Essays on the psychology of senior leadership, from a board-certified psychiatrist and executive coach. Written for the executives who carry weight they rarely get to set down.
Executive coaching rates range from a few hundred dollars an hour to several thousand. Here is what sits behind those numbers and how a senior leader should evaluate the spend.
Read the essay →The research on executive coaching is more encouraging than skeptics assume and weaker than the industry implies. What matters most is what predicts a good outcome.
Directors are trained to read results. Very few are trained to read the person producing them, and the gap between the two is where most leadership failures incubate.
The fusion of founder and company produces the conviction that builds something from nothing. It also produces a specific and predictable set of failures.
High standards and perfectionism look identical from the outside and function completely differently from the inside. The distinction determines whether the trait builds a career or slowly dismantles one.
Organizations prepare leaders for the mechanics of a workforce reduction and almost never for what conducting one does to the person who has to do it.
Most executives who drink are not in trouble. Almost all of them are paying a performance cost they have not measured, because the mechanism is invisible from the inside.
Many senior leaders reach the C-suite with undiagnosed ADHD, carried there by intelligence and compensation. The scaffolding usually fails at a predictable point.
Grief is a physiological event with measurable effects on cognition, and organizations schedule three days for it. What senior leaders need to know about leading through loss.
Coaching confidentiality is a professional commitment, not a legal privilege. The difference matters most in exactly the situations where a leader most needs to speak freely.
What executive burnout looks like beneath the surface, and why the earliest signs are physiological and cognitive long before they become behavioral.
Why the isolation that comes with the top job is not a personality issue but a structural and clinical risk with real consequences for judgment and health.
An honest account of how executive coaching and therapy differ, where they overlap, and how to tell which one your situation actually calls for.
The neuroscience of why a leader's tenth good decision is harder than their first, and what senior leaders can do to protect the quality of their judgment.
Why the sleep most executives treat as expendable is, clinically, the single most reliable lever for sharper judgment and steadier leadership.
Resilience is not the ability to absorb unlimited strain without complaint. The leaders who treat it that way are the ones most likely to break.
Imposter feelings rarely disappear with success; they often sharpen. A clinician's guide to understanding and working with them at the highest levels.
The first 90 days of an executive role reward structured observation over early action, and a clinical lens shows leaders how to read the system before changing it.
High-functioning anxiety drives the behaviors organizations reward, which is exactly why it goes unrecognized and unaddressed in senior leaders.
A framework for senior leaders evaluating executive coaches, covering credentials, clinical depth, confidentiality, and the questions that reveal real competence.
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