About Pian Shu, PhD
1. My Background as a Business-School Teacher
For ten years, I was a faculty member at business schools, first at Harvard Business School, and then at the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Scheller College of Business. I taught operations management, strategy, and design thinking to MBA and undergraduate students. I immensely enjoyed interacting with students and facilitating class discussions.
During this decade, I developed a distinct teaching style that proved highly effective in discussion-based classrooms. I focused on making complex concepts intuitive and accessible, while using discussion and debate to push students to think critically, articulate their ideas, question assumptions, and engage seriously with different perspectives. One of my students at Harvard described my teaching approach as:
“You really engaged the classroom and challenged us. You encouraged us to become our own professors more than any other professor did. You were very supportive of our learning efforts and pushed us to perform our best.”
I consistently received near-perfect ratings on my teaching. But more importantly, I have been surprised and inspired, time and again, by the depth and breadth of insights that my students generated when they “became their own professors.” When students were given the freedom to explore the material rather than simply being taught it, they often came up with original insights that shed new light even for me on subjects I had been teaching for many years. Empowering students to develop their own views as they grapple with unfamiliar material fostered both intellectual independence and confidence.
The techniques I developed and refined as a teacher form an important part of my coaching. A coaching session with me is a dynamic conversation where we actively engage with an issue, examine it from different angles, question assumptions, and develop new ways of understanding and approaching it. My goal is to help you work through problems for yourself and come up with solutions that you are genuinely excited about and can take ownership of. Just as in teaching, there is a delicate balance between providing guidance and creating space for exploration. Sometimes you may benefit from a targeted observation, a new perspective, or a concrete suggestion. At other times, the most productive thing I can do is let the conversation unfold more spontaneously, using open-ended questions to allow insights to emerge. I see both as essential parts of an effective coaching session that can lead to clarity and insight.
2. My Background as an Academic, and Why I Left Academia
My journey as a researcher began at MIT, where I earned a PhD in Economics and wrote my thesis on MIT alumni’s career choices and inventive output. (How people choose and succeed in their careers has always been an interesting question to me.) More broadly, during my ten years as a faculty member, I developed several research streams in innovation, entrepreneurship, and international trade. I published in top journals and had good prospects for getting tenure. Nonetheless, I felt that something crucial was missing. Publishing papers and researching/teaching abstract concepts did not energize me at a deeper level. I wanted to do work that has a more concrete and tangible impact.
When I left academia, I knew more clearly what I didn’t want to do than what I wanted to do. I left without lining up another job, because I did not want to commit to another path before giving myself the space to consider what would make me genuinely happy. It was an unconventional decision, but I had a strong intuition that it was what I needed at the time. In my mind, I saw an image of a room filled with dated furniture. Sometimes, simply bringing in new furniture to replace the old does not improve the room. Sometimes, the room needs to be empty for a while before new possibilities can emerge. I wanted to explore what might be possible with a fresh and open mind.
3. Why I Was Drawn to Coaching
Over time, the idea of creating a coaching practice where I can help people solve complex career challenges grew stronger and stronger. The roots of this idea can be traced back to the one-on-one advising I did during my years in academia. During my office hours, a student and I would have a focused conversation on a topic or challenge of immediate concern to them. Interestingly, these conversations often began with a specific question but evolved into much broader discussions about who they were, what motivated them, and how they saw themselves and the world. A decision about a job offer would turn into a deeper conversation about what the student actually wanted from their career. A concern about classroom participation could lead to a broader discussion about confidence and self-expression.
Looking back, these conversations almost always left me with a deep sense of gratification. Their individualized nature meant that we could work toward a resolution specific to the student and their situation, often ending with greater clarity and concrete next steps. Over the years, students have shared with me, initially to my surprise, that the value they gained from my office hours paralleled what they gained in the classroom. These experiences with one-on-one advising made me realize that a focused and nurturing setting dedicated to one’s professional and personal development can be highly beneficial, and that the need for this kind of support extends well beyond the school setting.
