This interview is with Federico Malatesta, Founder & Executive Coach, FM Transformational Coaching™.
For Featured readers who may be meeting you for the first time, how do you describe your work today as a Founder & Executive Coach and the kinds of senior leaders you serve?
I am the founder of FM Transformational Coaching™ and work with executives and high-achievers navigating complexity beyond slogans and frameworks. Previously, I served as the Chief Investment Officer for a $40 billion energy portfolio. I now apply the discipline of global finance to the psychology of transformation.
My work isn’t about finding the right answer; it’s about helping clients interpret context, name real trade-offs, and reclaim authorship of their story under uncertainty. I blend leadership practice with narrative theory, neuroscience, and contemporary psychoanalytic thought, and I include diagnostic tools like Hogan and LeadNow assessments when useful.
My coaching offerings include Executive Coaching and Transformational Coaching programs bespoke to each individual client. Both coaching modalities have a 60-day “ignition” offer and a longer-term 5-month plan for deep narrative recalibration.
I work with clients both remotely and in person at The Artha Ranch, where I reside in Texas. The Ranch functions both as a reflective coaching retreat and a working horse ranch, where I breed and ride reined cow horses, keeping the work of transformation grounded in the grit of daily reality.
Through my FM Equine Coaching™ program, I also offer in-person clients the option to integrate a rare form of experiential learning with horses.
Looking back on your career across energy, corporate finance, and M&A, what pivotal experience nudged you from deal-making to transformational coaching, and how did it shape your approach to executive purpose and growth?
The pivot wasn’t disillusionment with deal-making; it was recognizing that a different vocation had already started to take shape.
By early 2013, I was fifteen years into Oil & Gas, stationed east of the Iron Curtain, overseeing a $40 billion capital program. Days were filled with investment committees and board briefings. Evenings told a different story. As the company entered acquisition talks with the Russian national oil company, junior executives kept showing up with questions that had nothing to do with Capex or Brent forecasts. They were questions about succession anxiety, stalled ambition, and the growing sense that their professional narratives no longer matched their lives.
In those conversations, I discovered a different kind of leverage: guiding leaders through volatility. Something was opening up. After the merger, staying made no sense, but the work I’d begun in the margins did.
What shaped my approach was recognizing that executive purpose is authored. The leaders in those evening sessions weren’t lacking motivation; they were stuck in narratives that had once served them but now constrained them. I call this narrative collapse: when the professional identity you’ve constructed over decades no longer maps to your lived experience. I treat it as an interpretive problem. Before you can act differently, you have to see your situation differently.
The shift from finance to coaching was about following a door that had already opened and translating the same skills (reading context, diagnosing misalignment, deciding under uncertainty) into a domain where the asset under management is a human life.
Many leaders in capital-intensive sectors consider a “second-life” beyond their last P&L—how do you help them surface an authentic purpose that isn’t borrowed from prior titles or external expectations?
I’d gently challenge two assumptions embedded in the question: that purpose can “surface” (as if it’s buried and waiting to be found), and that “authentic” is the right frame for what leaders are actually seeking.
The notion of an authentic self—some essential core beneath the roles and titles—is seductive but flawed. Identity isn’t archaeological. You don’t dig down to find who you really are. Identity is authored: constructed, revised, and enacted in context. The leaders I work with need to author a purpose that fits where they are now, not where they were when they last updated the story.
The second distinction matters just as much: purpose and meaning aren’t the same thing. Purpose is goal-oriented; it points toward outcomes. For high-achievers leaving capital-intensive sectors, finding another “purpose” can quickly become another optimization problem, another KPI to hit. Meaning operates differently. It’s not about where you’re going; it’s about whether the story you’re living makes sense to you now, in this moment.
As a result, when I work with leaders navigating what you’re calling a “second life,” I’m less interested in helping them find an authentic purpose and more interested in helping them author a meaningful narrative. That means examining the stories they’ve inherited—from their industries, their families, their early successes, their circle of friends—not to discard them, but to decide consciously which ones they want to keep writing and which ones have run their course.
The question isn’t “What is my true purpose?” The question is: “What story am I willing to claim authorship over now, knowing it will need to be revised again?”
In volatile contexts you know well—commodities, emerging markets, complex JVs—what practices strengthen the interpretive judgment and narrative coherence leaders need when data is incomplete and signals conflict?
