The founders and executives I work with across San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and Los Angeles are usually running multiple things at once: the business itself, a team that depends on them, a personal life getting squeezed into whatever time is left over. Add in the actual psychological weight of the role, and it's not hard to see how even people who look like they have it together end up burned out.
What I hear most often is that the hardest part of the job isn't the job itself, it's what the job stirs up. Push yourself hard enough for long enough, and old insecurities, the fear of not being enough, the belief that one mistake undoes everything, tend to surface right when you can least afford the distraction.
My work goes past frameworks and tactics. We go after the actual belief systems shaping how you process a decision, read a room, or react under pressure, the layer most coaching never reaches.
Coaching sessions are 45 minutes at $650/session. Because my approach goes deeper than typical coaching, I work with clients weekly to create real traction. Sessions may be tax-deductible as a professional development expense, and many companies cover executive coaching as a benefit.
Patterns I Hear Most Often
Delaying the start because it might be the wrong direction
Spending weeks building the wrong thing can feel intolerable, so the research and deliberation stretch on in search of certainty first. The irony most leaders eventually notice: the time gets spent either way, whether it's spent deciding or spent doing.
Keeping someone on longer than makes sense
When a person was there for the early, hard days, letting them go can feel less like a business call and more like a betrayal. The company quietly absorbs the cost of that loyalty in the meantime.
Staying in a role or a partnership that no longer fits
Someone took a chance on you once, and leaving can feel like abandoning them for it, so the obligation gets recalculated and extended, sometimes for years past the point it made sense.
Carrying weight that was never actually yours
Not just your team's livelihoods, but a parent's financial security, a sibling's direction, an investor's trust. When responsibility gets that wide, rest starts to feel like negligence.
Pressures Specific to Asian American Leaders
Asian Americans are hired into professional roles at high rates and promoted into leadership at some of the lowest rates of any group. That gap points less toward outright prejudice and more toward a mismatch between how many of us were trained to communicate and what American organizations recognize as leadership.
Restraint scored as passivity
Where a lot of us learned to lead, staying measured under pressure was the mark of a steady hand. In many American executive rooms, that same restraint gets read as hesitation or as having no opinion at all, often by people less prepared than the leader they're misreading.
Success experienced as repayment
When your achievement gets measured against what your parents gave up, hitting a goal produces more pressure instead of relief, because the debt never quite settles. Some leaders stall right at the point where they'd exceed what their parents achieved, because outdoing the people who sacrificed for you can feel, in a way that's hard to put into words, like leaving them behind.
When a shutdown isn't just yours
Closing something down, a product, a round, a company, doesn't stay contained to a business decision once your family is watching. It becomes something they have feelings about, stories about, maybe comments about for years at gatherings. Knowing that in advance keeps some leaders holding on to something well past the point it made sense to.
Areas I Specialize In
- Naming the core beliefs quietly running your decisions without you noticing
- Keeping work stress from following you home and taking over the hours that are supposed to be yours
- Rebuilding your footing faster after a setback that rattles your confidence
- Getting ahead of burnout before motivation and follow-through start slipping
Why Work With an Asian American Psychologist for Executive Coaching?
As a Chinese American psychologist and executive coach across San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and Los Angeles, I bring both the clinical lens for what drives high-achievers and the lived understanding of how a lot of us were raised to lead: to prepare far past what the moment requires, to let results do the talking instead of ourselves, to weigh a decision against what it means for the whole family before we weigh it for ourselves. Most coaches will hand you better tactics. I help you see the machinery underneath the ones you already have.
The Operational Build
A limiting belief, once you can see it, becomes something you can test. But testing it often means the week itself has to change too: what gets delegated, what runs on an AI system instead of your attention, what stops depending on you personally. That second half is Sam Hirbod's work as an AI systems builder. Together we run Mind & Mechanism, a 90-day program that starts with a joint two-hour assessment and a written Blueprint.
Mind & Mechanism →