, years ago, back when finding a root cause could take eleven hours in one sitting. With one client he got through two emotions and ran out of time for the day. What was underneath those two was fear, and fear is the emotion most people run from. The client said he was freaking out a little and asked to pick it up in the morning. They set it for nine.

He didn’t come. Not that day, and not for a week.

When Wei finally got a hold of him, he explained: “I was too afraid to go back. All this stuff was kicking up in me and I don’t know why.”

“That’s on me. I was told not to let people go home on fear.”

Wei Houng

He came back in. They took the fear off, what was under it was easier to deal with, and they finished in one sitting.

So in a single ninety-minute session, when Wei can feel the work getting close to something like that, he stops. He notes where it is and leaves it alone. That’s the right call when there’s no time to finish, and he’ll tell you that’s what he’s doing.

Twelve weeks is what it takes to go the rest of the way. When there’s always a next session, every emotion that comes up gets dealt with, and you’re never sent home with something half finished.

The thing holding your wall in place is a strategy you built to stay safe, and it worked. Most people keep theirs for life, and they have good reasons. You want to put yours down, and yet you haven’t, because it still feels like it’s protecting you. Getting it to stop protecting you from something that is no longer a threat is what the ninety days is for.

How the season runs

Three hours, then twelve weeks, then a written close-out you keep

The ninety daysWeek zero to day ninety

3 hours

Week zero

Three hours, before the weekly sessions start. Longer than a normal session because it has a different job: your history, the patterns you already know about, and the two of you agreeing on what these ninety days are for.

12 × 90 min

Weeks one to twelve

One ninety-minute session a week for twelve weeks. You bring whatever is going on that week. Each session is recorded, with your consent, and you get a written summary of it before the next one.

Close-out

Day ninety

One more session after the twelfth. You compare what you said you wanted in week zero with what actually happened, you talk about what comes next, and you get a written close-out to keep.

The week between sessions does as much work as the session. Same thing, once a week, week after week, until the old strategy stops fighting back. Each session shakes the old habit a little. Then you go live a normal week and notice you were fine without it. Doing that twelve times is what convinces the scared part of you that it’s safe to let go. Between sessions you’ll have a few things to do, small tasks that lock in what shifted, and Wei is reachable by message if something comes up.

What a session looks like. Say you come in one week and want the session on your marriage, because it has started to affect you at work. Fine. You tell him what happened, and somewhere in the telling you say you were disrespected. He stops you there. Not everybody feels disrespect. Some people, in the same moment, feel something closer to being treated unfairly, and call it disrespect because that’s the word they grew up hearing. A borrowed word, a reaction that followed the word, and every fix you’ve tried was a fix for the label. So the session is spent on that one word. Where you learned it. Whether it actually describes what you feel. What the moment looks like when you take the word away. Nothing about the marriage gets solved that day. But the borrowed label comes off. And the next time something like it happens, you react differently, because you were never reacting to what happened. You were reacting to the word.

Other weeks there’s no specific challenge to bring. Those sessions are about the finish line. What you said in week zero you wanted out of this. What has to be true by week six for that to happen. Whether last week changed the answer. If it did, the target moves. Life doesn’t stand still for ninety days, and your time and work with Wei never assumes that it does.

The problem you bring changes every week. But what’s causing it usually stays the same.

If this sounds like what you need, write and let’s talk.

Tell us what the wall is →

Inside a session

Some of the things he is listening for while you talk

You’ll be describing the problem, and somewhere in it you’ll say a word like always. Or never. Or everyone, or everything.

Those words are almost never literally true. They’re there for a reason: they’re vague enough to keep you from looking at the specific thing underneath.

That is where he stops you.

“How is that a problem?” He asks how instead of why. Ask a person why and they give you the answer they’ve rehearsed, because if they really knew why, they would have solved it already.
“What is the problem, specifically?”
“If you don’t want that, then what do you want instead?” That one comes out when somebody has spent ten minutes describing what they don’t want and hasn’t once said what they do want.

None of these questions are the work itself. They’re the way in. Whatever is keeping you on this side of the wall gets weaker the moment you describe it exactly, and describing it exactly is what the vague words were protecting you from.

After week zero

He will see where you’re stuck before you do, and he will keep it to himself

By the end of week zero, Wei will have a fair idea of where this is going to get hard for you, what old reaction will come back the first time you’re under real pressure, and what you’ll find a reason to avoid.

