A skills coach who’s done the work herself.

I’m American, with Croatian roots on my father’s side. I’ve been coming to his country since I was a child; a year ago it became home. Two children, a house on the Adriatic, paperwork in three languages, work across time zones — the shape of a life I didn’t plan and don’t regret.

What I learned the hard way: moving abroad doesn’t fix the anxious mind. It just gives it new things to be anxious about. Visa renewals, friends in three countries, the quiet question of where home is now. The bureaucracy of a place you chose. The grief for the life you didn’t take.

I spent years training in anxiety and emotion-regulation skills before coaching was my work — including years inside Dr. David Burns’ TEAM-CBT group at Stanford. Training with clinical depth. Coaching is not a licensed practice, and I hold that line: no diagnosis, no treatment. What crosses over is the skills themselves, taught directly. Tools you keep. The practice, not the theory.

The move is my story, not an entry requirement. Across more than a decade of that work, most of the anxious minds I’ve sat with never changed countries — the same patterns ride on a job, a decision, a body, a season of life. The skills don’t care what the anxiety is attached to.

And the practice keeps growing with my own life. The newest specialty — women’s midlife and wellness — isn’t a market decision. I’m in that season myself: the mood weather, the 3am wake-ups, the identity renegotiation nobody briefs you on. I bring the same professional training to it that I bring to the anxiety work, plus the one thing training can’t give — being unsurprised by any of it.

Most coaching wants you to identify your values, set goals, and run at them harder. Most therapy wants you to understand where the anxiety came from. Neither is wrong — they’re just answering a different question than the one you need answered this Wednesday.

What I do is closer to a structured curriculum. Specific skills, practiced in order: emotion regulation, cognitive reframing, somatic awareness, decision-making under uncertainty, communication for hard moments. One or two tools per session. You leave with something concrete to practice — not insight to mull over.

One thing to know going in: there’s homework. Every session ends with a written practice plan, because the change happens between sessions — in your actual week, not in the hour with me — and that’s what makes weeks enough. The session teaches the skill and corrects the practice; the doing is yours.

By the end of a package, the goal is that you can do this without me. The work is portable.