I spent over 25 years, both in corporate roles and in my own businesses, making consequential capital allocation decisions in exactly those environments: volatile commodities, emerging markets, and joint ventures with substantial political subtext. In my experience, leaders who navigate uncertainty well share a common discipline: they are rigorous interpreters of context, especially when the data does not tell them what to do.
A few practices stand out:
- Separate the signal from the stance. In volatile contexts, there’s enormous pressure to project confidence, to declare a position before you’ve actually diagnosed the situation. Some executives have a tendency to rotate through familiar postures: “We need to be more aggressive,” “We need to be more cautious,” “We need to empower the team.” Each sounds very leadership-like. However, what I have noticed is that the most effective discipline is to sit longer in the diagnostic phase, to describe what you’re actually seeing before you name what you’re going to do about it.
- Name what you don’t know, explicitly and early. In data-poor environments, the temptation is to fill gaps with assumptions and then forget you made them. The best operators I worked with would articulate their uncertainty out loud: “We’re assuming the regulatory timeline holds, but we have no visibility past Q2.” This creates a shared map of where the narrative is solid and where it’s speculative. When signals later conflict, you know which assumptions to revisit first.
- Stress-test the narrative, not just the numbers. Every investment case tells a story: why this asset, why now, why us. In complex JVs and emerging markets, the numbers are only as good as the story holding them together. I learned to ask: “What would have to be true for this narrative to break?” What context are we misreading? Whose incentives are we misunderstanding? Where is our story about the situation diverging from theirs? Sometimes the simple question, “Tell me, how exactly are we going to make money here?” can reveal critical fault lines.
- Use expertise as a resource, not a shield. When signals conflict and data is incomplete, organizations instinctively reach for external validation, highly paid and influential consultants, advisors, and technical experts. At times, there’s a place for that. But the question to ask before commissioning any analysis is: “Am I looking for insight, or am I looking for cover?”
When a client’s progress stalls, what is one diagnostic question you ask that reliably surfaces the real resistance beneath the stated goal?
Every case is different, and I’m skeptical of silver-bullet questions. Coaching that relies on a universal unlocking phrase tends to produce generic insights. The value lies in understanding the specific situation.
That said, one question I frequently return to when progress stalls is: “What would you have to give up if this actually worked?”
Goals carry costs. For example:
- A promotion means visibility you can’t rescind.
- A career change means surrendering an identity you spent decades constructing.
- A difficult conversation means losing the option to keep things ambiguous.
When clients stall, they’ve usually accounted for what they’ll gain. Often, they haven’t considered what they’ll lose.
The question reframes resistance as information since this resistance can signal that the client has intuited a cost they haven’t yet named. Once the cost is visible, they can consider it fully—or at least consciously. Sometimes they decide the goal is still worth it. Other times, they realize the goal itself needs revision, acknowledging that they were chasing an outcome inherited from an earlier version of themselves. Either way, they will have moved from facing an invisible wall to having to think about whether it’s worth surmounting it.
Once purpose is clear, how do you translate that into a weekly operating rhythm that balances time autonomy with the structure required for executive clarity and renewal?
Without revisiting the pivot from question 3, I’ll assume we’ve moved past “purpose” toward a narrative the client has consciously authored and is ready to live.
At this stage in my work with clients, we’ve typically completed the first four steps of what I call the FM ROADMAP™: they’ve recognized their agency as authors of their own story, opened up to their current narrative, assessed its storylines, and decided what to change. The question now is how to translate that clarity into lived practice. This is step five: Map Your Next Chapter. Here it’s important to understand that mapping isn’t about scheduling. It’s about building a weekly structure that supports the work you’ve just done. A few principles guide this:
- Anchor the week to the story, not the calendar. Most executives default to filling time with obligations and then squeezing “purpose” into the margins. The sequence matters: start with the narrative you’ve authored, then build the structure that serves it.
- Build in ‘interpretive space’. Executives are good at execution; they’re often less practiced at reflection. A weekly rhythm needs protected time – even thirty minutes – where the task is simply to notice: What’s working? Where is the new narrative gaining traction? Where is the old one reasserting itself? Renewal comes from this kind of attention, not from unrealistic “optimization protocols.”
