About Skip Level
About the Founder
The intersection of psychology, business, and AI.
Skip Level Executive Coaching was created by Dr. LaHood, a Psy.D. in Clinical Psychology and MBA with over 22,000 hours of face-to-face client work, student clinician supervision, and training.
What sets this work apart isn’t a single degree or credential — it’s the rare combination of three worlds:
- Clinical Depth – 2 decades of direct engagement with individuals and teams cultivated Dr. LaHood’s ability to see beneath surface behaviors into the unconscious patterns, blind spots, and unspoken dynamics that determine how leaders actually function under pressure.
- Business Acumen – With an MBA, entrepreneurial experience, and recognition as a Master Business Coach, Dr. LaHood speaks the language of growth, P&L, and high-stakes decision-making. You can’t coach what you don’t understand — and Dr. LaHood understands the realities of scaling, risk, and resilience.
- Human Development Expertise – As a Master Life Coach, Dr. LaHood integrates tools for purpose, mindset, and identity work that go far beyond performance. This approach equips leaders not only to achieve, but to sustain fulfillment.
- AI Integration – Recognizing the cognitive burden leaders carry, Dr. LaHood developed a unique approach: partnering with AI as a parallel processor. This isn’t gimmick or trend — it’s about using technology to reduce noise, anticipate patterns, and give leaders more space to lead.
Why This Work
Dr. LaHood built Skip Level not as a practice, but as a partnership model for leadership. The belief is simple:
That conviction grew from over 22,000 hours sitting with clients in their highest stakes and deepest challenges — watching executives burn out, founders fracture under pressure, and teams lose trust in each other. Traditional coaching was too shallow. Therapy wasn’t the right fit. What leaders needed was a model that could hold the complexity of their reality without diluting it into clichés.
Skip Level exists as that model.
A Distinctive Approach
- Confidentiality – A leader’s greatest risk is exposure. Skip Level is designed as a secure container where the stakes can be explored without consequence.
- Selectivity – Clients are taken by referral only. Fewer clients, deeper relationships.
- Parallel Process – Leaders experience the coaching process in the same way they’re expected to lead their teams: with clarity, presence, and adaptability.
Beyond the Bio
While grounded in formal training, Dr. LaHood is not defined by academic titles or business credentials. The work is defined by:
- The ability to sit with leaders in both their confidence and their uncertainty.
- A refusal to reduce leadership to hacks or formulas.
- A belief that the future of leadership will be measured not only in profit, but in how leaders expand the humanity of those around them.
A Personal Note
Behind the credentials, Dr. LaHood is driven by a simple truth: leadership can be profoundly isolating. Too many capable people carry their roles like a weight that slowly erodes their clarity, energy, and relationships.
The work of Skip Level is not just professional — it’s personal. Dr. LaHood has seen what happens when leaders burn out or fracture under pressure, and knows what it takes to restore them to clarity and presence.
Every engagement is guided by the same conviction: leadership should not cost you your humanity.
About Skip Level
Coaching redefined for the realities of modern leadership.
Skip Level Executive Coaching was founded on a conviction: leaders at the highest level don’t fail because they lack skills — they fail because the capacity required to sustain vision, people, and performance outpaces their current way of leading.
Traditional coaching often falls into one of two traps:
- Surface-level productivity hacks — lists, habits, or tips that can’t withstand the pressures of scale.
- Generic consulting — models borrowed from another business, another context, with no attention to the leader’s relational and personal reality.
Neither is enough.
Executives need something deeper, sharper, and more adaptive. Skip Level is that model.
Our Foundation
Skip Level blends three disciplines into one practice. This hybrid is what allows us to hold a mirror to leaders in a way no single discipline can.
1. Psychology
With a background in clinical psychology, Skip Level understands the complexities of human behavior, trauma, resilience, and the unseen forces that shape how leaders show up. This depth allows us to address blind spots, relational conflict, and emotional intelligence with precision — not platitudes.
2. Business
With an MBA and years of executive and entrepreneurial experience, Skip Level speaks the language of growth, P&L, and high-stakes decision-making. We understand what it means to be responsible for both strategy and execution, and for the people caught in between.
3. AI Integration
The future of leadership isn’t human or artificial. It’s human with artificial. Skip Level helps leaders integrate AI into their decision-making as a cognitive partner — reducing noise, revealing patterns, and freeing space for creativity and presence.
Who We Work With
Skip Level is built for leaders who carry responsibility at scale. We are referral-only by design. Exclusivity ensures we work with those committed to transformation, not transaction. It also ensures the confidentiality that leaders at this level require.
- Founders balancing vision with relentless demand.
- Executives whose promotion exposed new cracks in their leadership.
- C-suite teams under pressure to perform but divided by unseen tensions.
- Leaders who have achieved what they thought they wanted, only to discover the cost.
The Parallel Process With
At Skip Level, coaching is not a set of techniques. It’s a relationship in process. The way we engage with you — direct, confidential, adaptive, and relational — is the way you will learn to engage with your own team. We call this the parallel process: you experience it, you embody it, you transmit it.
- When you learn to navigate conflict without posturing, your team learns the same.
- When you build trust under pressure, your organization mirrors it.
- When you integrate AI into your decision-making, your company follows.
In this way, Skip Level doesn’t just develop leaders. We develop systems of leadership.
Why Skip Level?
Because at the highest levels, performance isn’t about adding more to your plate — it’s about changing the way you lead entirely.
- We don’t offer platitudes. We offer presence.
- We don’t hand you scripts. We help you write your own.
- We don’t scale volume. We scale vision.
Our name reflects our purpose: to take leaders beyond the plateau of what they know, into a higher level of clarity, trust, and capacity.
Skip Level isn’t here to teach you leadership. We’re here to help you expand into it.
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