The more senior the person, the longer they usually wait. In my practice, the people responsible for everyone else are often the ones who have carried it alone the longest, and they almost always arrive alone.Dr. Prerna Kohli

There is a particular kind of client who takes months to make the first call. He runs a company, or built one, or carries a designation that means two hundred people read his mood every morning. She chairs the family business her father started, or manages a P&L bigger than most companies. Everyone assumes that someone this capable is fine. The person has usually stopped asking themselves the question.

Being at the top is isolating in a way few people who haven't done it understand. You cannot think aloud with your team, because your doubts move markets of their own. You cannot always take it home, because home has its own account to settle with your working hours. The usual options are a peer who is also a competitor, a spouse who has heard enough, or nobody. This page describes a fourth option: what leadership psychology is, who I see, what it costs, and how the work stays private.

What is leadership psychology?

Leadership psychology, as I practise it, is clinical work applied to the realities of running something: a company, a family business, a large team, your own venture. It is not motivational coaching and it is not a performance dashboard. It is a psychologist working with you on the patterns that the role rewards in public and that cost you in private, with the same confidentiality and the same methods I use in the rest of my practice.

The premise is simple, and it is not that successful people are secretly unwell. Most of the leaders I see are functioning, often impressively. The qualities that build businesses, control, drive, vigilance, the refusal to show weakness, tend to come with a bill: they are hard to switch off at 11 pm, hard on the people at home, and hard on the body. Work on those patterns is ordinary, evidence-based psychology. What makes it leadership psychology is that the person doing it understands the seat you sit in.

Who I work with

Four kinds of people, and, just as often, the family around them.

• Business owners and promoters. First-generation builders and the heads of established family firms: the people for whom the business, the family and the self are one account, which is exactly why the problems travel between all three.
• Founders. Building, scaling, shutting down, or living with what came after the exit. The startup founder page covers this ground in its own right.
• Senior executives. CXOs, directors, partners and the people one promotion away from those rooms, including the ones whose companies provide every benefit except somewhere truly private to speak.
• The second generation. Sons and daughters stepping into a parent's business, carrying authority on paper and comparison in every meeting.
• The family. Often the first call does not come from the leader at all. It comes from a wife who is done competing with the business, a husband watching his wife burn out, or parents worried about a son who runs everything except his own life. That is a legitimate way in, and sometimes the only one.

Clients see me as individuals, as couples and sometimes as families. Where the problem lives between people, a marriage strained by working hours, a father and son who cannot discuss the business without a fight, the format follows the problem.

What brings a leader to a psychologist

Almost never the word "depression". In my experience the presenting problem is usually concrete and recent: a temper that has started costing good people, a presentation that triggered something close to panic, a third month of broken sleep, a board seat that feels like fraud, a sale that was supposed to feel like victory. Underneath, the themes repeat:

• Burnout that cannot be admitted. Exhaustion in a role with no one to hand over to, and the question behind it, whether this is burnout or something more, like depression.
• Anger. A temper that works in the factory and fails everywhere else, including at home; anger management is its own service here.
• Sleep. The 2 am audit of the day's decisions. A mind that will not switch off because everything depends on it.
• Anxiety in performance moments. Panic before presentations, investor meetings, town halls, in people who are otherwise unshakeable.
• Control. The inability to delegate, trust a successor, or let the business survive without you, and what that is doing to the people being managed.
• Self-doubt at altitude. Imposter feelings after a promotion, or a lifetime of being measured against a successful parent.
• Success that didn't deliver. Everything achieved, and a flatness nobody is allowed to see.
• Transitions. Selling the business, handing it over, retirement, a senior-level layoff: the exits that take identity with them.
• The family business. Fathers and sons, brothers, daughters-in-law, succession: business disputes that are family wounds wearing office clothes.
• The marriage. A spouse who has started saying "you are married to your business", and the slow distance that sentence describes.

Each of these is its own piece of work, and through November this page becomes the hub of a full series on them; the list at the end of this page shows what is coming. If what you are carrying is on that list, you do not need to wait for the article. The first session is where it gets looked at properly.

Psychologist or executive coach: which do you need?

Both exist for good reasons, and the honest distinction is about training and scope, not branding. Coaching carries no statutory licence in India: anyone may call themselves a coach, a point the largest coaching body itself makes, and the certificates behind the title are private credentials, some rigorous, many not. A psychologist's training is a university degree in how minds work and what helps when they don't, in my case a PhD and M.Phil in clinical psychology and three decades of practice.

My view, stated plainly: a psychologist can do coaching-style work, goals, performance, leadership behaviour, because the deeper training contains the lighter work. A coach cannot do therapy, because the lighter training does not contain the deeper work. If what you need is accountability on business goals, a good coach serves you well. If the problem touches sleep, mood, anger, a marriage, alcohol, grief or anything with roots, you need someone trained for roots. Many of the leaders I see have had a coach, valued the structure, and reached the place where the coach, to their credit, said this needs more than me.

One more difference is worth naming. Executive coaching in India is commonly paid for by the company, which means the engagement exists in a triangle: you, the coach, the sponsor. My work has no triangle. Nobody at your company pays for it, reports on it, or receives anything from me.

How sessions work: fees, hours and confidentiality

Everything about the format is built for people whose time and privacy are expensive.

• Confidentiality first. What you share stays between you and me, within the usual ethical and legal limits. No reports to your board, your investors, your HR, or your family. I do not take referral fees, and I do not discuss who I see.
• Fees, stated openly. ₹6,000 for 30 minutes, ₹10,000 for 60 minutes, ₹15,000 for 75 minutes, the same rate online or in-clinic. Sessions are booked one at a time, with nothing prepaid. The 75-minute format suits complex situations and people who want fewer, fuller sessions. Why a senior psychologist charges what she does is answered on its own page, and the first session can be booked directly.
• Hours that fit a working life. By appointment, 9:00 AM to 8:00 PM, seven days a week. Early and late slots exist because my clients' calendars look like yours.
• Online from anywhere in the world, or in person. Video or audio sessions wherever you are, including while travelling, and in-clinic sessions in Gurugram for those who prefer a room with a door.
• The first session is an assessment. What is happening, what it is costing, what you want, and whether anything needs attention first, sleep, mood, health, with a medical review where the causes may sit beyond psychology. You do not need a diagnosis, a crisis, or a decision to book it. What to expect in a first session is described here.

I do not advise on the business itself. Strategy, structure and succession documents belong with your advisers; what I work on is the person making those decisions, and the relationships the decisions run through. The two kinds of work go better together than either goes alone.

For the family: when you are the one searching

If you are reading this about someone else, a husband, a wife, a father, a son, in my practice you are far from alone, and you are not overstepping. Where there is intimidation or control at home, what is safe to do comes first, and that is worked out before anything else. In my experience the people who run businesses rarely search for help with their own name attached; the people who love them do. You can book a session for yourself, talk through what you are watching, and work out how to raise it, or whether to. Some of my longest work with leaders began with a spouse who came alone first, where it was safe and sensible to do so. And sometimes the work stays with the family member, because living alongside a consuming business is its own load. The marriage and couples counselling page describes the joint-work side.