Margaux
C-suite, international media group — London
Thirty-eight. Promoted twice in three years into a role she had asked for and could not, in private, admit she wanted. The competence was real. The fit was not.
Margaux came in October on the suggestion of a former client. Her brief, in the first session, was crisp. She wanted help thinking, in private, about something she had not allowed herself to think about in public.
The shape of the work was patient. We met fortnightly for eight months. Between sessions she wrote, often at length, and I read carefully and asked one or two questions in return.
What we were doing, though neither of us would have said so at the start, was helping her notice the difference between ambition that belonged to her and ambition that had been handed to her. The distinction was not theoretical. It changed where she chose to spend the next decade.
She left the role she had been promoted into. She did not leave the industry. She is, by every measure she now cares about, more senior than she was.
She negotiated a structurally different mandate and is now, by her own definition, in the right room.