About Zachary R.J. Strong

Education and Academic Research

My formal education was intentionally interdisciplinary. I completed an undergraduate degree that combined engineering physics, mathematics, and business, and was heavily involved in artistic extracurriculars. This combination of technical training and creative work allowed me to approach problems from both a scientific and artistic perspective.

After receiving my undergraduate degree, I spent several years coaching students and managing a research project within McMaster’s business school. After completing forty hours of interviews with students involved in an accelerator program, I discovered that student performance was closely related to the language patterns they displayed when answering my interview questions.

Independent Scholarship

The relationship between language and competence was extremely interesting to me, but this topic could not be adequately addressed within a single discipline of study.

As a result, I shifted toward independent scholarship to study this issue at the depth and breadth it required. Over ten years, I reviewed the discoveries made across many disciplines, including developmental psychology, positive psychology, neuroscience, expertise studies, wisdom research, and educational psychology. My goal was synthesis: understanding how these fields converged, where they reinforced each other’s findings, and what discoveries in these fields revealed about accelerated psychological growth.

Identifying Developmental Leverage Points

Between my research, my professional work as a marketer and coach, and my lived experience, a pattern became increasingly clear: adult development tends to stall at predictable points – not because of a lack of effort or intelligence, but because certain developmental milestones are difficult to reach without the proper resources.

I realized that my research allowed me to map out these developmental milestones, and my experience as an educator and coach allowed me to design resources that would help people reach them. My focus shifted to helping people take complex perspectives, confront fear and shame, relate to others, and develop a robust sense of self.

Why Guided Journals?

One-to-one support such as therapy or coaching can be powerful, but it is resource-intensive, difficult to scale, and not accessible to most people over long periods of time.

However, well-designed guided journals support development in an accessible and affordable way. They preserve autonomy, encourage self-authorship, and make inner work possible at scale. They are also able to reach demographics of people that would never be able to afford the kinds of coaching and therapy that are typically required to support accelerated growth.

The journals I design are based on the best research available in the psychological sciences… and the coaching industry. In some ways, I am attempting to become the “Robin Hood” of developmental psychology and coaching.