Executive, Leadership & Transition Coaching by Susanne Kruger
There is a point in many working lives where the strategies that carried you this far stop carrying you. The role still fits on paper. The calendar still fills. Something underneath has shifted, and thinking harder about it brings you no closer.
This is one to one coaching for people at that point. A co-creative journey. It is slower than most things sold as coaching, and it works with what is actually happening rather than with what should be happening by now.
Who this work is for
Senior professionals, visionaries, founders and leaders who have been capable for a long time and have arrived somewhere capability does not reach. People carrying a loss that the working week made no room for. People whose energy has thinned out over years rather than weeks. People who have moved country, or role, or life stage, and find themselves between two versions of themselves with nothing settled yet.
Most of us come to this work having already tried the sensible things. That is usually the right starting point, and it tells us something about what is needed next.
Burnout, and what tends to sit underneath it
Burnout is rarely only about workload. It is more often about sustained effort in a direction that has stopped meaning what it once did, held in a body that has been overriding its own signals for a long time.
Recovery work here is about capacity: how much can be met at any given moment without being overwhelmed by it. Capacity narrows under pressure, after loss, and in the long middle of a transition. When it narrows, the things that usually work stop working. We begin with what your capacity actually is, and we work with that.
Grief and loss
Some losses are recognised and given time. Many are not: a marriage that ended, an estrangement, a miscarriage, a parent present in the room and already gone, a career or a country left behind. The loss is real and the recognition is missing, which is what makes it heavy to carry alone.
This work offers company through that stretch. It does not shorten it.
Life and leadership transitions
A promotion into a role where everything you were good at no longer applies. A move you chose and cannot admit is hard. The end of a role that had become who you were. These crossings have a shape, and knowing the shape changes how they are carried.
The middle of a transition is where the reorganising happens. It takes the time it takes, and it is far more ordinary than it feels from inside.
Coaching across cultures and for expatriates
Relocation asks more of a person than logistics. Alongside the practical adjustments sits the quieter work of who you are when the context that recognised you is gone.
I work with internationally mobile professionals and their partners, and as an intercultural trainer and coach, through relocation agencies. Twenty five years of living and working across continents sits behind that, and so does a fifteen year international corporate career before this practice.
Why the body is part of this
We can only meet what we feel safe enough to meet. The mind can know perfectly well that there is no danger while the body goes on sensing alarm, and no further explanation closes that gap.
So some of this work is somatic. We pay attention to what tightens, what goes quiet, what leans forward. The body registers a change before the mind has words for it, and it holds the reorganisation while the mind is still arguing about whether anything has happened.
A new way of thinking, starts with a new way of moving.
How the work is arranged
Sessions are one to one, online worldwide, or in person in Cape Town. In English or German.
I am certified by the International Coaching Federation as a Professional Certified Coach (PCC) and accredited by the European Mentoring and Coaching Council as a Senior Practitioner, with over 1,500 coaching hours and fifteen years in coaching and training globally.
If something here recognises where you are, you are welcome to get in touch.