Welcome!

Thank you so much for stopping by! I’m passionate about coaching, leadership, and trauma, and this blog will help us learn about all three of those things together.

First, let me introduce myself and go a little deeper than my coaching bio. My name is Craig Maier, and I’m a coach currently living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (USA) with my wife and two boys. Before launching my practice in August 2021, I taught communication for nine years at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. And before that, I worked for about 13 years in the nonprofit sector as a communication professional.

My path here is more than twenty years in the making. It began in the late 1990s, when I studied for about a year at a local seminary. During my time there, I became fascinated with pastoral care and counseling, especially with people experiencing painful transitions and losses. But I also felt seminary wasn’t the right place for me. 

Though I’m an idealist, a helper, and general do-gooder, I’m also exceedingly practical. I loved what I was learning, but something was missing. I also realized that I didn’t feel called to serve in a congregation. And so in 1999, when the Roman Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh offered me a position as a communication professional, I took it. 

I wasn’t Catholic at the time, so it might seem odd I got the job. But my seminary experience helped me understand, respect, and appreciate religious experiences different from my own. My communication and writing background helped me address what the diocese needed. And I learn quickly, which helped me navigate the intellectual and organizational complexity around me.

When I arrived, the diocese was already in the middle of an excruciating transition. Since the demise of the steel industry in Pittsburgh in the 1980s, the diocese’s population had declined rapidly, and the number of priests was dropping even faster. As a result, the diocese had come through a decade of painful parish reorganizations that were forcing it to come to terms with its changing identity.

And that was before the clergy abuse crisis. That scandal that has come to define Catholicism—and Christianity as a whole. Today, as scandals in the Boy Scouts, U.S. women’s gymnastics, and most recently the Southern Baptist Convention show, sexual abuse isn’t limited to the Catholic Church. But the scandal remains, rightly so, the prime example for institutionalized abuse, trauma, betrayal, and failure.

And I was in the middle of it.

My time at the diocese continues to haunt me. To be sure, some moments, such as when I wrote the bishop’s media response to September 11 terrorist attacks, showed me how important strong institutions can be.

But I also feel a deep sense of spiritual brokenness I’m still grappling with. When I was there, I was deeply involved in the efforts to remove people who were preying on children. In fact, I can’t think of a day that went by when I wasn’t involved in some discussion or another focusing on protecting young people from abuse. My work even won two national awards from the Catholic Communications Campaign.

I stayed because I believe protecting children is important, because I thought I was supporting that goal, and because everyone around me told me they felt the same way.

They assured me they were doing everything they could. And I saw them enforce their child protection policies so conscientiously and aggressively I felt they meant what they said. We removed priests from ministry, made their names public, ran thousands of background checks to flag potentially dangerous people, and designed programs to support safe environments in parishes and schools.

Yet, in the years since, I’ve learned that not everything I was told was true. Of even it it was true, I know now that the policies and procedures that were designed to protect children and hold perpetrators accountable have not done what they were supposed to do.

This experience changed me and the questions I ask. How do you lead an institution that’s changing—and failing—on so many levels? How can well-meaning institutions inflict so much trauma? What does healing look like? 

These questions and others inspired my doctoral dissertation and later my first book, which the Religious Communication Association named its 2017 Book of the Year. They also propelled my work at Duquesne, where I taught and researched leadership communication in nonprofit organizations. 

Because leadership communication touches so many areas—organizational theory, nonprofit management, public relations and marketing, and advocacy, to name a few—my teaching rotation was diverse. I ran my classes like workshops, with students putting ideas together in new ways or doing hands-on research. In fact, my second book on community-based responses to the opioid epidemic grew out of one of those courses.

I loved this work. And I was good at it. But after I earned tenure, I began to feel a growing sense of isolation. As a writer, I became dissatisfied with writing for an audience of a few dozen people. And as a teacher, I became increasingly worried that students were falling through the cracks.

Around that time, I remembered how much working with a coach several years prior helped me transition from my work at the diocese. He helped me figure out what I wanted, create a plan to meet that vision, build the confidence I needed, and make that plan a reality. In fact, his work with me was so instrumental that becoming a coach was my backup plan if I didn’t get tenure.

So in 2019, I decided to explore how to make my Plan B my Plan A.

I entered Duquesne University’s coaching program, and I immediately realized I made the right decision. The moment I opened my textbook, my mind raced back to my time in seminary. Coaching isn’t about making things happen for people or giving advice that doesn’t fit. Coaching is about sitting with people at difficult moments of their lives as they meet problems that can feel too big to handle. 

In other words, I heard an echo of what drew me to seminary in the first place.

A few months after I began my coach training, I had to take a quick trip to the library after coaching a student. As I walked across campus, I noticed something strange. Everyone was smiling at me. I immediately looked down at my shirt, thinking I had spilled something on it. But then I realized people were smiling at me because I was smiling. The joy of coaching was radiating out from me. And that’s when I knew my next journey was about to begin.

This blog will be my notebook for that journey. In it, I will be posting weekly on what I’m learning about the intersection of coaching, leadership, and trauma. And I will be talking every so often about my practice: A life-long endeavor supporting leaders as they build communities where we can all feel safe. 

I hope you’ll join me. And if you would like to talk more, you can start your conversation here.