Ada Chen Rekhi on Career Coaching, Curiosity Loops, and Personal Values

Ada Chen Rekhi on Career Coaching, Curiosity Loops, and Personal Values

transcriptlennys-podcastcoachingcareervaluesdecision-making

Ada Chen Rekhi on Career Coaching, Curiosity Loops, and Personal Values

Source: Lenny’s Podcast Speaker: Ada Chen Rekhi Date: ~2022 Link: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-make-better-decisions-and

Key ideas

  • The Curiosity Loop. A structured advice-seeking process: (1) ask a specific question (not “what should I do?”); (2) curate respondents who know both the subject matter and you personally; (3) make the ask lightweight (here are five options, pick two and say why); (4) close the loop by thanking people and reporting back. Borrowed from marketing customer advisory councils; applied to personal decisions.
  • Specific questions prevent garbage feedback. “What should I do with my career?” generates vague answers. “I’m thinking of quitting my job to do a coding bootcamp — is that a good idea?” gives respondents something concrete to react to and surface risks you missed.
  • Values as internal scorecard. A 10–15 minute values exercise (choosing from a curated word list, then stack-ranking) produces a three-to-five item personal value hierarchy. Used as a decision filter against external scorecard pressure (status, money, what LinkedIn suggests is the obvious next step).
  • The external scorecard trap. The “obvious next step” (next big company, next promotion, write the book) is often objectively better by external metrics but produces less personal satisfaction than decisions that align with one’s actual value stack. The trap is waking up in late career, successful by external measures, unhappy.
  • Coaching works best when you’re stuck on decisions, not for operational questions. Curiosity Loops are a self-coaching tool for decisions that don’t require external expertise so much as perspective and pattern-matching from people who know you.

Overview

Ada Chen Rekhi — executive coach, Notejoy co-founder, former LinkedIn and SurveyMonkey marketing leader — introduces two practical frameworks from her coaching practice: the Curiosity Loop (structured peer advice collection) and the Values Exercise (building a personal internal scorecard). The episode includes a live demonstration using Lenny himself as the subject.

Her argument: most advice-seeking is poorly structured and produces bad output (“garbage in, garbage out”); and most career decisions fail because people optimise for external scores rather than personal alignment.