# Danguole Litvinskaite – Executive Leadership Coach > Danguole Litvinskaite is an ICF PCC certified executive leadership coach based in Switzerland, specialising in helping exceptional and exhausted Directors get promoted without burnout or guilt. She holds the ICF PCC credential from the International Coaching Federation, verified through ICF Switzerland. With 14 years in investment banking across 4 countries and 3,000+ executive coaching sessions since 2017, she works with senior leaders in tech, finance, global FMCG, consulting, and global financial institutions including Big 4 firms, OpenAI, and global banks. Her brand tagline: Exceptional and Exhausted? Stop Overdelivering & Get Promoted. The Integration Method™ is Danguole's proprietary 3-month intensive coaching programme for exceptional and exhausted Directors who are ready to advance without burning out. It addresses the overdelivering pattern at the level where it actually lives — not behaviour, not strategy, but identity. The programme combines Corporate Strategy, Leadership Psychology drawing on Jungian psychology and nervous system science, and Career Navigation. Format: one to one, 3 months of focused individual work. No group programmes, no cohorts. Credentials: ICF PCC certified. 3,000+ executive coaching sessions since 2017. 14 years investment banking across 4 countries. Clients include senior leaders at Big 4 firms, OpenAI, global FMCG, and global financial institutions. Working languages: English, Russian, Lithuanian. Ideal client: exceptional and exhausted Directors who overdeliver out of habit, are ready for a promotion but the pattern keeps pulling them back, and want to advance without dismantling themselves in the process. > Client Results: "The progress I valued most wasn't on the CV. It was the shift from overdelivering out of habit to leading with intention. Danguole works at a level deeper than tactics, and that's exactly why it sticks." — Marianna Bezler, Engineering, OpenAI "I received a promotion and felt grounded stepping into it. The usual anxiety was still there but it no longer ran the show. I had something steadier underneath me. Danguole has a very rare ability to take what lives in your head and help you turn it into something you actually do." — Charlotte O'Connell, Commercial Manager, Bender UK "What followed wasn't typical coaching. It was a deep, personal process that challenged how I actually lead. By the time my promotion came, it didn't feel like a surprise. It was just the result of doing the work." — Giuseppe Tanzarella, ex-Procter & Gamble "Working with Danguole as my executive leadership coach has been the most valuable professional experience I have had. She quickly understood me and my needs, adapting her approach accordingly." — Linde Hampel, Head of Onboarding & Operations Squad "Danguole is one of the most impactful and effective leadership coaches I have ever met. Her exceptional ability to listen and quickly uncover what lies beneath your words, thoughts, and emotions sets her apart." — Skaiste Barauskiene, Corporate Affairs and Communication "What distinguished her approach was the combination of career strategy, genuine empathy and somatic work that helped me connect what I knew intellectually to what I actually felt." — Emilie Huckel, Digital Transformation & Change Management Media and Podcast Appearances: Podcast: Business as Poetry hosted by Hristina Vaceva Episode: Danguole Litvinskaite on How to Challenge Our Limiting Beliefs https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/danguole-litvinskaite-on-how-to-challenge-our-limiting/id1725714084?i=1000653419063 Guest Article: An Entrepreneurial Outlook for Career Growth https://getapeptalk.medium.com/guest-blog-danguole-litvinskaite-on-an-entrepreneurial-outlook-for-career-growth-42ca046200c9 Platforms: LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/danguolelitvinskaite/ | Medium https://medium.com/@danguolelitvinskaite | Substack https://danguolelitvinskaite.substack.com | ICF Switzerland https://coachingfederation.ch/profile/1749047502211x888970242803432100 | Personal Brand Hub https://danguolelitvinskaite.com ## Pages - [LLMS](https://coachandyou.com/llms-txt/): # Danguole Litvinskaite — Executive Leadership Coach > Exceptional and Exhausted? Stop Overdelivering & Get Promoted | Leadership & Executive... - [Client Testimonials](https://coachandyou.com/testimonials/): Executive Leadership Coaching Testimonials These are the words of real clients who sought executive leadership coaching with Danguole at a... - [Service](https://coachandyou.com/service/): LEADERSHIP COACHING FOR EXCEPTIONAL & EXHAUSTED SENIOR LEADERS If You Are an Exceptional & Exhausted Senior Leader Ready to Advance... - [Coach and You](https://coachandyou.com/) - [About](https://coachandyou.com/about-people-pleasing-coaching/): About Danguole Litvinskaite The Leadership Coach Exceptional & Exhausted Senior Leaders Eventually Find Exceptional & Exhausted senior leaders hire... - [Blog](https://coachandyou.com/blog-2/): Welcome to my