Executive and leadership coaching for career transition and burnout recovery
Whether you've hit a wall, lost the role, or outgrown your path — let's increase your capacity to take the next step
There’s no doubt that you're good at what you do. You've spent years being the person other people rely on to hold it together, make the call, carry the weight and make the big things happen. From the outside, nothing’s changed.
However, inside you something's shifted. Maybe you can feel yourself slowing down in a way that no amount of rest seems to fix. Maybe the role that used to define you disappeared in a reorg and took more of you with it than you expected. Or you've simply arrived at the top of a ladder and realized you don't want what's up here.
Different starting points, same underlying situation: the way you've been running isn't working anymore, and pushing harder isn't the answer, because pushing harder is part of what got you here. And maybe you’re already aware that you’re feeling burned out but you don’t know what to do about it.
I'm Shayla Malek. I work with senior leaders at exactly this point — the moment where the old once-reliable usual solutions stop working. It’s not about hustling more or futilely trying to increase your capacity to be productive, it's about finding what's actually in the way of your capacity for doing what lights you up.
The corporate world is excellent at building high performers. It's a lot less good at telling you what to do when your performance stops.
If you've built a career in tech or any other high-pressure industry, you've been trained your whole working life to optimize, ship, and move on to the next thing. You're rewarded for output and for never letting them see you struggle. It's an effective system. It builds people who can do remarkable things under pressure.
What it doesn't build is any plan for the moment the output slows — or stops. There's no runbook for the Monday morning you can't make yourself open the laptop, or the month after the layoff when the calendar is suddenly empty and you don't know who you are without the title and back to back meetings. The same culture that made you effective has almost nothing for you when the industry shifts and your inbox gets unnervingly quiet.
Most people assume the problem is them. That they've lost their edge, or their nerve, or their discipline. It’s not. It's that a system built entirely around performance has finally hit the thing performance can't fix — and no one ever taught you what to do at that point. That's the work I do.
What executive coaching looks like when it actually works
Plenty of executive coaching is useful but changes very little. You have a tough conversation, you leave with a clear insight about yourself, you feel briefly lighter, and then Monday arrives and you do the exact same thing you've always done. The insight was real, but you didn’t get any new tools or systems to really change anything.
I think that's because most coaching stops one step too early. It gets you to understand the problem and then assumes understanding is enough to change it. For a certain kind of high-functioning person, it never is. You are, if anything, over-supplied with insight! You can explain your patterns better than most therapists could. And yet, you're still stuck.
The approach I use has three phases and almost everyone skips the most important middle one:
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Insight (the discovery phase): working out what's actually in the way, which is rarely the thing you think it is.
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Alignment (the collaboration phase): this is the phase that usually gets missed. Where you are doing the internal work so that every part of you is actually willing to move in the same direction, instead of one part driving while another quietly slams on the brake.
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Action (the implementation phase): comes last, and when the first two phases are done properly, it stops feeling like forcing or fighting yourself to make real, lasting change and starts feeling like the brakes have been released and you are cruising easily towards your goals.
Most people try to go straight from insight to action. That's why they end up exhausted — they're flooring the accelerator with the handbrake still engaged. The alignment step is what this whole practice is built around.
Most senior leaders I work with aren't lacking strategy. They're stalled because they have one foot on the brake and the other on the accelerator.
The people who come to me are not short on plans. They know what they should be doing. They could outline a brilliant strategy for their own life on a whiteboard in ten minutes.
What they can't work out is why they're not executing it.
Why the thing that should be simple keeps not happening. Why can they sit down fully intending to make the changes they know they want, but for some reason they just won’t let themselves make it.
That gap — between the plan and the doing — is almost never a strategy problem. It's friction inside the system. It’s an internal conflict - otherwise known as self-sabotage. Some part of you learned a survival strategy a long time ago that kept you safe then, but is actively working against you now.
That part of you realized back then that slowing down felt dangerous, or that success would cost you something, or that if you actually let go of trying to control everything you'd never feel safe. That part is still running, still protecting you the only way it knows how, and it's quietly working against the very thing you're consciously trying to do now. Until you deal with it directly, you can rewrite the strategy as many times as you like, but the brake will stay on and zero positive change will happen - or just won’t last.
If you've already been to therapy, read the self-help books, and hired a career coach — and you're still circling the same problem — that’s because you haven’t closed the integration gap.
I want to be straight with you, because you'll have noticed it yourself: if you’ve tried the usual approaches and they were the solution, they'd have fixed it by now. Most likely you've tried therapy. You've read the right books. You may already have even worked with a coach or two. And here you are, back at the same junction, looking at the same problem from a slightly more articulate angle.
It's a sign you've been given a lot of insight and never the missing piece that turns insight into change and positive evolution.
The therapy helped you understand where it came from. The books gave you the language. What none of them did was get the different parts of you aligned enough so that you could let go of the unhelpful thoughts, beliefs or behaviors so that you could move from understanding the problem to taking real action to change it.
That missing piece has a name. It's the integration gap — and it's the whole point of what I do.
Who this coaching is for
This is one-to-one coaching for high performers in senior positions — founders, executives, directors, and the kind of experienced leaders who are used to being the most capable person in the right rooms.
It tends to be a good fit if you're intelligent, self-aware, and maybe even quietly frustrated that your regular smart way of doing things has not been enough to get you unstuck.
My coaching methodology works across a few different situations that look unrelated on the surface but share the same root. Here are the two I see most often:
If the layoff didn't break you but the silence after it did
The layoff itself, you probably saw coming and had it handled. You've been through hard industry shifts before; you know how to manage a crisis, run a process and land on your feet. If anything, the days right after were almost easy because there was a lot to do.
