A promotion or transition with personal stakes
The next role looks right on paper. You are not sure it fits the person and the family who would have to carry it.
Executive Coaching for Senior Leaders and C-Suite Executives
Brian BachmanExecutive Coach · MA, LPC
Senior enough that no one gives you honest feedback. Human enough to still need it.
At a certain altitude the honest conversations stop. Your boss is a board or a CEO with their own agenda, your peers are competitors for the next role, your reports manage you, and your spouse is inside the life your decisions shape. I coach senior executives privately, with ten years of clinical practice behind me, and my job is to be the one room where the unedited version is welcome and useful.
Does this sound like you?
The role is going well. Something underneath it is not.
The politics are wearing on you
You are good at it and you are tired of it. The version of yourself the role requires is starting to feel like a costume.
A pattern is following you upward
Defensiveness, conflict avoidance, control, or intensity that was survivable at VP is now expensive at the top.
Home is paying for the role
The marriage has become logistics. The kids get the depleted version. You have told yourself it is a season, for about six seasons.
You are carrying something no one at work knows about
A health scare, a marriage in trouble, a kid who is struggling, a parent’s decline. It is consuming the capacity the role depends on.
You have no one to think out loud with
Every relationship in your professional life has a stake in your standing. So the hardest thinking happens alone.
How I work with senior leaders
Direct, confidential, and interested in the whole person rather than the competency model.
I am not going to give you a leadership framework. You have had those. I am going to find the pattern connecting what your 360 said, what your spouse says, and what you say to yourself at 3 a.m., and put it on a whiteboard where you can see it. Most senior leaders tell me that is the first time anyone has looked at the whole picture.
From there the work is specific: the decision you keep not making, the conversation you keep avoiding, the response under pressure that needs to change. And because I am a licensed counselor, I can tell you when something is a leadership problem and when it is not.
A story I see often
A division president was three months from the promotion she had worked toward for twenty years. She was not sure she wanted it.
Details changed. Everyone around her had an opinion, and every opinion had a stake in it. What she did not have was a place to sort out which parts of her hesitation were exhaustion, which were a genuine mismatch, and which were an old rule about never disappointing anyone. Three of those needed different responses.
She took the role, on terms she would not have thought to negotiate before, and with two functions carved out that had never belonged to her anyway. The work was not deciding for her. It was clearing enough noise that she could decide from something other than depletion.
How an engagement starts
Four steps from “something is off” to a plan you can actually run.
A 20-minute call about fit
You tell me what is actually going on. I tell you honestly whether it is the kind of problem I help with, and whether coaching or clinical care is the right door. No pitch, and no pressure to decide on the call.
We pick the right depth
One defined problem is Focused Coaching. A problem that crosses work and home is Integrated Coaching. If you want a full working model of how you operate, that is Private Advisory. I will tell you which one fits, including when the answer is the cheaper one.
I build the map
Integrated and Private Advisory engagements start with assessment and a written synthesis: strengths, blind spots, the patterns connecting your complaints, and the two or three leverage points that will change the most. See a sample Whole-Person Profile
We test it against real life
Meetings roughly every other week. Between them you run specific experiments: a conversation you have been avoiding, a decision, a boundary, a different response under pressure. The map gets corrected by what actually happens.
Three depths of engagement
The engagement should match the problem, not force every client through the same process.
Focused Coaching
$2,750 · 2 months
One defined problem, four private meetings, specific experiments between them, and a written continuation plan. For people who already know what needs attention.
Integrated Coaching
$4,500 · 4 months
Most clients start here. A problem that crosses several areas of life, a targeted whole-person assessment, a written synthesis, eight meetings, and a check-in between them.
Private Advisory
$7,800 · 6 months
A comprehensive Whole-Person Profile, twelve meetings, priority access, optional spouse perspective, and a final synthesis of what changed. For a select few who want the full model.
“Brian sees patterns other experts miss. I could never turn my brain off or simply enjoy the life I built. Now, with Brian’s expertise, money serves me. I do not serve it anymore.”
Questions
What people usually want to know before they book.
Is this confidential from my company?
Completely. The engagement is with you, not your employer. Nothing is reported back. If your company pays, that does not change what I share, which is nothing.
How is this different from coaching my company arranged?
Company-arranged coaching is usually competency-focused and at least partly reported to the organization. This is private, whole-person, and psychologically informed. It works on the patterns underneath the behavior and the way your life outside work is affecting the role.
Is this therapy?
No. Coaching is provided under a coaching agreement and is organized around decisions, patterns, and implementation. My clinical license means I can recognize when something is not a coaching problem, and I will tell you.
I travel constantly. How does scheduling work?
Almost all engagements are by video, scheduled roughly every other week around your calendar. Private Advisory includes priority scheduling and responses within a business day.
Keep reading
Related pages.
Private whole-person coaching
The higher you go, the fewer people can tell you the truth. That is exactly when you need one who can.
A 20-minute private conversation. Confidential, no pitch, and a plain answer about whether this is a fit.
Book a private 20-minute consult