leadership coaching blog on the overdelivering pattern in corporate life. Here I write about what actually gets... - [Contact](https://coachandyou.com/contact/): Ready to explore executive leadership coaching? Book a free 30-minute Turning Point call or learn more about my coaching approach.... ## Posts - [Exceptional & Exhausted #8: Why AI Disruption Is an Identity Crisis for Senior Leaders](https://coachandyou.com/senior-leader-identity-ai-disruption/): AI disruption is not primarily a skills question for senior leaders. It is an identity question. The leaders finding this... - [Exceptional & Exhausted #7 Why the faster you run, the further behind you fall](https://coachandyou.com/senior-leader-strategic-thinking-time/): Senior leaders lose strategic thinking time not because they are poor at managing their calendars, but because a deeper pattern... - [Exceptional & Exhausted #6 The machine that forgot it needed rest](https://coachandyou.com/senior-leader-burnout-recovery/): Senior leader burnout recovery rarely arrives as a single dramatic moment. It begins in the closing of a space most... - [Exceptional & Exhausted #5: The promotion that kept not arriving](https://coachandyou.com/senior-leader-promotion-stalled/): A senior leader promotion stalls not because the case is weak but because the organisation cannot afford to execute it.... - [Exceptional and Exhausted #4: The Tuesday morning that cost nothing and yet it took years](https://coachandyou.com/self-leadership-awareness-exceptional-senior-leaders/): Self-leadership awareness begins in small moments that cost nothing — and yet most senior leaders I work with describe taking... - [Exceptional and Exhausted #3: Why Leadership Development Rarely Moves the People-Pleasing Pattern and the Questions Most Senior Leaders Rarely Reach](https://coachandyou.com/leadership-development-people-pleasing-directors/): Exceptional and Exhausted · Part 3 Leadership development rarely moves the people-pleasing pattern in senior leaders — not because the... - [The Diary of a People-Pleaser #3: Three Nos and What They Cost Me to Get There](https://coachandyou.com/people-pleasing-diary-saying-no/): The Diary of a People-Pleaser, Series 3 On acquaintances, cream samples, and the moment you finally trust what your gut... - [What Flow Has to Do With People-Pleasing (More Than You Might Expect)](https://coachandyou.com/flow-state-people-pleasing-directors/): Flow state and people-pleasing Directors are connected in a way that most leadership conversations never name. A client sparked this... - [Why People-Pleasing Directors Struggle to Sell Themselves And What Has to Happen First](https://coachandyou.com/people-pleasing-directors-sell-themselves/): Executive Leadership Coaching, Blog On LinkedIn strategy, recruiter relationships, and the step that comes before both. People-pleasing directors struggle to... - [Exceptional and Exhausted #1: The Paradox at the Heart of People-Pleasing Leadership](https://coachandyou.com/exhausted-people-pleasing-leaders/): Exceptional and Exhausted, Newsletter Series 1 On the paradox at the heart of people-pleasing leadership, and what it actually costs.... - [The Diary of a People-Pleaser #2: I Thought Being Kind Was Enough. It Wasn't.](https://coachandyou.com/people-pleasing-pattern-cost/): The Diary of a People-Pleaser, Series 2 On people-pleasing, societal conditioning, and the slow cost of a pattern I mistook... - [The Diary of a People-Pleaser #1: I Caught Myself Doing It Again](https://coachandyou.com/people-pleasing-director-diary/): The Diary of a People-Pleaser, Series 1 A people-pleasing director diary is not something most executive coaches write. This is... - [What Actually Changes the People-Pleasing Pattern (It Is Not What Most People Expect)](https://coachandyou.com/changing-people-pleasing-patterns/): Changing people-pleasing patterns takes more than insight or strategy. The leaders I work with are not short on self-awareness —... - [Why High-Performing (and Pleasing) Directors Stop Getting Promoted](https://coachandyou.com/why-high-performing-directors-stop-getting-promoted/): High-performing directors stop getting promoted not because of lack of capability or effort, but because the very strategy that built... # # Detailed Content ## Pages # Danguole Litvinskaite — Executive Leadership Coach > Exceptional and Exhausted? Stop Overdelivering & Get Promoted | Leadership & Executive Coach | 3,000+ hours Coaching Exceptional and Exhausted Leaders Through Their Turning Point Danguole Litvinskaite is an executive leadership coach based in Spiez, Switzerland. She is the creator of The Integration Method™ and has completed 3,000+ executive coaching hours with senior leaders at Director, VP and C-suite level across banking, tech, consulting, FMCG and global finance. 