Strategic Life Coaching — New York
The internal dimensions of a Wall Street career — the burnout, the imposter syndrome, the identity questions, the moment when the career that defined you starts to feel like a cage — these are not solved by career coaching or management consulting. They require a different kind of work. This is what I do.
Book a Consultation"The specific cruelty of a Wall Street career is that it is designed to exceed your capacity — and then to make you feel that the excess is a personal failing rather than a structural feature of the environment."
The people who work with me from New York are typically not early in their careers. They are the MD at a bulge bracket bank who has achieved everything they set out to achieve and is quietly asking what it was for. The VP who is performing at a high level while running, beneath that performance, an exhaustion that rest does not resolve. The analyst or associate who entered banking with genuine ambition and is discovering, earlier than expected, that the environment is producing a cost they did not fully anticipate.
What connects them is not the level or the firm. It is the specific experience of carrying something that the role does not have space for — the doubt, the depletion, the question of whether this is actually the right life — in an environment that rewards the performance of having none of it.
The most common presenting situations:
Burnout that rest does not fix
The exhaustion that a holiday does not resolve. The flatness where the ambition used to be. The increasing difficulty of finding genuine reasons to care about outcomes you are still technically pursuing.
Imposter syndrome at a senior level
The MD who has been promoted three times and still feels the quiet dread before every major presentation. The voice that finds new material at every level of the hierarchy.
The question of whether to leave
Not the practical career management question — the deeper one. Whether this is the right life. Whether the golden handcuffs are keeping you because you want to stay or because you have not yet built the internal freedom to leave.
What success has not answered
The partner who has closed dozens of deals and finds that the arrival did not feel like arrival. The professional who has succeeded by every external measure and is quietly asking what the success was for.
Identity after banking
The transition away from a career that has been the primary organising structure of identity — and the work of building something that does not depend on the institutional scaffolding for its stability.
Performance under pressure
The decision quality that declines under sustained cognitive depletion. The relationships that receive the diminished version of the person that the hours produce. The cost of the performance, sustained over years.
I am based in London at 67 Pall Mall, and I work with clients across time zones — including a meaningful number of people on Wall Street and in the broader New York finance community. The work is done remotely, which for most of the people I work with is a practical advantage rather than a limitation: sessions happen early morning before the trading day starts, or in the evening when the deal pressure has subsided.
I am a former investment banker and venture capitalist. I understand, from the inside, what it means to make consequential decisions under sustained cognitive depletion. To perform certainty in client meetings when the internal experience is considerably less certain. To carry a fund through a crisis — and to navigate the specific kind of loss that follows when the thing you built does not survive the conditions it encounters.
Before finance, I was a professional tennis player on the WTA tour — which means I have also lived the specific experience of building an identity entirely around exceptional performance, and then having the structural context of that performance removed. That experience — of having to build a sense of self from the inside rather than from the outside — is the foundation of the work I do with clients who are navigating similar transitions.
You do not need to spend the first six sessions explaining what an investment committee is, or why the bonus number matters more than it should, or what it feels like to carry eight portfolio companies while performing composure in every conversation you have. I already know.
I work with a small number of private clients at any one time. Sessions are conducted via video call, typically on a weekly or fortnightly basis. The work is not structured around a fixed programme or a prescribed framework — it is shaped by what is most important for the specific person at the specific moment in their career and their life.
The sessions are a space for the version of the conversation that has no other space in a Wall Street life. The honest assessment of what is actually happening — not the version prepared for the partner meeting or the performance review or the conversation with a spouse who is trying to understand but does not quite have the context. The full version, without the performance requirement.
What we typically work on falls into three categories: the immediate — the specific situation, decision or challenge that is most pressing right now. The structural — the patterns, beliefs and habits that are creating the conditions the immediate situation reflects. And the foundational — the relationship with worth, identity and meaning that determines whether any structural change holds over time.
Typical client profile
— Analyst to Managing Director, across bulge bracket and boutique banks
— Private equity professionals, from associate to partner
— Hedge fund professionals and asset managers
— Finance professionals navigating transitions — within or out of the industry
— Founders with finance backgrounds building companies
— Senior professionals navigating the question of what comes next
Wall Street has specific features that make the internal dimensions of a finance career there distinct from their equivalents in other financial centres. The pace is more aggressive. The culture around vulnerability is, if anything, more prohibitive. The status dynamics are more visible and more consequential. And the geographic concentration of finance in a single district of a single city creates a specific kind of proximity — to peers, to competitors, to the constant implicit comparison — that does not exist in the same way in London or Hong Kong or any other global financial centre.
The New York finance professional carries their career in a specific social environment where the credential and the institution are immediately legible to almost everyone in their social world. Where the Goldman or the Blackstone affiliation is not just a professional fact but a social one. Where leaving or stepping back carries a specific kind of visibility that the equivalent transition in a less finance-saturated environment would not.
These specific features of the Wall Street context are not obstacles to the work. They are the content of it. Understanding them from the inside — not from a general knowledge of finance but from the lived experience of having navigated high-performance professional environments where the stakes of performance were personal and the cost of authentic vulnerability was real — is what allows the work to begin where it needs to begin rather than at the introductory level that a less contextually fluent coach would require.
Does it matter that you are based in London and I am in New York?
In practice, no. All sessions are conducted via video call, which removes the geographic constraint entirely. The time zone difference — New York is five hours behind London — typically works well for early morning sessions before the trading day starts, or early evening New York time. Many of the people I work with find the separation from their immediate professional environment a practical advantage — the coaching relationship exists outside the social world of the firm and the industry, which makes the kind of honest engagement the work requires considerably more accessible.
How is this different from executive coaching or career coaching?
Executive coaching typically focuses on professional effectiveness — leadership skills, communication, performance management. Career coaching focuses on career management — job searching, positioning, transitions. What I do addresses the internal dimensions that determine whether any of those external changes hold: the beliefs, patterns and identity structures that shape how professional situations are experienced and responded to. Most of the people who work with me have tried executive or career coaching and found it addressed the surface without the root. This is different work.
Is this confidential?
Completely. The coaching relationship is private. Nothing discussed in sessions is shared with employers, colleagues or anyone else. For Wall Street professionals particularly — where the professional and social worlds overlap significantly and where the acknowledgment of any kind of personal difficulty can carry professional cost — this confidentiality is not a feature. It is the foundation of the work.
How do I start?
A consultation. A direct conversation — thirty to forty minutes — about where you are and what the work might look like. No commitment required beyond the time. The consultation is the place to establish whether this is the right kind of support for what you are navigating. If it is, we discuss how to proceed. If it is not, I will tell you honestly what might be more useful.
What does it cost?
The consultation to discuss the work is the starting point — book that below and we will cover everything including structure and investment as part of that conversation.
A direct, private conversation about where you are and what the work might look like. No commitment beyond the time.
Book a ConsultationStrategic life coach based in London at 67 Pall Mall. Former WTA professional tennis player, UC Berkeley graduate, ex-investment banker and venture capitalist. Working with a small number of private clients globally — founders, finance professionals and senior executives — on the internal dimensions of high performance. More about Kasia →