Katerina, let's hear your story of your journey of actually coming to work with men what made it what started it i give the floor over to you yeah absolutely

and i will say i do work with women as well but the majority of my clients are men so what got me into this world is kind of an unexpected journey i never planned for this to happen i never thought it would happen it really came about from a combination of my personal life academic experience and then really just the professional way that my career has planned out academically speaking it was during my undergrad when i was actually at nottingham universities in the uk and i was studying a pretty broad degree and at the time i was in a relationship with you know what i would argue a a very wonderful successful guy and i have a brother i have a father and a pretty nuclear family But at that point in my life, it felt like a lot of the men in my life were struggling.

My brother was struggling with his own mental health.

My father was struggling in his marriage.

He ended up actually leaving my mother.

And my own partner at the time was struggling to find work.

And it was fascinating because at the time, in theory, on paper, life should have been easy for all of these guys.

so

right? What do you see then from the female perspective when you're working with perhaps starting initially with working with the female in the relationship?

Yeah, great question.

It's interesting because I see very similar patterns, very similar patterns.

And one of my arguments is, in all of my gender work that I have done academically is actually that yes there are socially constructed differences but on that very human level we're quite similar there's so many similarities and the women that I tend to work with are in a similar role of often being the breadwinner of often i'll say actually i'll correct that the women who come to me originally initially because very often i will work with the the main ambitious breadwinner type and then later down the line their partner will work with me as well so that does happen and obviously they're kind of in a very different situation but the women who voluntarily come work with me are typically yes breadwinners the responsible one of the relationship the one who's really carrying that mental and emotional load of providing for the family of thinking through the finances, of managing all of the logistics and also navigating the kids.

navigating the domestic space there's a lot on their shoulders and very often what i find is that if she is earning enough to actually provide for the whole family he very often will actually stay home and be the stay-at-home husband or stay-at-home father there's a lot of work involved there and actually a lot of challenge from a gender role perspective that he might be going through and what tends to happen is because as women we are so conditioned into being the nurturers and to being the empath, and then you're in this very responsible breadwinning role, we can end up creating this dynamic.

And I say we, because I absolutely did this with my own husband, where we start to create a relationship where we are the ones who are really taking charge of everything in the relationship, in the home, in the workplace, in all arenas.

And our partner ends up feeling a little bit disenfranchised.

How would you define that?

Do you want to open that up a little bit and tell us what

that might mean? Yeah, absolutely.

I might start with a story about a client I'm working with right now who is a fantastic founder.

He's been running his company for about six years now.

It's valued at, you know, in the hundreds of millions in valuation.

And he's brilliant.

He's in his late 40s.

One is, some of it's obvious, but what is it about ambitious individuals that might make this more of an issue than average or the high achiever? What might make them more likely to find themselves having difficulties in this area?