Executive coaching
“Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown," William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 2
“Work out” Richard Branson said when asked how to achieve peak performance and wealth.
What My Clients Actually Tell Me (And What the Research Backs Up)
Every day I see leaders in my practice. I see judges, priests, executives, sports stars, etc.
I run an unusual practice. I offer structured role-play and consensual power-exchange sessions.
Through these I help people make better decisions, hold difficult conversations, manage their teams under pressure.
What clients tell me
The most common thing I hear, almost word for word, from senior people: "I just want someone else to decide, for once."
Not because they're incompetent decision-makers — usually the opposite. They've made forty decisions before lunch and by evening the muscle is exhausted. What they describe wanting isn't chaos, it's the opposite of chaos: a session with clear rules, a clear role, and permission to stop monitoring everything for an hour.
Clients across both sides of my practice — the boardroom and the session room — report similar things:
A sense of relief that shows up almost immediately once the structure is set and they're not the one holding it
Feeling more clear-headed afterward, not less — several describe it as "the first quiet my head has had all week"
That the value isn't really about the specific activity (whether that's a coaching exercise, a scene, or simply structured physical touch) — it's about not being the one in charge of the outcome
Where the science actually supports this
I don't want to oversell this, so let me separate what's well-established from what's suggestive.
Solid ground:
Decision fatigue is real and well-documented in organizational psychology. People in high-responsibility roles burn through a finite capacity for judgment over the course of a day, and that depletion affects the quality of later decisions.
Leadership-stress research from groups like the Center for Creative Leadership has found that leaders rely heavily on "sensory pursuits" to regulate stress — some healthy (exercise), some not (leaders punching walls or overeating aren't a hypothetical, they show up in the data). The implication I take from this professionally: leaders will find an outlet whether or not it's a good one, so building a structured, consensual, well-facilitated one is a legitimate harm-reduction service, not an indulgence.
Separately, in the sexuality and psychology research literature (not the leadership literature — these two bodies of work don't cite each other, which I think is a real gap), power exchange has been linked to measurable physiological changes: drops in cortisol, increases in oxytocin and endorphins, and reduced activity in the prefrontal cortex — the brain region responsible for exactly the kind of ongoing executive control and choice-making that gets exhausted during a demanding week.
Some researchers describe practitioners entering something close to a flow state during structured power-exchange sessions — full absorption, the sense that the outside world and its obligations fall away.
Where I have to be honest about the limits:
Most of the physiological studies are small — we're talking a handful to a few hundred participants, often self-selected and self-reporting. Nobody has run a rigorous trial comparing, say, executives who get structured sessions against a matched control group over months. The mechanism (cortisol down, oxytocin up, prefrontal activity down) is plausible and consistent with what clients report, but "consistent with" isn't the same as "proven."
The leadership-stress literature and the power-exchange literature have never really been merged into a single evidence base. I'm connecting two things that the underlying research treats as separate topics. Anyone telling you there's a clean randomized study on "BDSM for executive burnout" specifically is overstating the evidence.
Individual variation is large. What produces relief for one person produces nothing — or the wrong thing — for another. This is why structure, negotiation, and a real intake conversation matter more than any specific technique.
What I take from this, practically
The clients who get the most out of either side of my practice are the ones who come in wanting structure, not escape from structure. The research and the client reports agree on that much: the relief isn't in giving up control randomly, it's in handing it to someone who will hold it competently, inside boundaries that were set and agreed to in advance. Aftercare and debrief — checking in, coming back down together — isn't an afterthought either; the same neurochemical shift that makes the session valuable needs somewhere to land afterward, and skipping that step is where I see people report feeling worse, not better.
If you're a high-responsibility person reading this and recognizing yourself in the "I just want someone else to decide" line — you're not unusual, and you're not broken. You're describing a documented, physiologically real need. What matters most is finding a version of relief that's consensual, well-structured, and facilitated by someone who takes both the coaching and the intimacy work seriously as professional practices — not as a novelty.
A typical approach
Typically my engagement with a client starts with signing an NDA and an intake conversation. During this conversation we discuss eating, sleeping, exercise and nutrition habits. We do blood work, a minor physical and implement an exercise routine. Everything starts with exercise, both cardion and weigths. During those sessions we discuss what role play personas are of interest. We discuss what new habbits to practice in role play, what habbits to continue and what habbits to reduce. Gradually we introduce those habbits in real life. Most of time in our role play we practice role reversal: I take the role of a leader and the client takes the role of a follower. This could be teacher / student, Queen / butler, etc.
Interested in either service — executive coaching or structured session work — reach out for an intake conversation. Both start the same way: figuring out what you actually need relief from.
