Helena
Senior partner, international law firm — Frankfurt
Fifty-two. Made partner at thirty-six. The kind of woman who is described, in profiles, as formidable. She had built a life she could no longer feel inside.
She arrived in March, by referral, with a clear and specific request. She wanted to be told the truth about what she was doing. She had stopped trusting the people closest to her to do it.
We worked through her calendar first. Not as a productivity exercise — as an inventory of where her attention had been spent and what it had been spent on. The pattern that surfaced was not what she expected.
She had been mistaking exhaustion for seniority and silence for composure. Once we named that, the second half of the work became possible. She made a series of decisions over the following months that were, by her own account, overdue by a decade.
Her practice did not shrink. Her week did. The two are not the same thing, and she had been treating them as if they were.
She redrew her role at the firm and took the first uninterrupted month off in seventeen years.