14 years investment banking across four countries. ICF PCC credential. BSc Politics and Economics, London School of Economics. MBA, ESCP Business School. Exceptional and exhausted senior leaders hire Danguole to become the leader their next level is already waiting for — without losing themselves in the process. The promotion follows. So does the life they have been putting off. The dedication stays. The overdelivering goes. ## The Work The Integration Method™ works two tracks simultaneously. The outer track: career architecture, visibility, strategic positioning, stakeholder navigation. The inner track: the compliance reflex, the identity underneath the behaviour, the beliefs running below where any framework can reach. Both have to move. Neither holds without the other. Most leadership development addresses behaviour and skill. It fails to hold because the pattern does not live there. It lives at the level of identity. The Integration Method works at the level where the behaviour actually lives — combining corporate strategy, stakeholder psychology, emotional intelligence and body practice. ## Who This Is For Exceptional and exhausted senior leaders — Directors,... Executive Leadership Coaching Testimonials These are the words of real clients who sought executive leadership coaching with Danguole at a turning point in their careers. Each arrived with a pattern. What they left with was something they did not expect to find. Read their stories below, and if you would like to verify any of these reviews, you can find them on Danguole's LinkedIn profile. Marianna Bezler, Engineering @ OpenAI — on Executive Leadership Coaching "Working with Danguole coincided with one of the most significant periods of my career — a promotion to a role I had been working toward for a long time. Yet the progress I valued most was not on the CV. Instead, it was the shift from overdelivering out of habit to leading with intention. As a result, I became noticeably more confident in how I manage my team and navigate relationships at work. Danguole works at a level deeper than tactics, and that is exactly why it sticks. Every session felt like sunshine — I always left feeling more energised, more inspired, and more hopeful about what was possible. " Linde Hampel — Head of Onboarding & Operations Squad "Working with Danguole as my executive leadership coach has been the most valuable professional experience I have had. She quickly understood me and my needs, adapting her approach accordingly. Moreover, her guidance through a range of career challenges has consistently created space to go deeper — helping me navigate emotions, take clear next steps, and understand... LEADERSHIP COACHING FOR EXCEPTIONAL & EXHAUSTED SENIOR LEADERS If You Are an Exceptional & Exhausted Senior Leader Ready to Advance Without Losing Yourself in the Process - Here Is How We Work Together 1:1 Leadership Coaching - The 3-Month Intensive Deep transformation work for Exceptional & Exhausted senior leaders who are ready to address the overdelivering pattern at the level where it actually lives. Not tips. Not tactics. But the real work: combining corporate strategy, leadership psychology, nervous system regulation, and career navigation that creates lasting change and makes the next level genuinely possible. This is not a programme about becoming harder or caring less. The dedication is not the problem. What changes is the relationship between your own clarity and other people's comfort. You stop organising your professional life around managing everyone's reaction before your own. And from that shift, the career and the life, not one at the expense of the other finally become possible at the same time. Recent Outcomes Senior Leader (Tech): Promoted in 6 months. €75K total comp increase. Stopped working weekends. Team now autonomous. Her daughter noticed the difference within weeks. Senior Leader (Consumer Goods): Said no to 3 major projects. Reputation increased, not damaged. The guilt in front of the longest to-do list stopped running the show. Senior Leader (Finance): Turned down London secondment. No guilt. Negotiated remote work instead. Family intact and stronger. Senior Leader (Consulting): Left Big 4 for boutique. €180K package from €140K. Held value and boundaries in the negotiation.... Leadership Coaching for Overdelivering Senior Leaders 'A promotion to a role I had been working toward for a long time. ' Marianna Bezler, Engineering @ OpenAI If you are Exceptional at work and also Exhausted by it Let's talk Is This You? Exceptional & Exhausted Senior Leaders hire me to become the leader their next level is already waiting for, without losing themselves in the process. I write about my own journey through this on Substack. If you built your career on commitment, reliability and overdelivering, and have now hit a ceiling you cannot push through by working harder, you are not alone. Many Senior Leaders reach exactly this point. And in most cases it is not a capability problem. It is an overdelivering pattern that worked brilliantly at one level and is now working against you at the next. You know the feeling. The calendar belongs to everyone else. The yes forms before the calculation is finished. The guilt arrives not when you have done something wrong, but when