You had a high-level career. Why did you step away from it?

I worked in oil and gas for about fifteen years. My last few years were in Russia, where I was chief investment officer of a very large private oil company. The company was purchased by the Russian national oil company, and I decided that was not a good fit for me. It would have been financially very rewarding, but culture-wise it was not the right fit. So I decided to go back to Europe.

During the merger transition, a lot of younger leaders came to me for advice, for suggestions about what to do. They were confused about what was happening, at a very stressful time, and I found myself having more coaching conversations than conversations about balance sheets and oil prices. It was something I started to enjoy. As I left Russia and came back to Europe, I thought that was something I wanted to explore further, and I came to love coaching very quickly. I had been lucky enough to have some very good coaches as an executive. I had also had some very bad ones, so I could tell the difference.

Then I fell in love with horses. An event out of nowhere, as sometimes happens. I saw a documentary and I said, I want to ride horses. I was forty-five years old and had never ridden in my life, so it was a big transition. I went to Montana for three weeks and fell completely in love with it: the business, the environment, the animals. Within nine months my wife and I moved to Montana. We lived there for six years, with six horses and three large dogs. Then in 2022 we decided to move to Texas. There is a kind of horsemanship I particularly enjoy, and Texas is the place to be for it. We also wanted to set up a ranch where we could breed horses and run coaching retreats at the same time, because some of my coaching is done with horses. So here I am in Texas. This is my fourth year.

Do you often see leaders who feel something is missing without knowing what?

Very much so. The majority of the people I work with go through exactly this kind of transition. There is a pattern I call Success Inflation, and strangely enough it happens to people who are, from the outside, genuinely successful.

Over time, success stops meaning the same thing. When you are young and coming up in your career, success is very meaningful; there is a value in being successful. Over time, sometimes but often, that success becomes less meaningful and less rewarding. People find themselves in their late forties or early fifties, and the story they had built about themselves, the identity they built, suddenly does not quite work, and they are not sure why. On the outside the money is good, the success is good, the regard of their peers and their family is good. Everything seems fine. But something inside says otherwise. That is usually when they come to me.

Where should someone start, without blowing up their life?

What you said reminds me of a line from an old Italian film: you cannot run away from yourself, not even if you are Eddy Merckx, who was a famous cyclist in the seventies. That dates me a little.

You are right, though. If something comes up, it is something you have to interrogate, without rationalizing it, without running away, without finding an excuse. That is very difficult for successful leaders, because they have built their lives on performing. Work more, work harder, do something different. So the first thing that happens is: I am going to do fourteen-hour days, I am going to take up the gym, I am going to learn golf. Intensity and quantity arrive as the first answer, and usually it is not the answer you are looking for.

The first step is recognizing that something is not working, and reflecting on it. The second is talking to somebody else. In the self-help world, and in self-development generally, there is a misconception that we can solve things through our own thoughts alone. That is probably true for small things. For bigger ones it does not work, because most of the stories we tell about ourselves are hidden. They are unconscious. They live beneath the surface. We act on them without knowing they are there, or without thinking about them, which amounts to much the same.

The way we become aware that something is not going to work, that there is a story we need to understand better, is by speaking with somebody else. It can be a family member, though that is often difficult. It can be a very good friend. It can be somebody at work, although there is always a different dynamic at work, especially in high-achieving environments. Having an external conversation is often the catalyst that makes you think: perhaps I have to think this through. We are all very good at lying about ourselves to ourselves. We make up the most wonderful stories. I do not have time. She does not like me. He does not care about me. They are wonderful stories, but they are stories, not necessarily realities.

How do you start that conversation, and what do you ask?

It depends on who the third party is, because we all have different dynamics with family and with friends. Most of us have one very good friend, somebody we can trust and be completely straight with, and in my experience that is usually a good place to start.

But it has to be the kind of relationship where the person can challenge you. Where they can say, you are making this up, that is not true, or, I understand what you are saying. A support system that says no, you are doing well, you are fine, do not worry about it, is not always the most helpful thing, which is why people often look for support outside their narrow circle.

And it often happens with an excuse. About half the people who come to me do not come for this kind of conversation at all. They come with small technical issues. I think of a woman who came a couple of years ago and said her leaders had given her feedback that she did not manage her time effectively. Her appraisal said everything else was fine; her time management was not great, and she would like help with it.

As we started working together it became clear that her time management was not bad. What she had was a narrative that she was indispensable to her team. She had made a story of being responsible and necessary for everything, so she got involved in every single thing, which made effective time management impossible. She had never realized the narrative was lurking underneath. That is how these conversations start. You begin somewhere and you end up somewhere different.

Can a narrative that no longer helps be let go?

