— Executive burnout coach

You cannot afford to look like this is happening.

Private burnout recovery for senior leaders — where the exposure is as much of the problem as the exhaustion.

What the engagement includes →

— The specific bind

Everyone below you is watching, and everyone above you is assessing.

A founder in trouble can, in the end, tell their board they need three months. You cannot. Your position depends on a continuous read of your judgment, your steadiness and your appetite — and any visible wobble gets filed permanently, in a way it does not for someone who owns the equity.

So you do what capable executives do. You hold the line in the meeting, you make the call, you go home, and the recovery never happens because there is nowhere to put it. The performance is real. The cost is invisible. And the invisibility is precisely what makes it dangerous.

— Why confidentiality is the product

The value is having somewhere it is safe to be accurate.

For most of my founder clients, confidentiality is a hygiene factor. For executives it is close to the whole proposition.

You need a room in which you can say: I do not respect the CEO's last three decisions. I think this strategy fails and I am executing it anyway. I have not felt anything about this job in two years. I am afraid that if I slow down, they will finally see what I have suspected about myself since I got here.

None of those can be said to your chair, your peers, your direct reports, or your executive coach if your employer is paying for them. Several of them cannot comfortably be said at home either, because your partner has heard a version of it for eighteen months and has their own view now.

I am not in your industry, I am not in your network, and I have no second stakeholder. That is not a soft benefit. For someone in your position it is the structural precondition for anything real happening.

— What we work on

Four things, in roughly this order.

1

Get your baseline back

Sleep, reactivity, and the physiological load of holding a public-facing composure for nine hours a day. This part is not glamorous and it is not optional — your judgment is downstream of it, and your judgment is the asset you are actually paid for.

2

Separate the role from the load

How much of this is the job, how much is the organisation, and how much is the way you personally hold both. Executives routinely absorb organisational dysfunction as personal failure. Untangling that changes the size of the problem, sometimes dramatically.

3

Rebuild the operating rules

Boundaries that survive contact with an executive calendar. Not aspirational ones. What you actually take on, what you genuinely delegate, what you stop attending, and what you decide never to carry home again.

4

Decide, with a clear head

Stay, restructure the role, or leave. All three are legitimate outcomes. What matters is that the decision gets made from recovered capacity rather than from month fourteen of depletion, because those two people choose very differently.

— Questions

What executives ask me first.

Will anyone at my company know?

No. There is no invoice through your employer unless you choose that route, no report to HR, no shared notes. Many executives I work with pay privately precisely so that no line item exists anywhere in the business. Nothing you say leaves the conversation.

Can I do this without taking leave?

Almost everyone does. Sessions are scheduled around a real executive calendar, including early mornings and travel weeks. Signed-off leave is sometimes the right call, but it is a clinical decision and not one a coach should be making for you.

How is this different from the coach my company provides?

Sponsorship. A coach paid for by your employer has, however discreetly, a second stakeholder. That is fine for leadership development and wrong for this. Here you are the only client, which is what makes it possible to say the thing you would never say in a sponsored session.

What if the honest answer is that I should leave?

Then we will look at that clearly, including the financial and timing realities, rather than talking you out of it or into it. Sometimes the exhaustion is the job. More often it is how the job is being held. Telling the difference is much of the work.

— Read next

If you want to test whether this describes you.

Am I burned out or just tired?5 min Why can't I switch off from work?5 min I don't feel like myself anymore5 min

More on the approach: burnout coaching for founders and executives.

Nobody has to know you are doing this.

That is not a marketing line — for most of the executives I work with, it is the condition that made getting help possible at all. The next step is a short private application.

About Christoph Sacher →
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