Executive Coaching

Executive coaching for Dubai and the UAE, online

Most executive coaches are trained in a matter of weeks. The coaching offered here is of a different nature. Dr Philippe Jacquet is a Jungian analyst with twenty-five years of clinical experience and an executive coach trained at ESSEC Business School, one of Europe’s top business schools. For leaders in Dubai and across the UAE, the work is delivered online by secure video, in English or French.

ESSEC rigour and Jungian creativity

Two qualities define this work, and they rarely come together. The first is rigour: ESSEC’s executive-coaching training brings a disciplined understanding of organisations, strategy and performance, and clear thinking about the real pressures a leader faces. The second is creativity: Jungian analysis treats the imagination as a serious instrument rather than a distraction, working with intuition, image and the symbolic life, where leaders often find answers that pure analysis cannot reach. Most coaching offers one or the other. This practice brings both, applied to the same questions.

What this reaches that conventional coaching does not

A standard coaching engagement helps clarify goals, improve communication and manage time and energy. These are real gains, but they do not reach the level where the heaviest difficulties play out. Why does a leader sabotage relationships once they reach a certain level of success? Why take disproportionate risks, as if part of them were seeking to lose? Why does outward success sit alongside a persistent sense of not belonging, of being about to be found out? These are serious clinical questions with answers, and the answers change the decisions a person makes.

What a Dubai career does to people

Coaching in Dubai has to account for things that do not arise in London or Frankfurt, and a coach who has not thought about them will keep missing the point.

Your residency is tied to your job. That single fact changes the psychology of every difficult decision. In most places a senior person who is being badly treated can resign and look around. Here, resigning can mean your family’s schooling, your home and your right to remain all moving at once. People therefore stay in situations they would otherwise have left years ago, and then cannot understand why they feel trapped by a life that looks enviable from outside.

The number that keeps moving. Many arrive with a figure in mind and a plan to be gone in three years. Earnings are high, the lifestyle expands to meet them, and the figure quietly rises. Ten years later they are still here, still two years from leaving, and no longer sure what the money was for.

Everybody leaves. Friendships are made quickly and broken by other people’s contracts. The result is a social life that can be busy and constantly repopulated, and a real loneliness underneath it, because the people who knew you three years ago are in Singapore.

The trailing family. A spouse who gave up their own career to come, children in their third international school, and a sense of responsibility that makes it impossible to admit you are unhappy, because everyone else moved for you.

And drinking. The expatriate professional world here has a heavy social drinking culture, in a setting where discretion genuinely matters and where the consequences of a problem becoming visible are more serious than they would be at home. That combination produces a specific pattern: people who know something has got out of hand, and who will not go anywhere locally about it.

Why this is not just another executive coach

Dubai has no shortage of executive coaches, many of them former businesspeople with a coaching certification. They are often good at what they do, and what they do is work on behaviour: how you present, how you delegate, how you handle the board.

Dr Jacquet is a clinician who is also a qualified coach, which is a different profession. He is a Jungian analyst with twenty-five years of clinical practice and a Doctorate of Professional Practice, trained as an executive coach at ESSEC Business School, and a specialist in addiction with nine years inside private residential rehabilitation and over five years supervising a private psychiatric hospital rated Outstanding by the CQC.

The practical difference is that the work does not stop when the problem stops being behavioural. Exhaustion, drinking, a marriage that has become logistics, the discovery that the career delivered everything and you feel nothing: all of it can be worked with rather than referred onward. A coach without clinical training will usually not recognise these early, and will coach around them for a year.

That last one has its own essay: what happens when achievement stops meaning anything.

Complete confidentiality, and no local footprint

This is the part that matters most to senior people in the UAE, and it is worth stating plainly.

Sessions are held online from London. There is no clinic here, no appointment in a building where you might be seen, and no record held in the UAE. Nothing is disclosed to an employer, a board, a sponsor or investors, including where a company is paying, save for the narrow legal and safeguarding limits explained at the outset.

For a senior expatriate whose visa, family and standing are bound together, that is not a preference. It is usually the condition of seeking help at all.

It also means the work survives a move. People in this region relocate, and a relationship that already exists online continues through Singapore, London or Riyadh without a break.

Online coaching for leaders in Dubai

Dubai is a hub of founders, executives and globally mobile leaders, many of whom travel constantly and run international operations. Online coaching by secure video removes the constraint of geography without removing the depth. The work stays continuous wherever you are that week, with a level of discretion an office visit cannot offer, and scheduling that accommodates the time difference.

How it starts

There is no free introductory call, and the reason is worth stating.

A short unpaid conversation is a sales meeting. Both people behave accordingly: one is being assessed, the other is being persuasive, and almost nothing is learned about whether the work will actually help, because nothing real has happened.

The first session is the assessment. It is a full session at the usual fee and it is genuine work rather than a preamble to it. You will get an accurate sense of how Dr Jacquet thinks and whether you want to continue, and you will take something away from it either way. If he is not the right person for what you need, he will say so and point you somewhere better suited.

There is no obligation beyond that single session, and no package to commit to.

Dr Philippe Jacquet is a UKCP registered psychotherapist, a Jungian analyst and an HCPC registered art psychotherapist, with twenty-five years of clinical practice. His Doctorate of Professional Practice at the University of Essex examined male eating disorders from the perspective of analytical psychology. Registration can be checked on either public register.

How the work is delivered from here

All international sessions are by secure video, in English or French. Online therapy is not a reduced version of consulting room work: it is the format that lets weekly work survive living abroad, travelling, or relocating. Sessions run in United Kingdom hours, which suits most regions, and if your time zone makes none of it workable, say so when you enquire rather than assuming it rules you out.

For clinicians and treatment services

Dr Jacquet supervises clinical teams in private residential addiction treatment and in a private psychiatric hospital. For treatment centres, psychiatric units and group practices looking for external clinical supervision, including in places where no supervisor of this seniority is available locally, team supervision is also delivered by video. For individual practitioners, see clinical supervision.

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