When I was twelve years old, I was the most academically successful student in my classroom for a long while. Getting into our school was kind of a big deal. In Turkey’s high-stakes education system, we had all spent two grueling years — from nine to eleven years old — studying for a nationwide standardized test. We spent our weekdays, weekends, and endless hours at school, in cram schools and at home with private tutors to earn our seats. Everyone in that building was ambit

If you are in the middle of a job search right now and it feels worse than the last time you did this, you are not imagining it. Employer ghosting is at a three-year high, most candidates have now been interviewed by a machine, and half of job seekers say the process is damaging their mental health. The experience has genuinely deteriorated, and the data behind it backs it up. I have several clients in career transition at the moment. Most of the people I coach are senior exe

I remember things. I remember what someone said in a meeting four years ago, the exact phrasing, and the pause before it. I remember who promised to introduce me to whom and never did. I remember the tone of an email from 2019. I remember which song was playing in the taxi on the way to an interview in 2014. I remember the name of the person who was kind to me on my first day somewhere, and the act of kindness itself. For a long time I thought of this as an asset, and in

Someone called me out recently for how I talk to my AI agents. Apparently, I was being rude. My response was something along the lines of: It's software. It'll be fine. But then I did what I usually do when someone tells me something I don't particularly want to hear. I looked into it. And I ended up somewhere much more interesting than the question of whether I should say please and thank you to Claude. The genuinely useful question, in my opinion, is what happens to our jud

One of the most dangerous positions you can be in, in a career, in my experience from thousands of hours of coaching, is being exceptionally good at something you’ve secretly outgrown. When you excel at a complex skill, the modern workplace responds with predictable efficiency: it escalates that work to you, builds your performance targets around it, and holds you up as the definitive subject matter expert. Your last three annual reviews praise it. Your peers rely on it. BUT

A client of mine, a director at a global tech company, told me recently about the moment she understood why her VP promotion kept not happening. Her team had prepared a partnership proposal, and she rewrote it herself the night before the executive review because it was faster than explaining what she wanted. The proposal landed well. Her leadership praised the output. And her name still didn't come up when the VP seat opened three months later, because everyone in that room

What a summer of sport this has been. The World Cup wrapped up last night, the Tour de France is grinding through the mountains as I write this, Wimbledon crowned its champions just a week ago, and I've been loving watching the Turkish Men's Basketball team in the world cup qualifiers. I love watching sport for its own sake, but I will admit that the coach in me never fully switches off. Sport compresses everything I see in careers and leadership, the effort, the setbacks, th

A coachee of mine, a director at a large tech company, keeps a spreadsheet of reasons to leave her job. She started it in early 2025. It has grown to 23 rows: a manager she has outgrown, a product she stopped believing in, a promotion cycle that passed her over twice. She showed it to me in a session last month, and then she said the sentence that prompted this article: "I know all of this, and I still haven't applied to a single role in fourteen months." She has options and

A senior executive I coach recently sat in the armchair opposite me, took a long sip of espresso, and asked a deceptively simple question: “Merve, why am I so profoundly lonely?” This is a man with a striking curriculum vitae, a seat on two prominent boards, and an enviable global network. He is an expatriate, navigating life far from his Mediterranean roots. Yet, as he entered mid-life, he looked around his beautifully appointed living room and realized it was structurally h

When I was in high school, a teacher I deeply respected sat me down and told me I was like a duck. Not sure where he was going with it at first, I twitched uncomfortably but kept listening. A duck, he explained, can walk, swim, and fly. It doesn't out-swim a shark, out-run a cheetah, or out-fly an eagle, but it does all three competently. It survives, adapts, and gets wherever it needs to go because it isn't trapped in a single element. It was a complement. For a long time,

I talked to two people last week who had recently been laid off from Meta. Both are talented. Both have strong track records. Both have spent the last few weeks doing what most people do when they lose a job: updating their CV, setting up job alerts, and pushing apply on LinkedIn. Neither has had a meaningful conversation yet. I speak with a lot of job seekers and career transitioners who are looking for a new path, either because they were impacted by layoffs or because the

I was speaking to a business owner recently - smart, experienced, building something genuinely interesting - when he mentioned, almost in passing, that his web developer had told him his website would go offline if he stopped paying the monthly fee. He had believed it. For two years. I explained that he owns his domain. That the site sits on a server he can move. That none of what he had been told was true, and that the fee he had been paying was, at best, for services he had

Last week, Meta notified roughly 8,000 employees that they were being laid off — about 10% of its entire workforce. The stated reason: funding its AI push. At the same time, around 7,000 more employees were being redirected into newly created AI-focused teams. And quietly buried in the internal memo from Meta's Chief People Officer was a line that should have gotten far more attention than it did: the company is restructuring around "AI-native design principles," flattening m

Some time ago, my client — let's call him Steve — came to me disappointed, angry, and confused all at once, which is a particular kind of exhausting. Steve is a founder. Sharp, self-aware, genuinely good at what he does. Some of the people he had invested most in — developed, advocated for, stayed late with, comforted when they confided in him about personal issues — had left the company the minute a competitor came calling. Not just left. They brought some of his client book

A few years into a senior role at Google, a more senior colleague pulled me aside after a meeting. "You're the smartest person in that room," she said. "But you're not landing the way you think you are." That sentence stayed with me for a long time. Not only because it stung (it really really did) but because I knew she was right, and I had no idea what to do about it. I had the skills, the track record, the ambition. What I didn't have was anyone who could help me see myself

It's one of the most common questions I hear from senior leaders, HR professionals, and founders navigating their next stage of growth: "Should I invest in coaching — or just send people to a training program?" It sounds like a simple either/or but of course in reality it's more complicated than that. And getting this decision wrong is expensive - not just financially, but in time, momentum, and trust. After 11 years at Google leading teams across sales, partnerships, Cloud,

I sat across from a founder last year. Series B, backed by a well-known fund, team of 60. From the outside, everything was working. Valuation up. Press coverage good. Investors pleased. He looked at me and said: "I have never felt more alone in my life." I have heard some version of that sentence more times than I can count. From founders. From VPs who were just promoted. From CEOs who are, on paper, at the peak of everything they worked for. The success arrives — and the iso

Most countries celebrate their national day on the date they declared independence, won a war, or became a republic. France has Bastille Day. The United States has the Fourth of July. Ireland does something different. St. Patrick's Day, held on March 17th, marks the feast day of Ireland's patron saint — the anniversary of his death in 461 AD. Not a revolution. Not a founding moment. A death. And the man being honoured wasn't even Irish. Born in Roman Britain in the late 4th c

I am currently reading Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell . You probably know the premise by now: it is the story of Shakespeare's son, who died at eleven, told entirely through the eyes of his mother Agnes. What strikes me every time I pick it up is the structural audacity of the thing. The most famous writer who ever lived appears in these pages as a peripheral figure. He is never once named. The novel insists, quietly and firmly, that the woman history forgot is the one worth kn

After 13.5 years in Ireland — and counting — I still smile every time I see a Dublin Bus display its gentle regret: "Sorry, Not in Service." Even the buses apologize here. It's such a quintessentially Irish moment that perfectly captures something deeper about this island nation's culture, one that every leader working in Ireland needs to understand. The Weight of History: How Emigration Shaped a Culture To understand Ireland's communication culture, we need to understand its