About Federico

As Chief Investment Officer for a global oil-and-gas major, I led a $40 billion capital program. Today, as a certified Transformational and Executive Coach, I work with leaders to disrupt limiting narratives, re-author their own, and foster lasting change in the people they lead.

The reassuring CV you are probably looking for, with all the proper degrees and certificates, is at the end of this page. But that is only part of my story and possibly, not the most important one. So let me start with another story. 

​The summer of 2013.

I am stationed east of the former Iron Curtain, midway through my fifteenth year in Oil & Gas, where my days are spent steering multi-billion-dollar capital portfolios and translating volatile barrel prices into board-level decisions across four continents. In those final months I felt the center of gravity shift. Days were still claimed by investment committees, strategy decks for the Board and capital-allocation briefings, but evenings belonged to a different ledger: impromptu coaching sessions with junior executives uneasy about a looming merger. Their questions had less to do with Brent and FX forecasts than with succession angst, stalled ambition, and the creeping sense that their professional narrative no longer matched the facts of their lives. In those closed-door conversations I discovered a more consequential leverage, guiding leaders, not budgets, through volatile terrain. By the time I boarded the flight home that November, an executive and leadership coaching vocation had taken shape.

For the next twelve months I toggled between short consultancy stints and disciplined work on my executive coaching repertoire. Most sessions were aimed at executives and professionals navigating the same disorienting leadership transitions I had just faced. There were other C-suite opportunities, but each offer stalled at the final calculation; the numbers added up, the narrative did not. Then, yet again, everything changed.

”That's what I want to do!” My wife Heli heard me utter those words not fully realizing what I had just said. On the large TV screen the credits started running.

I had just finished watching ”Buck”, a richly textured documentary on the story of one of the most remarkable horsemen in America, Buck Brannaman.  I was transfixed. I had never seen anything like this. The grace, the elegance and the power of the horse were perfectly matched by Buck's legendary "feel" for these extraordinary creatures. All I could think was ”I want some of that”. 

There was only a minor problem with my plan. I was a 44 year old Business Executive who did not know how to ride. Not in the sense that I was not good at it, but in the sense that I had never taken a lesson, not one. I had been on a pony a couple of times as a child, and on two trail rides as an adult, but that was it. Hardly the stuff of legends. I've always liked horses, but until then it had been a platonic, unrealized passion. 

Then, one day, without thinking about it too much, I started calling all of the ranches featured in the documentary to see who would be brave enough to take me as a student.