There is a big difference between becoming more productive and changing a narrative, and the difference is time and effort. When we have an ingrained pattern that comes from years of doing the same thing, it takes a long time to create something new. And we do have to create a new story.

Not because the old story was a bad story. It is very easy to fall into this is bad, this is good. The story may have served us at one point and does not serve us now. That is the first thing to realize.

The second is that most of what is out there under the heading of self-help is three-step and four-step protocols. Do these three things and you will be happy. Do four things and you will fix your marriage. I wish it were that simple. But when something is lurking in the unconscious, we do not understand it until we go and investigate, and it is there for a reason. It is not by chance that we do certain things. Overcoming it takes time and a great deal of effort. It is much harder than improving how fast you answer an email. It is a different order of thing.

Life is a complex system, which means there are no defined rules and the range of possibilities is close to infinite. We tend to narrow it down, and we reach for sport metaphors, which are reductive, because a sport is a simple closed system. Few rules. Some things you can do, others you cannot. You do not turn up to a tennis match with a baseball bat. Life does not work that way. So the more hidden the story, the more complicated it is and the longer it takes. I want to be realistic about that. It does not mean years in therapy, and as a coach I do not do therapy; those are very different things. But it is not a weekend workshop either.

How do you become the next version of yourself without discarding the last one?

Every case is different. We all have strengths and weaknesses; our genetic makeup, our environment and the way we grew up give us different skill sets. Change has been relatively easy for me, and I struggle with other things. Others are the reverse.

That said, a few ideas are useful. The first is that the past is always present. We do not have to negate our past, we cannot do it, and we should not think we can. We are who we are now. Change is not discarding everything. It is thinking: I had a certain life, I did some things well and others less well, and there is a moment of change now, so which stories are going to help me move forward? It is not that the old self has to go away. That is not possible, and it would not be useful.

The second is that identity is something you construct over time. You sometimes hear that you can change your identity by identifying with somebody else. It does not work like that. We build identity step by step, often unconsciously. So it is work, and the first step is recognizing that we can change within limits. I will never play in the NBA, whatever identity I adopt. That is outside my boundary. I will never solve quantum mechanics; it is outside my skill set, so identifying with Albert Einstein will not be much use to me.

But I can decide that I want to learn more about quantum mechanics, that I am interested in the field, and I can start building a pattern of reading and work that nudges me in that direction. Over time I will make progress, and as I make progress I will discover it is not exactly what I wanted, and I will move again. There are always small shifts, sometimes larger ones, and they keep happening. As long as we understand that we can make some shift, and that it will take work, we can make them.

How does coaching with horses actually work?

It has to be live; I cannot do it over Zoom, so it is only for clients who can come to the ranch.

Horses are prey animals, so their perception of what is around them is vastly greater than ours. The coaching usually happens in a round pen, an enclosed space large enough for the horse to move around in. And a horse only reacts to what it sees in its environment. When somebody walks in, the horse does not know their title, how much money they make, or how many people work for them. The only thing it registers is whether this person is congruent. Are the signals clear? Do the way he moves and the sounds he makes mean anything?

As a result a horse can give feedback in a fraction of a second about a story a person has been carrying in their mind for twenty years. That is quite spectacular.

Some time ago a very alpha-male executive came to the ranch and started ordering the horse to move. The horse looked at him, turned around and walked to the other side of the pen. It was saying: I do not know what you want from me. You are loud, you are making noises, but the way you move and the way you behave has no meaning for me. The man was shocked. He was used to people listening and obeying every barked order. The change in him over ten minutes was remarkable.

These experiences are a catalyst. There has to be work afterwards to make sense of them and bring them back into real life, but they show very clearly when something is not working. On the same day, a young executive, a woman in her early thirties who carried a lot of self-doubt about how she was perceived in her company, went into the round pen and the horse did exactly what she asked. She had a clear idea of what she wanted to communicate, and she communicated it in a way that made sense. The other executive was shocked, and asked how it could happen for her and not for him. That gives you a great deal of information.

There is a danger with horses, which is attributing mystical qualities to them that are not real. Because they are such beautiful animals, because they have lived alongside people for so long, because we have given the horse symbolic attributes over centuries, it is easy to say the horse is wise, or the horse is a mirror to the soul. That is not quite how it works. But the feedback they give is remarkable.

What would you tell a leader thinking about a transition?

Not to ignore their desire. And by desire I do not mean wanting an ice cream, or a good Sicilian cannolo. I mean what comes from within, that we cannot quite express.

Do not ignore it. Try to make sense of it, and if you cannot make sense of it, find somebody who can help you do that. The more we ignore our desire, the more our life takes a trajectory different from the one we would have wanted.

Where can people find you?

At federicomalatesta.com. I publish on Substack, Medium and LinkedIn: newsletters about identity, change and transition, so there is a lot of material there. I write at least a couple of times a month.