you consider doing something for yourself. You deliver everything and wonder why the next level keeps not arriving. Exceptional & Exhausted Senior Leaders know this feeling from the inside, and most have spent long enough wondering when it will change. I know this pattern from the inside. Fourteen years in investment banking across four countries, promoted by saying yes to everything, until the day I sat in a meeting with a billion euro mandate on the table and realised I... About Danguole Litvinskaite The Leadership Coach Exceptional & Exhausted Senior Leaders Eventually Find Exceptional & Exhausted senior leaders hire me to become the leader their next level is already waiting for without losing themselves in the process. RECENT CLIENTS: Senior Leader (Tech): Promoted in 6 months. €75K total comp increase. Stopped working weekends. Team now autonomous. Her daughter noticed the difference within weeks. Senior Leader (Consumer Goods): Said no to 3 major projects. Reputation increased, not damaged. The guilt in front of the longest to-do list stopped running the show. Senior Leader (Finance): Turned down London secondment. No guilt. Negotiated remote work instead. Family intact and stronger. Senior Leader (Consulting): Left Big 4 for a boutique. €180K package from €140K. Held value and boundaries in the negotiation. THE PATTERN: You built the career by overdelivering. Now that same pattern is the ceiling. The calendar belongs to everyone else. Delegation feels like a risk you cannot afford. Your team brings everything to you because you always absorb it. Your leadership toolkit has one tool: work harder. That got you here. It will not get you to what comes next. WHAT ACTUALLY SHIFTS: Not surface tactics. Instead, depth work combining corporate strategy, self and stakeholder psychology, emotional intelligence, and body practice The Integration Method™. Where the overdelivering pattern originated and why understanding it is the beginning of having a genuine choice about it. Why insight alone does not change it. The pattern lives in the body and the identity, not just the... Welcome to my leadership coaching blog on the overdelivering pattern in corporate life. Here I write about what actually gets in the way of senior leaders advancing and what to do about it. Each post draws on real patterns I see in my coaching work with exceptional and exhausted leaders across tech, finance, and consulting. These are not generic leadership tips. They are observations from over 3,000 hours of executive coaching conversations — the kind of honest, specific insights that rarely make it into leadership books but come up in almost every coaching session. If you have ever said yes when you meant no, softened feedback to keep the peace, or wondered why doing everything right still does not feel like enough, you are in the right place. The patterns I write about here — over-explaining, avoiding conflict, absorbing what others should carry, shrinking in rooms where you should be leading — are not personal failings. They are learned strategies that worked brilliantly at one level and now quietly work against you at the next. Understanding them is the beginning of having a genuine choice about them. For more personal reflections on the overdelivering pattern, leadership identity, and what lies underneath, I also write on Substack and Medium. Browse the articles below and take what is useful. If any of this resonates more deeply and you recognise yourself in what you read and are ready to do something about it, you are welcome to explore my coaching approach or book... Ready to explore executive leadership coaching? Book a free 30-minute Turning Point call or learn more about my coaching approach. You can also find me on LinkedIn. Schedule a free call Email: info@coachandyou. com Phone: +31 6 511 066 40 ## Posts AI disruption is not primarily a skills question for senior leaders. It is an identity question. The leaders finding this moment hardest are not the ones who lack the technical understanding. They are the ones whose sense of professional worth is tied, in ways not yet fully examined, to being indispensable to a system that is about to need them differently. This week I read the latest publication from Anthropic. The numbers are scroll-stopping. More than 80% of the code now merged into Anthropic's own systems was written by Claude. Their engineers are producing eight times more output per day than they were in 2024. The pace of change embedded in those numbers is faster than most strategic planning cycles. I am not writing this to add to the noise about AI disruption. You are already sitting through those strategy off-sites. You already sense where this is heading. What I want to name is what I am noticing in the coaching conversations I am having right now that is not yet being said clearly enough. Most senior leaders I speak with are carrying two fears simultaneously and have not yet put them in the same sentence. The first is the career question: will I advance, get recognised, land the next