Leadership and the C-Suite

There is a particular isolation that comes with sitting at the top of an organisation, and almost no language for it. The higher the role, the fewer the people to whom you can say what is actually true. This is depth psychotherapy and analysis for senior leaders: for chief executives, founders and board members for whom the usual sources of counsel have run out, and for whom coaching, however good, no longer reaches the real question.

More than coaching

Coaching is what you send your high-potential people to. It works on goals, behaviours and performance, and within its limits it works well. But the difficulties that arrive at the top are rarely behavioural. They are questions of identity, authority, meaning and mortality, and they ask for something deeper than a framework. As a Jungian analyst with a doctorate, trained in executive coaching at ESSEC, I work at the level beneath the symptom: not what you should do differently, but what is actually happening, and why.

The loneliness of the top

The loneliness of leadership is real, and rarely admitted. You cannot be fully candid with your board, your team, your investors, or often your family, because each of them needs you to be certain. So the person carrying the most pressure has the fewest places to set it down. Before anything else, this work is a place to be completely honest, without consequence.

The weight of being the one who decides

Every organisation has one person who is finally responsible: the captain of the ship. In calm seas this is invisible. In an uncertain macro-economic landscape, where the map keeps changing and there is no precedent to follow, the weight of deciding without certainty becomes a burden of its own. Much of this work is learning to hold that responsibility without being consumed by it, and to navigate the unknown rather than simply endure it.

Exposure, scrutiny and attack

At a certain level of seniority you become a target: for the media, for critics, for people who attack the position rather than the person. The constant possibility of being scrutinised, or publicly undone, is its own kind of strain, and it corrodes when carried alone. Confidential, depth work offers somewhere to face exposure and threat clearly, rather than armouring against them until something gives.

When the role ends: retirement and identity

For many leaders the hardest transition is not a crisis in the role but the end of it. A working life of total commitment builds a powerful persona, and when the title goes, so, it can feel, does the self. Stepping back, succession or retirement raises an unspoken fear: who am I when I am no longer this? Beside it sits the wish to stay relevant, to still matter in the field one helped shape. This is some of the most important work there is, and it is rarely begun in time. The task is to find what endures beneath the role, and to move toward the next chapter with curiosity rather than dread.

Discretion above all

Sessions take place in discreet, private consulting rooms in Central London (Fitzrovia), away from the spotlight of the medical district, or entirely online for those who would rather not be seen attending at all. The same absolute confidentiality that governs clinical practice governs this work. Nothing leaves the room.

How it begins

The work is bespoke, arranged around the realities of a senior schedule, whether as regular sessions or focused intensives. It begins with a single, private conversation: a chance to speak plainly about what has brought you here, and to sense whether this is the right person to think alongside. There is no obligation, and confidentiality is absolute from the first contact.