He won’t tell you that part.

A client once said it to him in almost exactly these words: “I know what I want is in that fog. I just can’t see through it.” He can see through it, because he’s standing outside it. And he found out early that if he describes what he sees before you’re ready to look at it, you get scared and pull back, and the rest of the ninety days gets spent undoing that.

So he works on whatever would get in the way first, and what he saw in week zero becomes something you find on your own.

And if you would rather just be told, say so and he will tell you. It doesn’t work as well, and he’ll say that too. It’s still your ninety days. The work gets done by you, with him in the room.

Wei Houng, seated, hands steepled, listening.

Who you would be sitting with

An engineer who never worked as one

You’d be spending twelve weeks with Wei Houng, who studied computer science engineering at UCLA and then never worked a day as an engineer, at least not in the traditional sense. What he kept was the engineer’s discipline: find the one thing that’s actually causing the failure, change that one thing, and watch what happens. Applied to a person instead of a machine, that’s the whole method.

The way he puts it, he took a software engineering background and pointed it at the original software, the human mind, the one that built everything else in the world.

He’s been doing it for over thirty years, with leaders from some of the largest companies in the world down to people bootstrapping out of a spare room, and he puts the number of people he’s worked with in the thousands. Mostly founders. Also professional athletes, first responders, veterans, celebrities, and executives inside very large organizations. The same problem shows up the same way in every one of those rooms.

He has trained in more ways of helping people change than what can reasonably fit on a page, and all of it comes out of one obsession: understanding the human condition, and what it takes for a person to change, for the better. Hypnotherapy, which in his sessions is an ordinary conversation, and you’re awake and aware the whole time. Neuro-linguistic programming, which he teaches at the trainer level. Reading faces and body language. Years of hands-on work as a personal trainer, and a long list past that. And HumanOp’s own: he is a CTHO, a Certified Technologist of Human Optimization, the certification HumanOp built for reading a person’s nature. Out of all of it he built his own method for letting go of old emotions, the Emotional Release Protocol. His clients and students shortened it to the ER Protocol, because it works fast enough that they use it in emergencies, to defuse a charged moment before it takes over. He stopped using any of it separately a long time ago. In a session it’s one conversation.

From your chair, none of it looks like anything but talking. Stories and the occasional metaphor, all pointed at what you came to change. If anything in it runs against an authentic value of yours, you’ll feel yourself push back, and that pushback is what keeps it honest for both of you.

“The goal is that they don’t become reliant on me forever.”

Wei Houng · Co-founder of HumanOp

Past clients

What a season has looked like

She was fighting for a contract she didn’t want
She ran an independent firm that lived on referrals from one large partner, under an exclusive deal. The partner had started sending work elsewhere anyway. She came in two sessions running to talk about it: the calls, the disrespect going both ways, the same fight every week.

After the second one Wei said what he was seeing. She was fighting hard for something she didn’t want. The deal had been holding her back for years. What she actually wanted was to be the firm people chose over their own in-house team, and no exclusive deal allows that. Underneath the fight were older things. Not good enough. Not allowed to push back at a table full of men. Those came off over the following weeks.

Then she pointed out that they had broken the contract, ended it, and went to work on being the firm people chose. Most of what she’d been afraid would happen didn’t. One of their partners stayed angry for a while. The rest stayed friends. She has since built four more companies beside the first and turned down every offer to buy them, and she’s talking to Wei again now, about who takes over.
A founder, services.
The family business, run to his mother’s standard
He ran the business his family had run for two generations in one town. His father had died. His mother did nothing but sign the checks, and every check was signed to the old way of doing things. He felt locked in by what was expected of him. When the beliefs underneath that came off, he took the business virtual and national over the next couple of years. He built a team that made the deals so he didn’t have to, and turned the place into where burned-out people from the rest of his industry came to recover. A national firm made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. He retired himself, his wife, and his mother.
A founder, family business.
A ceiling he had been under for seven years I was so stuck, and though it was about revenue, I had been stuck for so long that it wasn’t even about the money. It was a weird ceiling that I couldn’t break for 7 YEARS! When Wei helped me realize the deep self-sabotaging belief systems that were running rampant underneath it all, and then helping me RELEASE IT, I broke through that ceiling just 2 MONTHS into our season together. Chuck C., founder, candle manufacturer
It kept working after the season ended Every single team meeting, every single customer engagement, every time I even walk out the door, working with Wei has helped me see the specific opportunities of how everything works. I’m more engaged, asking better questions, getting to solutions faster, and able to connect with people more effectively. The confidence and peace that I have going out into the world continues to help me evolve and grow in all areas of life long after my season with him was done. Randall D., founder, Business Partner Blueprint

The two stories are told with the clients’ permission and without their industries. The quotes are shortened, names are abbreviated at our clients’ request, and every one of them was volunteered.