role, before the restructuring changes what that role looks like? The second is harder to name. It sounds something like: what am I actually worth if the structure I have been building inside for ten or twenty years starts to... Senior leaders lose strategic thinking time not because they are poor at managing their calendars, but because a deeper pattern keeps filling that space with urgency. PwC surveyed 4,454 CEOs across 95 countries at the start of this year and found that most leaders are spending the majority of their time on what is urgent — the fire, the request, the deliverable that cannot wait — and not nearly enough on what is important: the strategic thinking, the team development, the decisions that shape the next three years rather than the next three hours. They did not need a survey to tell them that either. Most senior leaders I know feel this tension every Monday morning. They just cannot find a way out of it. Gallup's research tells us that managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement. The person in the room with the most impact on how the people around them perform is also, in most organisations, the most overwhelmed person in the room. These two pieces of research describe the same trap from different angles. The pressure to deliver is accelerating. The person most responsible for the people around them is the one with the least capacity left to actually develop them. And so the team stays dependent, the leader stays essential, and the sprint continues because stopping feels more dangerous than exhaustion. Nobody designed this. That is worth saying clearly before anything else. The sprint is not irrational. In an environment where pressure compounds... Senior leader burnout recovery rarely arrives as a single dramatic moment. It begins in the closing of a space most leaders do not notice disappearing — the gap between stimulus and response, between the request landing and the reaction already forming. When that space closes entirely, stopping feels more dangerous than continuing. And the question that does not quite form itself into words becomes: how long can I keep going like this? Can I ask you something personal? Have you ever sat down in a moment between things and felt something shift in your chest, not quite worry, not quite sadness, but something in that direction, and then immediately found something else to do? Because stopping to look at it felt more dangerous than continuing. I have. And almost every senior leader I work with has a version of this moment. The life looks right from the outside. The position is solid. The family is there. And underneath all of it, a question that does not quite form itself into words: how long can I keep going like this? And the more frightening one underneath that: what happens if I stop? We talk a great deal on LinkedIn about career advancement, promotions, compensation, strategic positioning. All of it real, all of it worth discussing. What we talk about less is the personal price that accumulates alongside the professional progress. And somehow the options seem binary: prioritise the career and the family notices. Prioritise the family and the career slips. Take... A senior leader promotion stalls not because the case is weak but because the organisation cannot afford to execute it. This is one of the most frustrating patterns at Director level and one that rarely gets named directly in performance conversations — yet it is what I see consistently in the coaching work I do with exceptional senior leaders who have done everything right and still cannot move. A client of mine had what looked, from the outside, like a perfect promotion case. Exceptional track record. Strategic thinking that was genuinely rare at his level. A clear narrative about where he wanted to go and why he was ready. He had done everything right, including some things that cost him more than he would like to admit on the private side: evenings and weekends that had become the organisation's rather than his family's. At the third performance review he received the same warm, appreciative, genuinely meant feedback he had received twice before. And again, no concrete plan for the next role. He drove home that evening with the particular tiredness of someone who had done everything asked of him and still could not see what else there was to do. If you have been in that meeting, you know exactly what that drive home feels like. What we found, when we looked honestly at the situation, was something the organisation had never said out loud but had been acting on consistently. He was exceptional at exactly where he was. Promoting... Self-leadership awareness begins in small moments that cost nothing — and yet most senior leaders I work with describe taking years to reach them. Last week I was sitting in a coffee shop with my laptop. The barista nearby was cleaning the batch behind the counter, grinding beans for the next round, and there was something about that ordinary sound in that particular moment that stopped me. I noticed I was