- Treat structure as flexible scaffolding, not architecture; it shouldn’t become a new cage. I encourage clients to revisit their weekly structure monthly and ask: Is this still serving the story I’m trying to live? Structures that outlive their usefulness easily become the next set of inherited scripts.
The goal is a structure that works until it doesn’t, and that the client knows how to revisit it when it stops working.
Drawing on your background in portfolio management and corporate finance, how do you coach leaders to bring leadership depth to irreversible capital decisions under high ambiguity?
I coach leaders to take responsibility amidst ambiguity.
My background has trained me to work with irreversible decisions under uncertainty, where waiting for full information is itself a decision with consequences. In that context, leadership depth comes from the ability to distinguish what can be optimized from what must be owned.
In coaching, I focus on three things:
- Clarifying the real irreversibilities in a decision—reputation, identity, and political capital—especially when financial models operate to obscure them.
- Separating analysis from judgment: models inform decisions, but they do not make them. Someone still has to choose and stand behind the choice.
- Helping leaders recognize how their past successes shape their risk perception, often narrowing their field of vision.
The main work is about accountability. Leaders who can tolerate ambiguity, name trade-offs explicitly, and act without outsourcing responsibility are the ones who bring real depth to capital decisions.
You’ve said a human‑centric leader is willing to be inconvenienced by people—what boundary or ritual helps operationalize that willingness without exhausting the leader or the team?
The phrase “willing to be inconvenienced by people” is about posture, not availability. It means treating interruptions, disagreements, and emotional complexity as part of the job rather than obstacles to it.
One ritual I recommend is simple: scheduled unavailability that the leader actually defends. Most executives have open-door rhetoric and resentment underneath. Teams sense the performative gesture, and the “availability” becomes theoretical, i.e., present in body, absent in attention. A leader who blocks two hours daily and holds that boundary is more genuinely available during the remaining time than one who is nominally accessible but internally depleted.
Also in these circumstances, discipline matters. Leaders need to distinguish between requests that require their presence and requests that require their attention later. Many “interruptions” are actually invitations to weigh in on something that doesn’t need an immediate response. A human-centric leader can say: “I want to give this the attention it deserves. Let’s find thirty minutes tomorrow.” That’s responsiveness without reactivity.
The goal is “sustainable” attentiveness. Leaders who burn out on accessibility often swing to the opposite extreme: withdrawn, transactional, and defensive. The boundary exists to protect the willingness, not to contradict it.
For an executive planning their second‑life over the next 24 months, what single, irreversible commitment should they make now that will protect the in‑person moments where trust and transformational growth actually compound?
I’m skeptical of universal prescriptions, but if I had to name one, it would be: tell people.
Make the transition public before you feel ready. Tell your board, your family, and your closest colleagues what you’re building toward, with a specific intention and timeframe. “In eighteen months, I’m stepping back from operations to focus on X.” This creates social accountability. You can silently abandon a private plan, but a public declaration makes retreat costly, and that protects the space.
The second commitment is less inspiring but equally important: prepare the groundwork early. Executives underestimate how much administrative complexity accumulates around a senior role—board seats, stock options, deferred compensation, non-competes, and insurance tied to employment. Each of these can become a reason to delay when the transition gets close. Start early. Map the obligations, the vesting schedules, and the contractual constraints. Consult the lawyers and accountants before you need to. The goal is to remove the logistical excuses that give cold feet somewhere to hide.
While you’re at it, revitalize your professional network now: organize the lunches, the dinners, and the trips. It’s far easier to maintain relationships from a position people recognize than to resurface two years later in a new identity that leaves them uncertain how to place you.
The in-person moments—mentorship, real conversation, and presence with family—require protected time. That protection comes from having already closed the administrative doors that would otherwise pull you back.
Thanks for sharing your knowledge and expertise. Is there anything else you'd like to add?
The through-line in all of this work is authorship. Most leaders I meet have spent decades performing stories they inherited—from their families, their early successes, and their industries. Those stories often served them well, but at some point, they stopped fitting.
The second half of life offers a different possibility: not reinvention, not optimization, but the chance to consciously author what comes next. That requires slowing down long enough to interpret where you actually are, deciding what’s worth keeping, and taking responsibility for the narrative you choose to live.
For anyone sensing that gap between the story they’re performing and the life they want to be living, that’s where the work begins.