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 a third thing. It’s closer to a structured curriculum — specific skills, practiced in order, one or two per session. Concrete things to take away, not insight to mull over.

We start by slowing down. You’ll have room to say the whole thing before I suggest anything, because nothing useful gets built on top of feeling rushed. From there we get oriented: your background, what’s actually getting in the way, and one area to work on at a time.

Done right, change takes time. The full arc of anxiety work usually runs 8–12 weeks — not because we go slowly, but because change has layers. Early relief often comes sooner than the full arc. The first layer is the thinking: catching the thoughts that are running the show underneath, seeing what they’re built on, and reframing them. We work the inside before we ask anything of the outside.

Then comes the behavioral work — and this is where things shift. If anxiety has been keeping you from something, I’ll ask you to move toward it, in steps you choose. Confidence tends to follow the doing, not the other way around. If relationships are the focus, I’ll teach you concrete communication scripts for your side of the conversation, so you leave with real skills, not just awareness. And if you’re facing a major life decision, there are tools for working the choice instead of circling it.

One thing to know going in: there’s homework. Every session ends with something specific to practice, because the change happens in your actual week — not in the hour with me. The session teaches the skill and corrects the practice; the doing is yours.

The goal is that by the end, you can do this without me. The work is portable.

You’ll also be introduced to a broader framework — podcasts, books, and resources you can return to anytime — so the learning extends well beyond our sessions.