Hey 👋🏻. My name’s Franziska Gonder but you can call me Franzi. I coach high-performing founders, CEOs, investors, political operatives, and social activists to realize their full human leadership potential.

This page is for friendly referrals — so no fluff here. Learn more about my approach below, and book a discovery call if you want to connect personally. Excited to share some time and space with you!

You Might Relate to Some of My Past Clients If:

• 🌞 You want radical clarity. 🌞
  • You have what it takes to be the beacon of light your people need, but you sometimes struggle to find your own unwavering conviction.
  • You want the inner peace to fully thrive in chaos and ambiguity, but something deeper inside holds you back.
• 🚀 You want bottomless capacity. 🚀
  • The commitment to hustle that got you this far is starting to show up as problems in sleep, relationships, addiction to performance-related drugs, and chronic pain. You need alternatives to what a life outside hustle can look like, while still getting your things done.
  • Your mission is too important for you to burn out. You need to figure out how to make “the work” energize rather than drain you. You want the mindset, self-perception, and habits to support the legacy-defining output that awaits…but aren’t sure where to start.
• 🕊 You want emotional freedom. 🕊
  • You want to initiate crucial conversations and express yourself truthfully, but hesitate because you fear conflict and fall-out.
  • Your obsession with performance keeps you from being playful, vulnerable, and present, and this makes it hard to build the levels of trust and loyalty you desire from others. The mask you live in is something you bring home, so personal relationships feel incongruent with your professional life.
• You don’t identify with any of the struggles described above, but simply want to:
  • Deepen your relationship with yourself.
  • Grow faster than the needs of your company.
  • Build better habits and expose yourself to new stimuli.
  • Know someone’s in your corner who always has your back.
  • View work, your organization, and yourself, from new perspectives.
  • Invite diverse thought into your leadership for future-proof business outcomes.
  • Stay ahead as your playing field, industry and economic outlook increases in difficulty.
• If you feel intrigued, and want to add your own context to what you just read, book a discovery call.

What My Clients Say About Our Experience Working Together

https://embed.testimonial.to/w/testimonials-coaching-with-franzi?theme=light&card=base

My Coaching Approach

• I’m not your guru.

  Instead: I’m the mirror who lets you see different versions of yourself.

  I’m the sherpa who brings you back to your mental balcony.

  I’m the guide who gets you out of your head and back into your body.

  I’m the intellectual sparring partner in your corner working through important business challenges, calling you on your bullshit, holding you accountable, and giving you tough love when you need it.

  And I’m the human who holds sacred space for you, holds your hand, and reminds you you’re not alone—that we’re all just here to walk each other home.

• My primary tool: Somatic Leadership Coaching.

  Somatic Leadership (soma = body) means to embody and practice leadership rather than intellectualize about leadership.

  The ambition is to build a greater capacity for more effective action.

  In our daily modern lives, most of us live and lead from our "upper quartile" - head, neck, and shoulders. We think, analyze, rationalize, and problem-solve from there for the most critical decisions in our life. We also leave enormous potential on the table.

  Neuroscience has made significant discoveries to somatic work by showing that our intelligence lies not just in the brain — it is in the body as a whole. Our bodies actually contain far more nervous tissue than our brains and that these nerves are responsible for judgment, decision-making, emotional regulation, and even trauma storage.

  By helping you tune into your sensate narratives, I help you cut straight to the root of your problems much faster than cognitive and speech based approaches. We can heal trauma, access our truth, and achieve peak performance through honoring somatic capacity.

  One bullshit-piercing Somatic question I often ask my clients is this: "When you pause your mind, and let your body speak, where would 'problem X' sit?"

  You can learn a little more about my approach to Somatics here.

Why I’m Here

• My Why is Just as Ambitious as Yours.

  Like you, I’m here to make a splash.

  For me, that means enabling leadership that heals the world.

  I want to impact millions by impacting a few.

  Though the many years of building companies and supporting founders, I know leaders shape culture and culture impacts people.

  If I can help a few fantastic humans shape better culture, then we together can make a big impact on society.

  Let’s heal the world, society, workplaces, communities, teams, relationships, and ourselves together. it’s all one.

• I’ve Done the Work, and I’m Just as Human as You.

  I’ve been in the boardrooms with billionaires, at the fancy political fundraisers, and featured in the media. But I’ve also been pulled in by a VC client to turn around a startup weeks after giving birth to my first child, breastfeeding in between meetings in a foreign country.

  I*’ve advised Fortune 100 clients* and raised millions of dollars in capital. But I have also dug myself out of financial ruin more than once (once while pregnant, driving myself to near-burnout).

  I’m consciously raising three beautiful young boys and love my family to the moon and back. But I also faced postpartum depression, which brought up a lot of pain and trauma from my childhood that’s taken me on a (beautiful and hard) healing journey.

  I have a thriving, visionary, and loving marriage today. Our 10 year journey has been full of challenges and my relationship history is messy.

  I’m here to give people back to themselves, and I believe we’re all just here to walk each other home.

Where to Learn More about My Work

• 📝 My Substack Newsletter: Leadership that Heals the World.