4. Additional Dimensions of My Coaching
During my time in academia, I experienced not only the thrill of intellectual discovery, but also the downsides of incessant doubt, questioning, and analysis. I applied the same rigorous thinking to my personal life, and the result was that I often struggled to make even the simplest decisions because almost everything seemed to invite another round of scrutiny and back-and-forth.
Towards the end of my academic career, I had an experience that changed how I saw the thinking mind. I had just finished a week-long meditation retreat, during which my mind had become calmer than usual. I was flying home and sitting on the plane, waiting for it to take off. Naturally, my mind started wandering, and thoughts and analysis began to flood my mind as usual. Suddenly, a visual appeared: ocean water was flowing over the frame of a hollow metal cube. A hand kept trying to scoop up the water with the cube frame, but each attempt failed, because the cube was hollow.
I saw then and there the futility of trying to live through the thinking mind. Putting everything into structures and frameworks, as thinking tends to do, can be helpful at times, but much of reality’s richness and complexity, like the ocean, lies beyond what can be conceptualized. The visual was very vivid and had a powerful effect on me, quieting my mind then and continuing to do so for a long time afterward.
During this time of career and personal transition, much of my searching turned inward. I learned to trust my intuition more and more, and to let it guide my steps alongside my analytical mind. The two are naturally intertwined, but intuition has a distinct quality of knowing. It can recognize something instantaneously, before the analytical mind has worked through all the reasons, comparisons, and explanations.
This became particularly noticeable to me in personal decision-making. Analytical thinking can weigh the pros and cons all day long without resting on an answer. Intuition, on the other hand, can recognize the simple voice underneath: “Yes, I’d love to!” or “No, this is not for me.” I found that intuition could often cut through layers of mental activity and bring me closer to what I actually wanted, valued, or knew. And the more I listened to this voice, the stronger it became.
During this period, I also studied intuitive arts such as tarot cards in depth as tools for inviting and guiding intuition. Images and symbols can bypass familiar patterns of thought and reveal connections that are difficult to reach through deliberate analysis alone. Sometimes they illuminate something that has been present all along but not yet consciously recognized. This is the aspect of metaphysical arts that I have found most powerful, and that I now draw on selectively in my coaching.
In coaching sessions, intuition often enters more quietly. For a visual person like me, intuition often comes to me as an image, and I have found that images can have a particular power to shift our perceptions and consequently our actions. In a session, I may offer what comes to me and invite you to see whether it resonates. I may also use metaphysical tools such as tarot to bring forward unexpected associations or perspectives if the timing feels right. These moments can open up a new line of inquiry, reveal a pattern that had been difficult to see, or illuminate something that analysis alone had not surfaced.
After one session in which an intuitive image emerged and revealed a pattern that deeply resonated with a client, she described the experience to me this way: “It’s like driving on Route 1 and turning a corner, and all of a sudden you see a beautiful view that is unexpected and clarifying.”
5. Why “Sight Sphere”?
I have always been fascinated by the moment when something comes into view and changes how we understand a situation. In the classroom and in advising, I saw the magic of this when students arrived at insights that changed how they approached a problem or understood themselves. In my personal life, I experienced how a single image or realization could suddenly quiet years of habitual thinking. And in coaching sessions, I continue to witness moments when a new perspective, pattern, or connection comes into focus and changes what seems possible.
I named my coaching practice Sight Sphere because this is the kind of experience I hope to create. To me, “Sight” is not only about seeing what is in front of us, but also about seeing differently: noticing a pattern, recognizing something that had been just outside awareness, or suddenly viewing a familiar situation from another angle. “Sphere” is what can emerge from that shift in perception: a changed atmosphere, a different field of possibilities, something tangible that we can move and act within. That movement from seeing differently to inhabiting a different space is at the heart of what I create in my coaching.