It's the void that's harder. It’s the morning a few weeks in, when there's nothing on the calendar and no one waiting on you, and you realize how much of who you were, was load-bearing. The role wasn't just a job; it was scaffolding you'd built your identity around, and when it went, more came down with it than you'd like to admit.
That's not a weakness and it's not something to wait out. In fact, it's a genuine transition opportunity, and it's one of the best possible moments to do this work; before you reflexively grab the next role to make the silence stop.
There’s no time like the present to make a fundamental shift to lead a happier and more fulfilling life. And if you do it now, you’ll be better resourced to proactively choose what comes next from a solid integrated foundation, instead of from a reactive need to fill an existential gap.
If you're still hustling, out-performing and delivering but running on empty
You feel your capacity to sustain your current role has severely diminished. Maybe you are struggling to function, running on fumes, or maybe you haven't crashed (yet!). That's exactly the problem. From the outside, nothing looks wrong. You're still hitting the marks, still shipping, still the one people count on. But you know how much more it's costing you now to produce the same output, and you know that the reserves you're drawing on aren't refilling the way they used to.
The precursor to burn out is the version almost no one talks about, because admitting it feels like admitting you're failing or that you’re weak, while you're technically still succeeding.
It’s an age-old adage but worth repeating here: “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure", meaning it is much easier and cheaper to stop a problem before it starts than to fix it when it breaks.
I'd rather you did this work here — while you're still functioning (even if barely)— than after the crisis point where you hit rock bottom, because it's a great deal easier to change the way you run before the engine actually seizes, than after.
The 90-Day Integration Protocol for Leaders
The core of how I work with executives is a focused, three-month engagement I call the 90-Day Integration Protocol. Over ninety days we run the full arc of insight, alignment, action on the specific obstacles that are keeping you stuck. Those obstacles might be the transition you're in, the pattern you keep repeating, or the version of success you've outgrown and can't yet replace.
We go deep into the alignment work, because that's where you’ll learn new tools and discover the place where the actual change emerges from; true alignment. We’ll build a grounded, practical and proactive path forward rather than desperately reaching for half-baked solutions through white-knuckled fear-based reactions.
Ninety days is long enough to change something real, and short enough to stay focused. You'll know at the end whether it worked, because you'll be moving on something you couldn't move before. If afterwards you feel that you still want to dive deeper or need more support there are other coaching packages and options available.
What actually happens in the sessions? How is it different from the leadership coaching you've done before?
Fair question, especially if you've done this before and it didn't work. Here's a breakdown of what we actually do in our sessions.
We start by laying a foundation I call the 5S's — where we implement a set of conditions (Set, Setting, Safety, Session, Self) that make it possible to do internal work under real-world pressure, not just in a calm room on a good day.
Most coaching approaches assume you arrive stable and ready. You often don't. Sometimes we arrive at the threshold of our new lives as a messy ugly-crying wreck. And that’s not only totally okay with me but it’s a very human sign that you’re already starting to grow out of your old way of doing things.
From there, the actual sessions are a structured internal conversation. We find the parts of you that are pulling in different directions. The part of you driving toward the goal, and the part of you with its foot firmly on the brake. And we get those parts communicating with each other instead of fighting. My method is drawn from Internal Family Systems (IFS), applied as leadership coaching rather than therapy, and it's a lot more practical and a lot less mystical than that might sound. You'll recognize the “parts” immediately once we name them. It’s quite an intuitive, creative, and even at times fun process.
The difference from coaching you've done before is simply that we don't stop at the insight. We keep going until the system is aligned enough that the insight can actually move you into aligned action. That's the part that makes it stick.
On CEO coaching, C-suite coaching, leadership coaching — it's the same work, just with different titles at the door
Typically, people find me searching for different things. Some are looking for CEO coaching, some for C-suite coaching, some for leadership coaching or executive coaching for burnout specifically. If you're wondering which one you need — you can stop wondering.
At this level, the title on the door or your corner office may change the context but not the actual work of alignment.
The specific pressures differ: a CEO carries a kind of isolation a director embedded in a team on a daily basis doesn't; a founder's identity is fused to the company in a way an executive hire's isn't. We'll account for all of that. But the thing underneath — the internal friction between the part of you that wants to move and the part that's holding the brake — doesn't much care what your business card says. The process of gaining alignment is the same.
Are you ready to stop managing the symptoms and get to the root cause?
You can keep managing your situation the way you've been managing it. Most people do, for a long time — rest a bit, push a bit, rewrite the plan, wait for it to pass. Sometimes that's enough. If you've read this far, it probably hasn't been.
The first step isn't a commitment and it isn't a sales call. It's the Capacity Check — a short, free assessment that shows you where your system is actually carrying friction right now, and what's quietly draining the reserves you're running on. You'll come away with a clearer read on what's really going on, whether or not we ever work together.
If it turns out the fit is right, we'll talk about the 90-Day Protocol from there. No pressure, just an honest look at what's driving the thing you've been trying to manage, and a real way through to the light at the end of the tunnel.
Prefer to chat first? Book a free 30-minute Strategy Session.
FAQs
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Is this therapy?
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No. Our approach is developmental, not clinical. We use evidence-based psychological frameworks (like IFS) strictly for professional growth, resilience, and skill-building.
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While this work can definitely support therapy, the workplace trainings are not the place for deep emotional processing, more for emotional education.
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Do you offer virtual training?
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Yes. All workshops can be delivered virtually or in-person for teams in Seattle. For in-person events outside of the Seattle area, a travel and lodging stipend will be itemized in the final proposal.
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