The day my division got sold to Credit Suisse, my boss told me on a call that lasted four minutes.
I remember the length because I checked, afterwards, sitting in my car in the garage. Four minutes to end fourteen years. And the line that came up was not "I am fired." It was stranger and more honest than that. It was: "I am being kicked out of the family home."
I want to tell you this story because I think it is the most useful thing I can offer you, more useful than my credentials, and I will get to those. But the story first, because I credential myself by confession before expertise, and because the confession is the credential.
Miss Morgan Stanley
I had been at Morgan Stanley for fourteen years. Private wealth. I was good at it. I knew the carry pool and the calibration cycle and what the bonus number did to a person's sense of their own worth, because of what it had done it to mine. Somewhere in those fourteen years, the firm stopped being the place where I worked and started being who I was. I was Miss Morgan Stanley. At dinner parties. In my own head. The identity and the institution had fused, slowly, one small accommodation at a time, so gradually that I never noticed the moment it happened.
So when the four-minute call came, it did not land like a job ending. It landed like an identity being repossessed. As if my family was telling me I was out.
Then came the fog. I do not have a more precise word for it, and I have looked. Two years of walking through fog. A foregone pension, which I think about more than I would like to admit. The strange, disorienting grief of a professional self that suddenly had nowhere to be at seven fifteen on a Monday. I had spent two decades being the one who held everything together. The CEO and the COO of a family life. Working like I had no family, raising a family like I had no career, the double shift nobody sees. And now there was no firm to hold it together for, and I genuinely did not know who that left behind.
What the fog taught me
Here is the thing I learned in those two years, and it is the reason this practice exists.
I did not lose myself when the division got sold. I had lost myself years before that.
I had been shapeshifting for twenty years. Becoming whoever the room rewarded. Composed in the meeting where I was unravelling. Certain in the pitch where I had doubts. Agreeable in the conversation where I was furious. So reliably, for so long, that I had forgotten it was a performance. The sale did not take my self away. It just turned the lights on and showed me I had misplaced it a long time before.
And the other thing, the contrarian thing I now build everything on. It usually is not what the industry says it is. It is not a problem inside the woman. It is an environment problem and an identity problem. I had coached myself, badly and alone, into believing I needed fixing, when what I actually needed was to stop agreeing with a system that had quietly trained me to doubt.
Why I came back
I could have stayed out. Plenty of women do, and I understand exactly why.
But I had learned something I could not un-know, and I kept thinking about the women still in it. The ones rehearsing resignations in their cars, the way I had. The ones who had read every book and hit a wall. The ones performing "fine" externally and falling apart where no one could see. I had been the coach I needed, eventually, alone, the hard way. And I kept thinking: nobody should have to do that alone.
So I did for myself what I wish someone had handed me on the way out. Rebuilt from what I actually wanted, not what the firm had trained me to want. Trained and certified as a coach after I left (CPCC, and ACC with the ICF). From joy, not strategy, which is how I try to make most decisions now. And I came back. Not to the trading floor. To the women still on it.
Here are the credentials, since you have been patient. Fourteen years at Morgan Stanley. Two as a Director at Credit Suisse. Two as Executive Director at FSG. The right credentials behind it. Very few people in the world have that exact combination, the lived eighteen years plus the credentialled process. I do not say it to impress you. I say it because it means you will never spend a single session teaching me your world.
Why this matters more now, not less
There is a temptation, in a moment when everything in the industry is being automated and optimised and accelerated, to think the human work matters less. I think it is the opposite.
The faster the rooms move, the more the women in them are asked to shapeshift to keep up, and the more quietly the cost compounds. The systems can do a great many things now. They cannot sit in a car with you after a four-minute call and help you find the self underneath the role. They cannot tell you the wall you have hit is the signal, not the failure. That work is more human, and more necessary, the faster everything else gets.
I believe you can be successful and not step over dead bodies. You can climb and bring others with you. I believe you can stay in the rooms you matter in, and stay yourself while you do it. I did not always believe both halves of that were possible at once. I do now, because I watch women do it.
I am not just a coach. I have kept every ball in the air. I know what it costs. And I think I am the person you can finally say that to.
If any of this landed, the next step is one honest conversation, confidential, no pitch.