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Executive Coaching · Leadership Development

Transformational coaching rooted in clinical expertise
and real-world operating experience.

For leaders ready to understand what's actually driving them — and to build the clarity, presence, and capacity to lead and live differently.

Christina Coles, Executive Coach

"Working with Christina changed not just how I lead, but how I relate to myself, my work, and the pressure that comes with it. The growth has been lasting in a way I didn't expect."

— Director, Airbnb

The work

Most leaders aren't limited by a lack of skill or drive. They're limited by the patterns they can't yet see — the ingrained habits, assumptions, and ways of operating that shaped their success and are now quietly defining its limits. That's where this work begins.

Who this is for

The leader who wants both:
 better performance and a more authentic,
aligned way of leading and living.

Whatever your industry or career stage, you're likely here because something is shifting, and you sense that the way forward requires something different from what got you here.

Leaders outgrowing their own playbook

Navigating expanded scope, a new role, or a pivotal career moment that's calling for a fundamentally different way of leading.

High-achievers managing burnout & sustainability

Outwardly performing, internally depleted. Ready to find a more sustainable relationship with work that doesn't require giving up ambition to find balance.

Professionals navigating work and parenthood

Holding the profound weight of raising young children while sustaining a meaningful career, partnership, and sense of self — and wanting to do it with more groundedness and less depletion.

Individuals grappling with identity & purpose

Questioning what success really means, what kind of leader and person you want to become, and whether the life you're building is actually aligned with what matters most to you.

Clients have come from

Airbnb
Dropbox
UiPath
Eightfold AI
VuMedi
General Assembly

The approach

Depth and practicality,
together.

The clinical expertise to understand what's actually driving your patterns. The operational fluency to know what to do about it. This combination is what moves the work beyond just insight and into lasting change.

Clinical depth

Extensive training in clinical psychology and organizational behavior gives me a genuine understanding of what shapes behavior, identity, and emotional patterns at their root rather than at the surface.

Operational fluency

More than a decade in management consulting and operational leadership has given me genuine fluency in the pressures, politics, and complexity of organizational leadership.

Systems awareness

You don't lead in a vacuum. My work looks not just at what you're doing, but at the dynamics, patterns, and systems you're operating within — and how you might move through them with greater agency and intention.

Honest partnership

I bring warmth and rigor without sacrificing one for the other. This isn't cheerleading, and it isn't therapy. It's a relationship built on honesty and mutual respect, where I'll say what's true even when it's hard, and create the conditions for you to do the same.

What clients say

"Her guidance has had a lasting impact on my life, even years after our sessions ended. The tools she provided continue to be effective in both my personal and professional journey."

Senior Strategist, Emergency Medical Services Company

"I made better hiring decisions, built stronger relationships, and had difficult conversations earlier and more effectively. Turns out stress doesn't need to scale with responsibility."

Director, Airbnb

At a glance

11

Years in executive coaching and leadership development

NVW

Certified Integral Coach, New Ventures West

M.S.

Human Behavior & Applied Psychology, University of Southern California

Startup → F500

Coached & consulted startups and Fortune 500 companies

Work together

Most meaningful work
begins with a conversation.

If something on this page resonated, the best next step is a conversation. I’d love to hear where you are, what you’re navigating, and explore if this is the type of support you’ve been looking for.

The work

Not just better performance.
A fundamentally different relationship with how you lead and live.

My work centers on leaders navigating complexity, change, and growth, helping them develop the mental, emotional, and relational capacities needed to lead and live with greater clarity, authenticity, and impact. Every engagement is tailored to meet the unique challenges you're navigating.

Individual offerings

Individual executive coaching

Rigorous, relationship-based coaching for the leader ready to look honestly at the patterns and assumptions quietly shaping how they lead, and to build the internal capacities that lasting change actually requires. Engagements typically run 6–12 months with sessions every two weeks.

Leadership presence & authority Communication & influence Decision-making under pressure Identity & role transitions Burnout & sustainability Navigating organizational complexity Work-life integration Relationship dynamics & conflict Managing up, down & across Strategic clarity

Leadership through parenthood

A specialized focus for professionals navigating the profound and ongoing tension of sustaining a meaningful career while raising young children, and trying to do both without losing themselves in the process. As a mother of three myself, I understand how easy it is to lose connection to your own center amidst constant responsibility and caregiving. And how transformative it can be to reclaim it.

Identity & values alignment Return-to-work transitions Purpose work Partnership & load-sharing Boundaries & energy management Career reinvention Reclaiming a sense of self Navigating ambition & caregiving

Organizational offerings

Leadership development programs

For organizations navigating growth, change, or the need to strengthen leadership at scale — I partner with HR, People, and Talent leaders to design and deliver development experiences tailored to your organizational context and goals, drawing on over a decade of management consulting and leadership development experience. Every engagement begins with a detailed assessment of what your leaders and the broader organization actually need, and is built from there.

