I was coaching long before I knew the word for it.
ABOUT
Twenty years in marketing, media and advertising. Now an ICF credentialed coach in Melbourne, working with the people in the industry.
My first direct report taught me something I didn't understand for another fifteen years.
She would come to me with a problem and I wouldn't give her the answer. Not out of strategy. I just thought it would have more impact if she found her own answers.
She told me, more than once, that it was hard. She was right. Working out your own answer takes longer than being handed one, and it is far less comfortable.
It also worked. Her decisions got better and we both found new ways of going about the tasks.
At the time, nobody had taught me how to be a manager, so I had no idea why any of that worked, or that it had a name. I thought it was simply how you managed people.
I think the habit started much earlier than that.
My mother raised me on her own from when she was twenty six. I was an only child, and I learned early to be the one who didn't add to the load. Quiet, useful, no trouble.
I spent a long time being that person at work too, which is probably why I noticed the ones doing the same.
I turned eighteen the week the Romanian Revolution began. I had spent years dreaming about how I would rebel against the regime, quietly, without putting my mother at risk. Within days the country changed and the plan had nothing left to push against.
It was the first time I learned that the future you prepare for is not always the one you get. Most of the people I work with have learned the same thing, usually more recently.
I was good at maths and physics, so I studied engineering. Five years later I had a degree in power engineering I have never used. What I found instead, somewhere in the middle of it, was advertising.
I left Romania for Cyprus, and in 2005 I arrived in Australia, where nobody knew my name or anything I had done.
I took a short course so I had a local qualification, then applied for a job below the level I had been working at in Romania. The person interviewing me stopped and said, you do know this role is very junior. I said yes. On purpose. I wanted to learn this market from the ground up, so that I would genuinely know it.
That turned into twenty years.
I led teams at ZenithOptimedia, emitch and Mitchell & Partners. I spent eight years at L'Oréal, where an eight month contract became Head of Search across Australia and New Zealand, and where the job was influencing local and regional teams who didn't report to me. I had no authority. People listened because I knew the subject better than anyone else in the room.
At Hotglue I came in as a consultant to lead a team and look honestly at what the agency was capable of, through a period that included Havas acquiring the business.
I cared about the numbers. Hitting them was my pride and joy. What I enjoyed just as much was connecting with the people, and what they were working out while we did it.
I didn't have a word for that either. Someone else did. A manager I worked for early in my management career wrote in a testimonial that I loved coaching the junior cohort. I read it again recently. Somebody saw what I was for long before I did.
In the middle of 2023 I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Towards the end of that year I was made redundant from a senior role.
Neither is why I coach. They’re why I stopped waiting.
I had the instinct. The training turned it into a craft. It took two and a half years instead of the eighteen months I planned, and staying in it that long is what made the difference.
I started with the International Coaching Academy at the beginning of 2024 and finished at the end of 2025. I was credentialed by the International Coaching Federation in August 2026.
Somewhere in the middle of it I moved to Greece, the fourth country I have lived in. It did not work out, so I came back to Melbourne. The future you prepare for, again.
These days I coach the marketing, media and advertising leaders who are carrying more than the role was built for. Group heads, account directors, heads of channel, marketing managers. The ones leading a team and still delivering the work.
I work with them one to one, and with the businesses that want to back them properly.
What that looks like from the other chair: you say something out loud that has only ever been half formed in your head. Nobody rushes to fix it. Someone takes it seriously enough to ask about it, and to keep asking, and to stay with you through the uncomfortable part rather than rescue you from it. Someone sees you properly while you work it out.
That is where people find the thing they already knew. It’s never the answer I could have handed over.
How I work
I listen, and I watch. Then I share what I notice, including the parts that are uncomfortable to hear.
I'll show you the gaps in your own story. The places where what you're telling me doesn't quite line up are usually where a different perspective is waiting.
I won't give you advice dressed up as a question.
I'll tell you if I can't deliver what you're asking for. If what you need isn't coaching, I'll say so and point you somewhere better.
The work happens between sessions, in what you process and what you do. You decide whether it's working, not me.
The shift can happen in a single session. Building it into an ordinary working week takes a lot longer, and I won't pretend otherwise.
All of it in service of one thing: getting you where you said you wanted to go.
CREDENTIALS
ICF Associate Certified Coach (ACC)
Member, ICF Global and ICF Australasia
What would change if you said out loud what's actually bothering you?
If you'd like to find out whether we're a fit, let's talk.