What is coaching?

Coaching is a deep exploration process that enables individuals to maximize their potential. Whether in a professional or personal context, a coach honors the client as the expert of her work and life, and believes that every individual is creative, resourceful and whole.

What is the difference between coaching and therapy?

Coaching is focused primarily on the present and future, while therapy tends to focus on the past. Additionally:

  • Therapy is for addressing trauma, addiction, depression, anxiety, and other mental health challenges. As such, therapists are licensed healthcare professionals, while coaches are not professionally trained to support these kinds of challenges.

  • A coach works with clients to establish clear, distinct goals for the coaching engagement, and to define what success looks like. An important part of this engagement includes homework, which is provided in each coaching session in order to support the client’s growth and development between sessions.

  • An engagement can be long term but not intended to be forever. Coaching serves as an accelerant to propel change in a client’s life, with purposeful and intentional closure once their goals are achieved.

Why work with a coach?

Growth is hard work. And hardest when you’re doing it alone. With a coach, you can cross the chasm between where you are and where you want to be, with a partner who supports you through values and strength discovery, goal setting, accountability, and compassionate candor.

Coaching is tailored to your specific goals. Outcomes you may be after could include:

  • Strengths, guiding principles and purpose discovery

  • Clarity around navigating a major career pivot or development

  • Building awareness around blind spots, resistance to change and getting ‘unstuck’

  • Cultivating self-awareness and discernment for better decision-making

  • Understanding and reclaiming personal power

  • Developing compassion and accessing self-compassion

  • Finding confidence, conviction and your voice as a leader

  • Evolving your leadership to adapt to changing environments

  • Delegation and energy focus to increase effectiveness

  • Building positive, productive and trusting relationships with your team

  • Maintaining high performance and bold ambition while also prioritizing health and well-being

What guides my coaching?

I believe in holistic leadership development. This is not simply about skills and behaviors at work (although this is important, too). Coaching is about understanding your whole self, enabling you to see yourself clearly, your guiding principles, and your vision for work and life. There is a fallacy that ‘winning’ is a zero-sum game and is only possible at the expense of your well-being and the well-being of those around you. I don’t buy into this fallacy — and do believe that it is possible to be fearlessly ambitious and achieve greatness while operating sustainably, staying values aligned, and leading with integrity. It is my greatest privilege to support leaders through their most meaningful moments, and to help them ‘see’ themselves in their fullness.

I am professionally trained and certified through the Co-Active Training Institute and a Fellow of the Institute of Coaching (IOC) at McLean Hospital (a Harvard Medical School teaching hospital) which is dedicated to ensuring scientific integrity in the field of coaching. As a dedicated practitioner, I am a member of and adhere to the professional and ethical standards of the International Coaching Federation. I have been professionally trained in the Positive Intelligence framework, and frequently draw on the work of the Conscious Leadership Group and Emotional Agility. I utilize radical self-inquiry, self-reflection, visioning, mindfulness, and presence-based coaching throughout my coaching.

While I am not the focus of our work together and I delineate clearly between coaching and mentoring/advising, I believe my professional and lived experience has played a powerful role in helping me build genuine empathy with my clients. This experience includes being:

  • A new business builder

  • An operations leader building and managing global teams in world-class, hyper-growth, and venture-backed companies

  • A venture investor backing founders of seed-stage tech companies

  • A board director and observer

  • An advisor to senior execs and mentor to emerging leaders

  • An advocate for underrepresented communities within the tech and venture industries

  • A biracial woman navigating the twists and turns of a personal journey to understand her racial identity

  • An expat 3x over in search of adventure and belonging

  • A new parent in a country that is not ‘home’

  • A competitive freelance violinist who has navigated the lows of extreme performance anxiety

Who do I work with?

While my clients come from a range of backgrounds and experiences, most work in the technology or venture capital industries, or are seasoned professionals at a career crossroads. I have partnered with leaders who have worked at established global tech companies like Canva, Dropbox, TikTok, Amazon, Figma, Palantir and Stripe, as well as early stage, high-growth companies backed by VCs like Accel, Index, Insight, Lightspeed, LocalGlobe, OpenView, GV, Blackbird and AirTree Ventures. The venture investors I work with range from investment managers and principals/directors through to GPs, and I also support operators and platform folks within VCs.

I am especially passionate about working with individuals from under-represented communities. For me to be a ‘hell yeah’ with a potential client, I am looking for evidence that you are:

  • Mission driven: You are internally motivated; you seek to build something of meaning and have an impact that’s bigger than you

  • Self-aware: You are prone to self-reflection and/or seeking to develop those muscles for the purposes of deeper growth and transformation

  • Curious: You see yourself, people and situations as opportunities to learn; you lead with curiosity rather than judgment

  • Committed: There is no such thing as overnight success; growth is cumulative and requires acceptance that at times, you must embrace the discomfort

What does partnering with me look like?

I deliver 1:1 coaching via Zoom with clients across the US, UK, and Australia. New clients engage with me on a 6-month commitment to start, with the option to continue working together on a rolling basis after.

Before we work together, we have an introductory call which focuses on your journey, and the challenges you are navigating and for which you’re seeking support. This call also gives you an opportunity to get to know me, my personal style and coaching philosophy. Coaching is deep and personal work, so before we commit, it’s important that we’re a ‘hell yeah!’ on both sides.

Coaching is not a one size fits all solution. How we work together and the structure of our sessions are designed to support your growth, your objectives and your vision. Along the way, we’ll do self-discovery and reflection work, enhance awareness and discernment, identify barriers and self-defeating behaviors that are holding you back, cultivate a growth and opportunity mindset, and tap into the strengths that enable you to rise to your greatest potential.

Get in touch and we can explore how we might work together.