A place to think clearly about the life you're building.
Coppermine Studio is a place to hear yourself more clearly. Begin with an essay or self-guided tool, join a small gathering, or think through what comes next with one-on-one support.
Created by Allison Yost, PhD, an organizational psychologist, coach, and writer.
Tools · Coffee · Coaching
Start wherever feels right.
Reflect privately, join other women around a table, or work through a consequential decision one-on-one.
- On your own
Reflection Tools
Private, self-guided ways to find language for what you are experiencing and begin listening for what comes next.
- In person, in Arlington
Friday Coffee Circle
An in-person gathering for women in the DC area who want thoughtful conversation and genuine connection.
- One-on-one
Coaching
One-on-one support for making a consequential career decision. Build toward what you want without leaving what matters behind.
Why Coppermine
Some questions need more room than everyday life gives them.
A question may begin with work. It may surface through a change in your family, health, relationships, ambition, or sense of who you are becoming. Often, several parts of life are moving at once.
Most days leave little room to follow those questions. There is another deadline, text, appointment, or person who needs an answer. You keep doing what needs to be done, while certain parts of you get harder to hear.
Coppermine Studio grew from the belief that we need places where we can stop performing, hear our own voices, and remember the parts of ourselves that have been crowded out by everything that needed doing.
Here, you can read, reflect, gather, or think with someone. You do not need clarity before you begin. You only need a little room to pay attention, and perhaps to start building what comes next.
Field Notes
Recent essays
Field Notes is where the thinking behind Coppermine gets worked out in public. Read one, and if something in it stays with you, there's a tool to try, a table to sit at, or a conversation to have whenever you're ready.
You Can't Think Your Way to Clarity
All that introspection you did told you what matters. It didn't tell you what's next.
How Many Summers Left?
Life Math, and the difference between being told the years are short and feeling it
What the Wiser Self Does Differently
What it sounds like when the steadier voice gets to lead
Behind Coppermine
Allison Yost, PhD
I'm an organizational psychologist, coach, writer, and executive. For nearly two decades, I've studied how people work, lead, and change, while spending much of that time leading inside organizations myself.
I know this territory from the inside. I built a career I was proud of alongside a family I love, then reached a point when the way I was working no longer fit the life around it. Thinking harder only got me so far. Conversations with a coach and other women helped me hear what I couldn't hear alone. I began trying things too: coaching, writing, gathering women around a table, and building tools. The next shape became clearer through the work itself.
Those experiments became Coppermine Studio, bringing together the parts of my work and life that matter most to me: helping people think well, writing, making useful things, and creating places for honest conversation and connection.
Coppermine takes its name from Coppermine Village, the Connecticut neighborhood where I grew up. It was a place where belonging was part of everyday life, and where my best friend and I learned that we could build something simply because we imagined it.
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Looking for organizational consulting, leadership advising, or speaking? Visit Allison Yost, PhD.