From Google Stage to Money Coach: Why I Changed Everything

In 2020, I stood on a stage at Google’s Zurich headquarters. The room was full of some of the smartest, highest-paid professionals in Switzerland. And I was talking to them about money, not investment strategies or tax optimisation, but the emotional relationship they had with it.

The response shook me. These brilliant engineers and managers, earning six figures in one of the world’s wealthiest cities, were coming up to me afterwards with tears in their eyes. “You just described my entire life,” one woman said. “I earn more than my parents made in a decade, and I still feel like there’s never enough.”

That moment changed the trajectory of my career. Within two years, I’d left the corporate consulting world entirely and founded Mindful Money Coaching.

The Question That Started Everything

My own money journey began not in a boardroom, but in a childhood home where money was the source of both comfort and conflict. Growing up in South Africa, I watched money shape relationships, create power dynamics, and define worth in ways that felt simultaneously wrong and inescapable.

When I moved to Switzerland, I brought those patterns with me — neatly packed alongside my qualifications and ambitions. I became successful by any external measure. Good salary. Nice apartment in Zurich. Savings. Investments. And an unshakeable feeling that none of it was enough.

The question that changed everything was simple: why do I feel poor when I’m not?

The Training That Changed My Understanding

That question led me to Deborah Price and the Institute of Money Coaches. Deborah had spent decades studying the psychology of money, not the mechanics of it, but the emotional architecture that shapes every financial decision we make.

Through her Certified Money Coach (CMC) programme, I discovered the eight Money Archetypes — patterns of behaviour that form in childhood and drive our financial lives as adults. I discovered that my own pattern, a combination of Warrior and Martyr, explained decades of behaviour that willpower alone could never change.

I added NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) and trauma-aware coaching to my toolkit because I quickly learned that money patterns aren’t just habits. They’re deeply encoded in our nervous systems. Changing them requires more than a spreadsheet; it requires working with the body and the subconscious mind.

Why High-Achieving Women?

After that talk at Google, I realised my calling wasn’t working with “people who struggle with money” in the traditional sense. It was working with high-achieving women who look like they have it all figured out and secretly feel like they don’t.

These women, executives, entrepreneurs, professionals, are everywhere in Zurich. They’re brilliant, capable, and successful. And many of them carry a hidden money story that’s quietly undermining their confidence, their relationships, and their ability to enjoy the success they’ve worked so hard for.

The corporate world taught me to perform competence. Money coaching taught me to embrace vulnerability. And vulnerability, it turns out, is where real transformation happens.

What Money Coaching Actually Is

People often ask me: “So you’re a financial advisor?” No. “A therapist?” Also no. Money coaching occupies a unique space between the two.

A financial advisor tells you what to do with your money. A therapist helps you process your feelings. A money coach helps you understand why you do what you do with money, and gives you the tools to do it differently.

In a typical 12-session programme, we:

• Map your money history — every significant financial memory from childhood to now
• Identify your dominant money archetype and how it drives your behaviour
• Uncover the beliefs about money that were handed down from your family
• Use NLP and somatic techniques to rewire patterns at the nervous system level
• Build a new money story — one that’s truly yours, not inherited

The Moment I Knew This Was My Life’s Work

It was a Tuesday afternoon. A client, a senior partner at a consulting firm, sat across from me and said: “For the first time in my life, I bought myself something beautiful without feeling guilty. Not because I gave myself permission. Because the guilt just wasn’t there anymore.”

That’s not a budgeting win. That’s a life transformation. And it’s why I do this work.

If you’re curious about your own money story, start with The Deal. It’s a card game I designed based on the eight archetypes, and it reveals patterns you might not even know you have. It takes ten minutes, it’s free, and it might be the beginning of something profound.