Wei only takes three clients in any given season, because that is the number he can carry well while being a co-founder of HumanOp. If all three spots are taken when you ask, we’ll say so and tell you when the next one opens. Asking does not commit you to anything.

Ask if one of the three spots is open →

What this is not

Three things people assume

It’s not a longer version of the single session. A single session works on one thing you do. Twelve weeks works on the reason you keep doing it.
There’s no program. No curriculum, no workbook. The only things to do between sessions come out of your own sessions. Twelve weeks of whatever is actually happening in your life, in the order it happens.
It is not a room of peers. If what you want is senior people thinking a high-stakes decision through with you, that is HumanOp Coherence, our group program for founders. Different room, different price.

It is also not therapy and not crisis support. If you are in acute distress, or carrying something that needs clinical care, this is not the right kind of help. Let us know, and we’ll help point you to the right resource.

Before you ask

When this isn’t for you

If what you want fixed is the business. The ninety days works on you, the person running the business. If the problem is inside the company, how it runs, who does what, how it makes money, that is The Founder’s Dividend, our consulting work on the business itself. Same team at HumanOp, different problem. If you never sent the new price list, that’s you. If the prices themselves are wrong, that’s the company.
If you want a daily coach. You can reach Wei by message between sessions and he will answer. He will not be on call. If what you need is somebody in your ear every day, this isn’t built for that.
If what you want is to be told what to do. No plan gets handed to you. The work gets you back in touch with what you already know. Once you own the problem and can see it clearly, advice is just noise. Plenty of people want to be handed the answer. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just not what this is.
If somebody else decided you should do this, and you’re only doing it out of obligation. A board, a partner, a spouse. If you don’t have your own desire for the kind of results this work produces, you won’t engage, and ninety days of that helps nobody.

The price

$30,000 for the season

Before you do the math on sessions, do this math. The hours a week you spend checking work before it goes out, times fifty weeks. The revenue the new prices would have added last year, if you had sent them. The hours you’ve spent on the job you took back, over two years. If your wall is a business you can’t step away from, the years since you first wanted out. Put a dollar figure on one year of that: the hours at what your time is worth, or the revenue you never collected. That is what staying stuck costs you every year, and it comes due again next year. The ninety days costs $30,000, once.

This is not twelve single sessions sold as a bundle. In a single session Wei has to stop short, because ninety minutes isn’t always enough time to fully deal with what he finds. Here he doesn’t stop, because next week’s session is already booked. What you’re paying for is that, plus the three-hour first session, the thirteenth session at the end, a written summary after every one, and the right to walk away with a full refund by day twenty-one. Twelve single sessions would be cheaper, and there would be no support between them and no continuity from one to the next.

Paid at the start. Or two payments of $16,000, the second at day forty-five.

Twenty-one days to decide, and the risk is on him.

After week zero and the first two sessions you will know. So will he. By then you will have three written summaries: week zero and two sessions. Read them. Ask two things. Are they about the problem you came in to resolve? Have you felt any progress? If the answer to both is no, you should stop. And if you want to stop for any reason at all, say so and we return everything you’ve paid. No reason needed. You keep every summary either way.

After day twenty-one there are no refunds, and Wei won’t drop you either. You’re both in for the full ninety days.

What we promise

Week zero runs its full three hours, before any weekly session does.
Every session is on what you bring, and nothing is sold to you inside any of them.
You are never named, quoted, or referred to, anywhere, without your written yes. If your situation needs an NDA, say so before we start and we will send one. The recordings live on Wei’s own machine, and the summaries are made there and signed off by him; nothing goes to an outside service.
Every session gets a written summary, and it is in your hands before the next one.
The close-out is in your hands within three business days of your last session.

If any of those does not happen, tell us and we return everything you’ve paid.

If you are at the wall again and are tired of turning around, write and tell him what it is.

Ask if there’s an open spot →

You already know which wall this is.