Embedded executive coaching programs Leadership cohort experiences New leader onboarding Peer coaching & learning circles People & Talent advisory Parental leave coaching programs High-potential development Manager effectiveness programs Culture & values work

Systemic team coaching

The most significant performance challenges in organizations rarely live in individual people — they live in the spaces between them: in team dynamics, communication patterns, unspoken tensions, and the structural conditions that shape how people operate and lead together. Systemic team coaching addresses this directly, working at the level of the whole system rather than developing individual leaders and hoping the results accumulate.

I bring deep experience designing and delivering this kind of work, drawing on a coordinated network of master coaches to architect engagements where individual coaching and team-level work reinforce each other in service of shared organizational goals. The result is a depth of impact no single coach working alone can produce: stronger individual leaders, and a team with greater trust, clearer communication, and a measurably stronger capacity to navigate complexity together.

Newly formed or reorganized teams Teams navigating rapid growth Cross-functional friction Leadership teams in transition Trust & psychological safety Executive team alignment Post-merger & reorganization integration

Who I work with

Leaders at every stage.
Organizations of every kind.

C-suite executives & senior leaders

C-suite executives, VPs, and senior directors navigating expanding scope, competing demands, and the growing complexity of leading at the highest levels of an organization.

Founders & entrepreneurs

Founders scaling their companies and themselves simultaneously, managing the high-stakes human side of rapid growth, ambiguity, and consequential decision-making.

Emerging leaders

High-potential leaders stepping into their first major roles and building the self-awareness, presence, and relational skills to grow into them with confidence and intention.

Clients have come from

Airbnb
Dropbox
UiPath
Eightfold AI
VuMedi
General Assembly

Ready to explore?

Let's talk about
what you're navigating.

Every engagement begins with an honest conversation about fit. If you're curious whether this work is right for you, I'd welcome the chance to connect.

The approach

Where insight meets
actual change.

My approach leverages developmental coaching, behavioral psychology, systems thinking, and organizational behavior to surface what's actually driving your behavior and shaping how you lead. The goal isn't simply to help you perform better, but to help you relate differently to yourself, others, and the complexity of your work and life.

Clinical depth

My extensive training in clinical psychology and organizational behavior gives me a genuine understanding of what shapes human behavior: the patterns, protective strategies, and internal structures that drive how people lead, relate, and make decisions. This isn't surface-level habit change. It's work at the level of how you see yourself, others, and the situations you're navigating. Most behavioral change stalls because it addresses symptoms without excavating the underlying patterns. My coaching orients toward the source of those patterns — which is where lasting change actually becomes possible.

Operational fluency

Before building my coaching practice, I spent over a decade in management consulting and leadership development, including building and scaling an executive coaching program within a top-tier consulting firm in San Francisco. That experience means I understand the real texture of high-stakes leadership from the inside: the organizational politics, board dynamics, and the specific pressures of leading at scale. As such, I'm able to move fluidly between the strategic and the deeply human.

Systems awareness

Leadership never happens in isolation. You're embedded in organizations, teams, relationships, and life structures that shape what's possible. My work is grounded in that reality. We look not just at what you're doing, but at the dynamics, patterns, and systems you're operating within, and how you might move through them with greater agency and intention.

Honest partnership

I bring a grounded, warm, and intellectually rigorous presence to my coaching, along with directness and a strong capacity to see patterns clearly, including ones that are difficult to name. Clients often tell me they feel genuinely seen in our work together: held with care, and challenged in ways that create real movement rather than just insight. This isn't cheerleading, and it isn't therapy. It's a relationship built on honesty and mutual respect, where I will say what's true even when it's hard, and create the conditions for you to do the same.

At the heart of it

"Lasting transformation rarely comes from striving harder or endlessly optimizing ourselves. It comes from increasing awareness, loosening old patterns, cultivating new capacities, and learning to meet ourselves and our lives with greater honesty, courage, and presence."
— Christina Coles

Curious about fit?

The best place to start
is a conversation.

I offer a complimentary introductory call for anyone seriously considering coaching. It's a chance to talk about where you are, what you're working toward, and whether we might be a fit.

About Christina

Clinically trained in the science of human behavior.
Seasoned in the complexity of real-world leadership.

Bridging psychological depth and operational experience — because the best coaching requires both.

Christina Coles

My deepest intention is to help clients unlock the mental, emotional, and relational capacities needed to lead, work, and live with greater clarity, authenticity, impact, and fulfillment.

At the heart of my work is a belief that meaningful change happens when deep insight is paired with honest reflection, experimentation, and support. Lasting transformation rarely comes from striving harder or endlessly optimizing ourselves. It comes from increasing awareness, loosening old patterns and protective strategies, cultivating new capacities, and learning to meet ourselves and our lives with greater honesty, courage, and presence.

