I've sat where you're sitting.

My story

From the executive seat to the coaching chair

I spent the first half of my career doing the job, not studying it: two decades in senior leadership roles, the last several years of it with a seat on an executive committee. I inherited a team in crisis more than once. I sat in rooms where I was the only woman, made the case for a decision I couldn't share with anyone below me, and learned — the hard way — what actually helps a leader under pressure and what just sounds good in a book.

What helped, almost every time, was one honest conversation with someone who had no stake in the politics and no interest in flattering me. Not a mentor from three levels up who needed me to keep performing. Not a friend who'd tell me what I wanted to hear. Someone whose only job was to ask the sharper question and hold me to what I said mattered.

I became a coach because I wanted to be that person for other women doing what I'd done: carrying more than anyone around them could see, and making it look effortless because that's what the room seemed to require.

My approach is direct, not soft. I trained formally — ICF, Hogan, EQ-i, Stakeholder Centered Coaching — because credentials matter and because the training sharpened instincts I'd already been using for years without a name for them. But what I bring first is having actually sat in the seat: the 2am decision, the board that wants an answer you don't fully have yet, the promotion that quietly terrifies you.

Outside client work, I stay close to the research on women in leadership, take regular coaching supervision, and mentor a small number of coaches earlier in their own training. I work with a deliberately small roster of clients at any time, because the work only holds up if I can give each of them my full attention.