The people who come to Valerie are serious about how they lead. Some have spent years in their own development. Others are only beginning to sense there is deeper work to do, and are ready to do it. What they share is a willingness to look beneath the surface.
Much of the work is about leverage. You arrive with real strengths, the talent, discipline, and hard-won judgment that have carried you this far. Together you look at what has made you successful and find how to draw on it more fully and more deliberately, especially in the moments that ask the most of you.
Some of what shapes how you lead is older than any role you have held. It formed in the body, in the nervous system, through years of learned response to difficulty, uncertainty, and the particular weight of being responsible for others. Met directly, it becomes one more thing you can work with rather than around.
ABOUTValerie’s Story
Valerie Abra Rosenfield has been a psychotherapist for 25 years, in private practice since 2012. Her work has always drawn people who are leaders and carry significant influence and responsibility.
She has also led. Years in management taught her what it is to hold a team accountable, to carry real financial stakes, and to keep people steady through demanding conditions. That experience of operational leadership and performance accountability still shapes how she reads an organization and the person trying to run it.
Over time, the line between personal and professional dissolved for many of her clients. They began asking whether their sessions could hold something more, the strategic terrain they were navigating, often alone, alongside the weight they were already carrying. She welcomed it. It drew on a different dimension of her training. She recognized what she had been observing for years without naming it. What she understood about how people change was exactly what these leaders were looking for.
Executive coaching grew naturally from that recognition.
What She Brings
Valerie is trained in Internal Family Systems, somatic practice, vagus nerve regulation, and clinical neuroscience. More than twenty years of practice have taught her to attend to a person on several levels at once: what they are saying, what the body is holding, what pattern is moving beneath both, and what the moment is actually asking of them as a leader.
She is also a lifelong practitioner and a student of Vedic philosophy. These as well as other philosophical traditions inform her perspective on her coaching work. The thread in all of them understands that the quality of a person's action depends on the quality of their inner attention, and that presence is a valuable skill you can build.
We tend to lead with more ease when we are in touch with what is happening inside the mind and body. A fast moving moment rarely allows time to address all of it. A leader can learn to notice and stay in relationship with the parts that surface, and to meet a high-stakes moment with confidence and presence. Her sessions are direct. She offers observations, asks precise questions, and gives practical guidance toward exactly that.
Why This Work
One leader, changed, changes everyone they lead.
A leader who understands what their nervous system is doing in a high-stakes moment leads differently. A leader who can place their attention with intention rather than by habit makes different decisions. These skills may be the most consequential capacities a leader can develop.
Credentials
Executive Leadership Coaching Program, Harvard University
Master of Social Work, Smith College School for Social Work
Bachelor of Arts, Psychology, Mills College
Certificate in Psychedelic Assisted Therapy and Research, California Institute of Integral Studies
Nutritional Psychiatry Program, Massachusetts General Hospital Psychiatry Academy / Harvard Medical School
Member, Institute of Coaching, McLean Hospital / Harvard Medical School
Licensed Clinical Social Worker, California Board of Behavioral Sciences
Trained in Internal Family Systems (IFS)
Somatic, trauma, and neuroscience-informed practice
Lifelong practitioner and student of Iyengar yoga and Vedic philosophy
Two decades working with clients who are founders, owners, CEOs, VPs, managers, nonprofit executives, elected officials, creative professionals, artists, authors, lawyers, journalists, medical professionals, and other high-impact leaders
Coach to ‘Fortune 500’ and ‘Forbes 30 Under 30’ Founders & Innovators