Before building my independent coaching practice, I spent over a decade in management consulting and leadership development, including building and scaling an executive coaching practice within a top-tier boutique consulting firm in San Francisco. I've partnered with executives, founders, and teams across a wide range of organizations, helping them strengthen leadership, improve team dynamics, navigate organizational transformation, and design and implement impactful leadership development experiences.

Having worked alongside leaders operating under intense pressure, rapid growth, and constant complexity, I understand firsthand the demands and tensions of high-stakes leadership — both the strategic dimensions and the deeply human ones. That experience continues to shape everything I bring to this work.

On the work

Much of my work centers around high-achieving people who are outwardly successful but sensing some kind of internal shift or inflection point underneath the surface. They might be navigating increased responsibility, identity questions, the expanding demands of parenthood, burnout, uncertainty, or the quiet realization that the strategies that once made them successful are no longer fully serving them.

What I've found, again and again, is that the leaders who make the most lasting progress aren't the ones who work hardest at changing their behavior. They're the ones willing to look more honestly at the patterns, assumptions, and ways of operating that are quietly running the show — and to respond differently from there. That's the work I'm most interested in, and most equipped to support.

Outside of work

I live in the San Francisco Bay Area with my husband, our three-ring toddler circus, and our husky-shepherd rescue — all of whom keep us gloriously, exhaustingly on our toes. When I manage to surface from the beautiful chaos of family life, I find my reset in nature. I was born and raised in Seattle, and the Pacific Northwest left a permanent imprint — a deep love of old-growth forests and the grounding that comes from standing at the edge of the ocean. Living in the Bay Area means both are never far. You'll find me hiking through redwood trails, doing yoga, painting, and watching the sun slip behind the San Francisco skyline from our deck with a glass of wine and some music.

I try to practice what I coach — staying present to this full, textured, imperfect life rather than just moving through it. Some days I'm better at it than others. But that's precisely what keeps the practice alive.

Christina Coles

"My goal is not simply to help people perform better, but to help them relate differently to themselves, others, and the complexity of their lives — so that more sustainable and aligned ways of leading and living can emerge."

What clients say

The measure of the work
is what happens after.

Coaching is a significant investment of time, energy, and trust. Here, in their own words, is what my clients say about the return on that investment.

In their own words

"Working with Christina changed not just how I lead, but how I relate to myself, my work, and the pressure that comes with it. The growth has been lasting in a way I didn't expect."

Director, Airbnb

The tangible impact, in their words:

"She supported me in setting practices and goals that enabled me to show up to work and tackle big challenges with a sense of calm. Based on our work together: I made better hiring decisions, built stronger one-on-one relationships with my team and cross-functional partners, had difficult conversations earlier and more effectively, and achieved desired business and technical outcomes sooner. I also developed a genuine sense of calm about my work life — turns out stress doesn't need to scale with responsibility. I now share much of what she taught me with my own team members when they face challenges."

More from clients

"Christina started coaching me about a year ago and it is incredible to look back at this past year and all the growth and self-discovery she has supported me through. Meeting with her bi-weekly really gave me the space to build awareness and intentionality about what I was working towards — and led me to a place of being ready to make some good and scary leaps."

Senior Director at an EdTech Company

"The impact has extended beyond my day-to-day performance — it has reshaped how I lead, how I structure my work, and how I relate to pressure. I've built a more constructive relationship with complexity and pace, responding thoughtfully instead of reactively. The result is not only stronger performance, but a more composed, resilient, and sustainable way of leading."

Senior Corporate Counsel

"I highly recommend Christina as a coach and consultant. Her guidance and development program have had a lasting impact on my life, even years after our sessions ended. The tools she provided continue to be effective in both my personal and professional journey. I am grateful for the clarity, purpose, and conviction she helped me discover. If you're looking for someone to empower you and drive meaningful change, Christina is the perfect choice."

Senior Strategist, Emergency Medical Services Company

"Christina was my Executive Coach and we met regularly for several months. I hadn't had a coach before so I was unsure what I would take away from the experience. After the first meeting she was able to hone in right to the source of some of the problems I was facing. I really appreciate that she works to get to the heart of the matter rather than trying to solve the immediate presenting issue. The experience left me more introspective and with tools that will help me progress for years."

Executive at a MedTech Company

Clients have come from

Airbnb
Dropbox
UiPath
Eightfold AI
VuMedi
General Assembly

Ready to begin?

Let's find out if
this is the right fit.

If you're ready to explore what this kind of impact might look like for you, the first step is a conversation — just an honest exchange about where you are and what you're looking for.

Connect

Most good things start
with a conversation.

I offer a complimentary introductory call for anyone seriously considering coaching. It's a chance to talk about where you are, what you're working toward, and whether we might be the right fit. No pitch, no commitment.

Send a message

Thank you — I'll be in touch within 1–2 business days to find a time to connect.