Johnny LaLonde

Johnny LaLonde headshot

Johnny LaLonde is a coach, counselor, and teacher, who draws on his extensive experience and doctoral training to offer insight and support to individuals in their process of personal and professional growth.

As a coach, Johnny draws on his doctoral training, therapy experience, and his work with founders at Builders VC. While coaching conversations may venture deep into the internal world, personal life, or family of origin for the individual, these are explored in the service of vocational and professional development. As a coach, he conducts individual coaching, provides co-founder coaching, and facilitates off-sites, trainings, and challenging conversations.

Coaching Founders & Early Stage Companies

In addition to his independent coaching practice, Johnny is an available resource for Founders in the Builders VC portfolio. In this role, he brings experience and training in order to help individuals and teams grow. He began working with individuals at early stage companies shortly after moving to San Francisco in 2011. He understands the entrepreneurial journey as an unfolding process of external and internal demands. He believes that founders need personal support in this process.

He is most enlivened by the deep questions of personal growth and identity that emerge in the demanding environment of scaling a company. Johnny joined Builders to be a consistent resource for the interpersonal and intrapersonal challenges faced by founders. He hopes that his work will lead founders to describe Builders as the most empathic and supportive venture fund they have worked with.

Education and Certifications

Johnny is a Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor in the state of California. He earned his Bachelor of Science in Psychology from the University of Central Florida, a Master of Arts in Counseling from Reformed Theological Seminary, and a PhD in Counseling from Oregon State University. After finishing his Masters degree, Johnny’s entrepreneurial side saw him founding a counseling center.

In 2011, he was recruited to begin work as a counselor at City Church San Francisco’s counseling center, of which he soon became director. In his years at the City Church Counseling Center, Johnny clinically supervised interns, led trainings and classes for the community, maintained a regular roster of clients, co-facilitated a yearlong course of spiritual formation, and provided clinical direction for the center.

Personal Interests

Johnny lives in San Francisco’s Inner Sunset neighborhood with his wife, Christy, and their daughter, Hope. When he isn’t teaching, coaching or in session, you can find him roasting his own coffee, playing basketball, cooking, or endlessly tinkering with projects at home. Since moving to SF, he has adopted the Warriors while he waits for the Orlando Magic to “return” to glory.

icon of a lightbulb with lines indicating light rays around the outside, inside is an icon of a brain

Learn More About Johnny

  • Inner work is the long, deliberate process of moving from self-awareness to self-knowledge. We begin by observing who we are at the very depths of our person. We notice the patterns and blindspots that emerge. I believe that our commitment to this process of increasing our awareness eventually grows into a deeper self-knowledge. We are not just aware of what we think, feel, or desire. We are also knowledgeable about where it comes from, how it operates within us, and how we can interact with it. We develop a strong working knowledge of our inner world. This means we start to understand our blindspots, the origins of our patterns, our deepest needs and longings, and we become skilled at the process of observing something in ourselves, asking the right questions, and living into new answers.

    One of my favorite pieces of writing on this process is by the poet Rilke: "I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."

    I believe inner work is important because it is an essential part of being human. Deepening our understanding of ourselves, others, and the world we live in. This strikes me as a very fundamental task of our humanity. And, it is important because I believe the deep stuff within us shapes and influences how we show up in the world. Essentially, the more knowledgeable we are about who we are and what drives us, the healthier we can become in life. As Carl Jung put it, "Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

  • Change is slower and smaller than we realize. And yet, the slow, small changes are far more profound than we realize.

    There are things we need to deeply accept about ourselves and the world and things we want to change. A lot of our work is in properly identifying which things belong to which category.

  • Direct. My clients have often said that they feel they appreciate my willingness to tell them what I am thinking or observing.

    Caring. Clients have said that this directness does not sacrifice the experience of feeling cared for.

    Intense. Over the years, many clients have described me as intense. In the ideal situation, this intensity is applied to my invitation for their openness, my expression of care, and my support in their ongoing work.

  • I really enjoy being a part of the process that leads people to realizing something new, deeper, or that they were unaware of. I feel like there is an incredible amount of power in these moments and they only occur after our consistent, diligent reflection.