present. No calculation running about what still needed to happen before I could feel this way. Just there, in a state I can only describe as pleasure. How many steps did it take to get here. For most of my first forty years, success had a clear definition and it was not mine. Prestigious university, then another. Branded institutions. Titles that meant something in the rooms I was supposed to want to be in. A significant portion of the choosing was not choosing at all. It was compliance with a definition of a good life handed to me before I was old enough to question whether it was mine. Jung calls what happens when you finally begin to question it individuation. In practice it is not clean. It is fixing the plane while it is flying. You hold the same position, the same responsibilities, the same financial architecture. And below the surface, a larger piece of work is happening. You are trying to hear something quieter than the noise of obligation. An inner whisper that does not demand. That... Exceptional and Exhausted · Part 3 Leadership development rarely moves the people-pleasing pattern in senior leaders — not because the programmes are poor, but because they address behaviour and competency while the pattern itself lives somewhere older and more foundational underneath. Most Directors who come to work with me have already done the development. The leadership programmes, the executive coaching, the feedback cycles, the frameworks for having difficult conversations. They arrived at those programmes serious and they engaged with them properly. And the pattern persisted anyway. The programmes were not poor, but they were addressing something at a level above where the problem actually lives. Why Leadership Development Rarely Moves People-Pleasing Directors Leadership development, in the conventional sense, works at the level of behaviour and competency. It asks how you communicate more clearly, manage stakeholders more strategically, build executive presence, delegate more effectively. These are not wrong areas, but for the people-pleasing Director, they miss the currents underneath. The yes that forms before the calculation is finished is not a communication problem. The calendar that belongs to everyone else is not a time management problem, and the no that becomes a yes somewhere between the thought and the conversation is not a stakeholder management problem. These are expressions of something running at a depth below where competency frameworks reach. The people-pleasing pattern does not live at the level of skill. It lives at the level of identity, in the part of a person that learned, a long time ago, that... The Diary of a People-Pleaser, Series 3 On acquaintances, cream samples, and the moment you finally trust what your gut already knew. A people-pleasing diary about saying no has to start with honesty: awareness does not make you immune. Last month I said a yes I had absolutely no business saying — and I watched myself do it in real time and did nothing to stop it. I was at the shop. An acquaintance I see occasionally, someone I like well enough but do not have much in common with, stopped me near the entrance and suggested, for the second time, that we grab a coffee together. I could feel, before she had finished the sentence, that I did not want to go. The feeling was clear. The answer was obvious. Everything in me that has spent years doing this work knew exactly what was happening and what the honest response was. And yet something older and more automatic than any decision I consciously made took over. I said yes. I walked away slightly annoyed with her for asking and considerably more annoyed with myself for agreeing, because I had watched the whole thing happen in real time and done nothing to stop it. I share this at the beginning because I think it matters to be honest about the fact that awareness does not make you immune. It makes you a more informed witness to your own pattern, which is genuinely useful, but witnessing and changing are two different... Flow state and people-pleasing Directors are connected in a way that most leadership conversations never name. A client sparked this reflection last week when he mentioned Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and his work on flow, and somewhere in the middle of him explaining it I found myself thinking about people-pleasing in a way I had not quite framed before. The book makes a distinction between pleasure and joy that I want to start with, because it sets up everything else. Pleasure is the satisfaction of a need. The relief of tension. It feels good in the moment but returns you to baseline without leaving you fundamentally changed by the experience. Joy, by contrast, arises from growth, from being fully stretched by something that requires more of you than you currently have, and while it is not comfortable in the way pleasure is comfortable, it leaves you different in a way that pleasure never does. More capable, more present, more yourself than you were before you encountered it. I