Having worked with Asian American founders and executives in Manhattan, I often notice that the nature of their work pushes them to their mental and emotional limits. Whether you're in finance, tech, law, consulting, or healthcare in New York or New Jersey, compounding intense responsibilities at work, balancing work relationships, personal relationships, and attending to your own self care, it is easy to see why founders and executives often feel overwhelmed and burned out.
In many instances, the most difficult part of being a founder or executive is managing your own psychology. When we are mentally taxed to our limits, our insecurities (internalized limiting beliefs, fear of failure) are often easily triggered and unearthed.
Unlike traditional executive coaches who focus on tactics and frameworks, I bring a psychologist's understanding of the core beliefs and unconscious patterns that shape how you lead, decide, and perform under pressure.
Executive coaching is focused specifically on performance, leadership, and workplace decision-making. 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
Many leave a meeting with a clear list of what needs to happen, then find the highest-stakes item is still sitting untouched weeks later, even though they've been busy with everything else. Underneath is often a quiet fear that if the work gets done and judged as not good enough, people will discover they're not as capable as everyone assumes.
Work keeps routing through you because you're not confident anyone else will hold the standard you hold. Delegating starts to feel less like efficiency and more like leaving your post.
A hire that made complete sense during a growth period can look like poor judgment once conditions shift. Layoffs are often where this lands hardest, since for many leaders a layoff doesn't just feel difficult, it feels like public proof they were wrong.
Under sustained pressure, a sharpness or a temper you grew up around can start to surface in how you lead. For a lot of executives, that's more unsettling than any business risk they're carrying that week.
Pressures Specific to Asian American Leaders
Asian Americans are hired into professional roles at high rates and promoted into management and executive roles at some of the lowest rates of any group. The research points less toward outright prejudice and more toward a mismatch between how many of us were raised to communicate and what American organizations read as leadership.
Many of us were raised to let the work speak for itself. Fundraising, board management, and executive visibility ask for the opposite, and the discomfort of doing it often reads to evaluators as a lack of conviction rather than as the value it actually is.
Most leaders already know how to say the direct thing. What many learned, long before any leadership title, is that saying it plainly could upset or cost them someone they depended on. The skill was never missing. It's been sitting under a standing instruction not to use it, one that doesn't lift just because you're the one running the room now.
In a lot of our families, love came through monitoring, reminders, and correction. Leaders raised that way often run their own teams the same way, and describe it as simply holding a high standard.
Areas I Specialize In
- Identifying limiting core beliefs that shape decision-making and thought processes
- Managing work stress that inhibits you from being emotionally "present" at home or outside of work
- Increasing mental and emotional resilience working through professional setbacks
- Managing burnout, motivation level, and procrastination
As a Chinese American psychologist and executive coach in Manhattan, I understand both the internal patterns that drive high-achievers and the cultural context that shapes how Asian American professionals navigate leadership: the pressure to over-prepare, the difficulty self-advocating, the weight of family expectations intersecting with career ambitions. Most executive coaches focus on tactics. I go deeper, helping you understand why you operate the way you do.
The Operating System
Some of what surfaces in coaching isn't just a belief to work through. It's a system that doesn't exist yet: a delegation structure, an operating cadence, the AI workflows that take the administrative weight off your week. For that, I work jointly with Sam Hirbod, an executive coach and AI systems builder, through a program called Mind & Mechanism.
- Starts with a joint 2-hour assessment
- Ends with a written 90-day Blueprint