dorianbaroni.com

Every leader reaches moments when the next step forward requires more than skill or strategy. It requires a clearer sense of who you are, what you actually want, and what is getting in the way. These are threshold moments — uncomfortable, often disorienting, and full of potential.

A coaching partnership gives you a dedicated space to think, question, and grow — with a partner who brings genuine curiosity, systemic awareness, and the kind of honest challenge that accelerates your own clarity. My role is not to advise you or direct you. It is to accompany you in a process of discovery that is, ultimately, entirely your own.

I work with leaders who are ready to go beyond surface fixes — who want not just better performance, but a more grounded, purposeful, and sustainable way of leading. That ambition is the only prerequisite.

Three Ways We Can Work Together

1 Executive Coaching Partnership

A sustained journey of leadership development — grounded in clarity, presence, and the courage to lead from your values.

A coaching partnership is typically three to six months in duration, with regular sessions that build on each other across three phases: establishing clarity about where you are and what is genuinely at stake; developing the practices, mindsets, and skills that serve the growth you are seeking; and building the sustainability to make those changes last beyond the coaching relationship itself.

• Who this is for:  Leaders at pivotal moments — navigating significant transitions, stepping into expanded roles, working through complexity or impasse, or simply knowing that the next level of their leadership requires a different quality of self-awareness and intention.

• What you can expect:  Deep listening. Questions that reach the things you have not yet found words for. Honest challenge offered with genuine care. Tailored frameworks, practices, and assignments that make the space between sessions as rich as the sessions themselves.

• What I bring:  Forty years of global business experience, training at Columbia University and in Gestalt coaching supervision, a lifelong practice of integrating mind, emotion, and body intelligence, and the perspective of someone who has navigated their own significant professional and personal thresholds.

 2 Self-Assessment& Awareness Session

A four-hour deep dive into how you see the world — and how the world sees you.

One of the fastest accelerators of leadership development is a clear, honest picture of your patterns, preferences, and blind spots. Using a carefully selected suite of confidential psychometric assessments, this standalone session creates that picture — and translates it into practical, actionable insight for your leadership.

• Leadership Circle Profile (LCP) — a comprehensive assessment of creative and reactive leadership tendencies

• Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) Step 2 — how you manage energy, gather information, make decisions, and organise your world

• FIRO-B — how you prefer to have your interpersonal needs for inclusion, control, and openness met

• TKI Conflict Styles — your preferred and least-used approaches to conflict and disagreement

• VIA Values Inventory — your core character strengths and how they show up in your leadership

• Kantor Four Player — your preferred communication and leadership stances

This session can stand alone as a powerful moment of self-knowledge, or it can serve as the foundation for an ongoing coaching partnership — beginning with the clearest possible picture of where you are.

3 The Symbols Way — A Strategic Clarity Session

A unique four-hour process for leaders facing a genuine crossroads.

The Symbols Way is a distinctive strategic inquiry process that I have used for many years with leaders who are at an impasse — facing a significant decision, navigating a life or career transition, or seeking deeper clarity about what they most want to create. It is unlike any conventional coaching or strategy session.

• It works through the lens of four archetypal leadership stances, each offering a different quality of intelligence about the question you are holding:

Home to emotional intelligence and embodied knowing. Where we access the perceptions that bypass analytical thinking — and find our capacity to truly follow.

Rooted, practical, and honest. Where we draw clear boundaries, assess risk honestly, and voice what most needs to be said. Our capacity to respectfully oppose lives here.

The dispassionate view from above. Where we discern patterns, reframe problems, and hold complexity without collapsing it. Our capacity to observe without reacting lives here.

Where we see through surface disturbance to the deeper essence of what we are here to do. Where past, present and future connect — and our capacity to move with genuine clarity is born.

The Symbols Way is particularly powerful for leaders navigating transitions or impasses where analytical thinking alone is insufficient. It creates practical clarity for action, grounded in a quality of understanding that is more complete than strategy alone can provide.

Is This For You?

Coaching works best when certain conditions are present. Not perfection — but genuine readiness.

• Readiness for change:  You are at a genuine threshold — a moment where growth is both possible and required, and where staying where you are is no longer sustainable.

• Openness:  You are willing to be changed by what you discover — to question assumptions, sit with uncertainty, and experiment with new ways of thinking and acting before they feel comfortable.

• Commitment to the work:  You understand that the real work happens between sessions — in the experiments, the reflections, and the small daily practices that accumulate into lasting change.

• Honesty:  You are willing to be honest — with me and with yourself — about where you are, what you want, and what is genuinely in the way.

If those conditions are present — or if you are not yet sure whether they are — the best next step is a conversation.

What clients say

"Dorian has the unique ability to dive into the heart of the matter with a fierce empathy that disarmed my resistance. I have been surprised by the lasting impact of her master questions."

"She has an elven warrior presence that I rely on when confronting day-to-day challenges. I both dread and can't wait for the insights she will demand of me in her coaching calls."

"As a 27 year old, I was worried about being coached by an experienced business woman in her 60s. I shouldn't have been. She has stayed young at heart. And she treated me as a partner, not a young client. Yet she also somehow - how did she do that? - guided me to grow."

"It isn't just about a set of coaching calls. The tailored homework, the readings, the introductions to new pragmatic models, the encouragement to put small intentions into daily practice.... it has all been a leadership development program in the form of a coaching relationship."

About Dorian - She is a global leadership consultant, executive coach, and the founder of Women Agents of Change. Based in Tucson, Arizona, She works with women leaders, leadership teams, and organizations who believe that high performance and genuine humanity are not in competition. Her approach draws on forty years of global business experience, an anthropology training, a bicultural Italian and American lens, and a deep commitment to what she think of as the intelligence of living systems. She has been trusted by leaders at Yale, Roche, Danone, Nestlé, UNDP, Mercy Corps, Morgan Stanley, Bottega Veneta, the US Forest Service, Hiscox, and many others.

All change starts with a pause.