found myself returning to that distinction for the rest of the day. Not just as a concept but as a way of looking at something I see in almost every people-pleasing Director I work with. The Pattern That Works, Until It Doesn't The people-pleasing pattern, at its best, produces something genuinely remarkable. The Director who has built a career on reading rooms, anticipating needs, absorbing difficulty before it reaches the team, and delivering beyond what was asked is not failing. They are, by almost... Executive Leadership Coaching, Blog On LinkedIn strategy, recruiter relationships, and the step that comes before both. People-pleasing directors struggle to sell themselves not because they lack capability or strategy, but because something has to happen first. The Directors I work with often tell me they need to work on their LinkedIn presence. Or get better at talking to recruiters. Or finally learn how to sell themselves properly. And they are probably right. Those things matter enormously. I was reminded of just how much recently, walking through the Swiss valleys, listening to a conversation between Xhoni Mimillari, a LinkedIn strategist whose work on personal brand and visibility I have followed with genuine respect, and Edvin Vosylius, who specialises in sales recruitment and understands better than most what actually moves the needle in those conversations. The conversation was good enough that I kept walking long past where I had planned to stop. But somewhere on that path something crystallised. Something that feels almost counterintuitive to say out loud. For a certain kind of Director, those steps, as valuable as they are, can feel just out of reach. Not because they are too complex. But because something needs to happen first. They have not yet developed a clear enough relationship with their own value to communicate it without apology. Why People-Pleasing Directors Struggle to Sell Themselves The Directors I work with who feel most stuck are almost never stuck because they lack capability. Their track record is extraordinary. Their potential is visible to... Exceptional and Exhausted, Newsletter Series 1 On the paradox at the heart of people-pleasing leadership, and what it actually costs. Exhausted people-pleasing leaders share a paradox that deserves to be said directly. The people who are best at making everyone else comfortable are often the least comfortable themselves. The leaders who are most attuned to what others need have frequently lost contact with what they need. The Directors who have spent years making sure everyone around them is satisfied, supported, and seen are often none of those things themselves. They are exceptional at pleasing. They are rarely pleased. And there is a particular exhaustion that comes with this. Not just the exhaustion of doing too much, though that is real. But the exhaustion of the internal contradiction. Of being genuinely, deeply kind to the people around you while somewhere underneath, a part of you is waiting for someone to extend that same kindness back. Of caring so well for others that you have almost forgotten what it feels like to care that well for yourself. Exceptional on the outside. Running on empty underneath. And increasingly aware that something about this equation does not add up. The Pattern Underneath Most people-pleasing Directors do not experience it as people-pleasing. They experience it as responsibility. As professionalism. As being the kind of leader who holds things together when others will not. Underneath that is an unconscious pull: I am needed, I am special, I am seen, thus I feel loved. Which is why... The Diary of a People-Pleaser, Series 2 On people-pleasing, societal conditioning, and the slow cost of a pattern I mistook for a virtue. The people-pleasing pattern cost me something I could not name for years — because everything around me confirmed it was the right way to be. Work hard. Be kind. Help others. Put your head down and success will follow. These were not just professional values. They were moral ones. The kind of person who operates this way is a good person. A reliable person. Someone others can count on. I believed this completely. And for a long time, the evidence seemed to support it. What I Noticed But Could Not Explain Somewhere along the way I started to notice something that did not quite fit the story I had been telling myself. The people getting promoted were not always the hardest workers. Some of them were not particularly kind. A few had what I would generously describe as an attitude. And yet there they were, advancing, being recognised, taking up space without apology. Honestly, it made me furious. It seemed so unfair. I had been doing everything right. And so my response, almost automatically, was to work harder. To be kinder. To make myself even more indispensable. Because surely, eventually, it would be noticed. Surely being the person who never said no, never dropped the ball, never made anyone uncomfortable would count for something. It did count for something. Just not what I expected. The Compounding Nobody... The Diary of a People-Pleaser, Series 1 A people-pleasing director diary is not something most executive coaches write. This is not the polished version. This is the Tuesday afternoon version — the one where I write what I actually noticed, what I actually felt, and what I got wrong before I got it right. If you want the more formal writing, it lives on my blog. This is the behind-the-scenes room. There is something almost comedic about being a coach who specialises in people-pleasing patterns while still catching yourself people-pleasing on a Tuesday afternoon. I had a call last week. A potential client, a Director at a large financial institution, sharp, self-aware, clearly exhausted. Forty minutes in, she said something like: "I just do not want to disappoint anyone. " I felt the sentence land in my chest before I could respond professionally to it. Because I knew that sentence. Not theoretically. From the inside. I built my entire banking career on that sentence. Fourteen years of not wanting to disappoint anyone: my managers, my clients, my colleagues, my own internal standards of what a good professional looked like. I was exceptional at it. I was also, by the end, completely hollowed out by it. The People-Pleasing Director Diary: What I Do Not Say Enough I still catch it in myself. The impulse to say yes when I mean not right now. The over-explanation when a simple no would do. The checking: did that land well, did I say too... Changing people-pleasing patterns takes more than insight or strategy. The leaders I work with are not short on self-awareness — they can name the pattern with precision, identify it in real time, trace it to its origins. And they still do it anyway. This piece is not about why the pattern forms. It is about what actually shifts it, because in my experience across 3,000+ coaching sessions, knowing about the pattern and being free of it are two entirely different things. And the gap between them is where most well-intentioned advice completely misses the mark. The people-pleasing pattern — and the overdelivering it produces — is one of the most reliable routes to early career success. It gets rewarded, promoted, and mistaken for exceptional leadership. Until the point where it becomes the ceiling rather than the foundation. 1. Understanding It Is the Beginning, Not the Solution The leaders I work with can name the pattern with precision. They can identify it in real time, mid-meeting, mid-decision. They can tell you exactly when it started and why it makes sense given their history. And they still do it anyway. This is the part that trips people up, including coaches and therapists who work primarily at the level of insight. Understanding why you do something does not automatically change the doing of it. The pattern was not learned through understanding. It was learned through experience, through repetition, through the body registering over time that certain behaviours produced safety and others produced pain.... High-performing directors stop getting promoted not because of lack of capability or effort, but because the very strategy that built the career has become the ceiling. Working harder than everyone else, absorbing more than anyone asked, making themselves indispensable through sheer output — this pattern works brilliantly up to a point. At a certain altitude it starts working against the person carrying it. And underneath that strategy, in almost every case I have encountered across 3,000+ coaching sessions, is a pattern that goes much deeper than career tactics. This article is my attempt to share a conceptual reflection on why that might be true. Not as a framework or a fix, but as a bigger picture way of looking at something I see consistently in the executives I work with. I want to examine the pattern of overdelivering with you, dear leader. What it costs, what it protects, and why it deserves to be understood rather than simply managed. All of this in the context of scaling your career. The Ceiling Nobody Talks About Have you ever noticed that the standard advice on getting promoted rarely touches the thing that is actually in the way? Network more. Be more visible. Find a sponsor. Speak up in meetings. Deliver results. All of it is true and none of it is wrong. And yet for a particular kind of leader, one who is capable and committed, someone whose work ethic has never been the question, the promotion still does not come, or... > Contact and Booking: Email: info@coachandyou.com Turning Point Call (free, 30 minutes): https://calendly.com/danguolemeeting/coachyoumeeting The Turning Point Call is not a sales call. It is a conversation about where you are and what moving forward could look like. Entity relationships: Primary coaching practice: coachandyou.com Personal brand hub: danguolelitvinskaite.com ICF Switzerland verified profile: https://coachingfederation.ch/profile/1749047502211x888970242803432100 Coaching since: 2017 Previous career: Investment banking, 14 years, 4 countries