For Executive, Couples, Creatives & Household Coaching
Private Coaching for When Pressure Follows You Home
You can lead well at work and still lose the clarity you rely on the moment the conversation becomes personal. Anne-Marie Duchêne helps executives, creatives, and couples recognize reactivity earlier and respond with greater intention when the stakes are high.
By referral︱New York︱ Montreal ︱Virtual worldwide
Steadier leadership. Stronger partnership. A calmer home.
Coaching leaders since 1998
Julie Mehretu
Artist; MacArthur Fellow; 2026 Art Basel Awards Medalist
Anne-Marie's approach helped me find daily presentness, she helped me to open up my creativity and establish a mental calm that I was always seeking… She is a special and unique talent who will change your mind and body relationship forever.
Where Does the Pressure Show Up?
Leaders and Founders
You are responsible for decisions that affect other people.
You know how to lead, communicate, and perform, but pressure can make it harder to access the clarity you normally rely on.
The work covers high-stakes decisions, executive communication and presence, boundaries, and difficult conversations.
Couples
You may both be accomplished, capable people and still find yourselves returning to the same disagreement.
Work stress, parenting, family decisions, and the demands of a complex home bring those patterns to the surface.
Couples coaching covers recurring conflict, communication under pressure, parenting alignment, and family decisions.
Artists and Creatives
For artists whose work depends on focus, presence, and access to their full creative range.
Exhibitions, deadlines, public attention, and the demands of running a studio and team can narrow attention and block the state their best work comes from.
The work supports presence, creative focus, mental calm, and clear communication with studio teams, galleries, and collaborators.
Households
The people who run your home shape its atmosphere.
When communication among principals, staff, and family breaks down, the effects reach everyone.
The Household Program gives your whole household a shared way of working together.
Not sure where your situation fits?
The Pressure Doesn't Stay at the Office
Pressure from work has a way of coming home with you. It shows up in a sharper tone at dinner, or in an argument about the children or the staff that, underneath, is about something else entirely.
Wealth brings a significant household: house managers, nannies, chefs, drivers, assistants, and estate and family-office staff. Managing them is a leadership role no one trains you for, performed in your own home, with no HR department and no off switch.
When a staff relationship goes wrong, it rarely stays contained. Disagreements about how to handle a nanny become disagreements about each other. Loyalty to a long-serving employee collides with a partner's frustration. Children absorb the atmosphere, and they often know more than anyone realizes.
Anne-Marie helps you lead at home with the same clarity you bring to work:
Aligning as a couple before addressing staff, so you speak with one voice
Setting expectations and boundaries that hold without resentment
Having direct, respectful conversations, including the hard ones
Recognizing when household tension is really partnership tension, and addressing it at the source
Sharen Jester Turney
Former CEO, Victoria's Secret
I found peace in working with Anne-Marie and learned how to get in touch with myself under stress… I started recognizing signals in my body… It led me to better relationships with my husband, son, family, and friends.
For the Partner Who Doesn't Need Coaching
Often one partner arrives certain the problem lies with the other person. They are accomplished and rational, and they have solved every other problem in their life on their own. Coaching can feel unnecessary, or like an admission.
Anne-Marie understands this. She has spent more than twenty-five years coaching executives. She also knows the pattern from the inside: the part of us that already knows the answer is often a form of protection. If we already know what the other person will say, we never have to actually listen.
No one is asked to adopt a new vocabulary or confess anything. The work starts with what you already care about: your performance, your judgment, your family. Then it looks at what is observable.
How quickly do you recover after conflict?
How are your words received?
What are the first physical signs that you’re under pressure?
Skeptics rarely change their minds because they are persuaded. They change because something works.
Ann O'Malley
Former EVP Creative Services, Victoria's Secret
In the corporate world, it’s so easy for me to communicate. What isn’t easy, and in fact is very difficult, is for me to be vulnerable and talk about my emotions…
My biggest ‘Aha’ moment was when I was able to ‘pause’ during a difficult conflict, and then respond in a loving way, instead of a habitual reaction.
Chris Cimino
Meteorologist, lifestyle correspondent, and co-host of New York Living, WPIX (PIX11), New York City
I highly recommend Anne-Marie, especially if you may not think that you need help. She is the real deal.
Somatic Intelligence: Earlier Awareness Changes What Becomes Possible
Most accomplished people already know how they want to communicate. The challenge is accessing that clarity when pressure is present.
You may notice your breathing change, your body tense, or your attention narrow. You feel the urge to defend yourself, push harder, withdraw, or speak before you've considered how you want to respond.
Anne-Marie calls the ability to recognize and work with those signals somatic intelligence. Instead of working with only what you think about a situation, you begin noticing what is happening in you while it unfolds. That earlier awareness gives you more room to choose how to respond.
Her understanding of these signals comes from two decades of clinical practice as a manual osteopath, somatic therapist, and Board Certified Structural Integration Practitioner. She reads the physical signature of stress with a clinician's precision, and teaches her clients to read it in themselves.
Marina French
Trustee, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Trustee, Carnegie Hall; Executive Board, Hospital for Special Surgery
Anne-Marie is an extraordinary European osteopath and has learned the profession in a completely different way than in America.
The Duchêne Method
Anne-Marie developed the Duchêne Method through more than twenty-five years of work across executive communication, relationships, performance, and clinical somatic practice. It centers on three skills.
Acknowledge
Read your body's early signals of stress and reactivity (breath, tension, heart rate) before they shape your response.
Engage
Stay present with difficult information without shutting down, overriding, withdrawing, or escalating.
Support
Turn that awareness into clearer communication, stronger boundaries, better questions, and more deliberate decisions.
The goal is not to eliminate pressure. It is to have greater choice in how you respond to it.
What This Work Strengthens
Leadership under pressure
Stay clearer during difficult decisions and high-stakes conversations.
Executive communication and presence
Address what matters directly while staying engaged and intentional.
Creative focus and presence
Access your full creative range, even under deadlines and public attention.
Partnership and relationship communication
Recognize recurring patterns and navigate disagreement more constructively.
Clearer boundaries
Know what you need, what you expect, and what you're willing to address.
Home and family alignment
Navigate parenting, household expectations, staff dynamics, and family decisions with greater consistency.
Modesto Cepeda Lacén
Actor, Director, Executive Director of Artocarpus76
I now feel up to the challenge of what it is to be a conscious, present, loving, and supportive father.
Private Coaching for Individuals and Couples
Some clients come with one conversation or decision they need help navigating. Others recognize a pattern that has repeated for years and want the time and support to change it. This work is designed for accomplished individuals and couples willing to examine their own responses, not simply change someone else's.
Private Session
For a specific decision, difficult conversation, or immediate impasse.
Includes a private intake, a 60-minute individual or 90-minute couples session, a written summary, and tailored practices.
Six-Month Foundation
For patterns that need more than one conversation to change.
Individuals: 12 private sessions, twice monthly
Couples: one joint session and one 30-minute individual check-in session for each partner, monthly
Includes integration practices between sessions and a review at month six.
Twelve-Month Concierge
For ongoing support as leadership, partnership, and family situations evolve.
Individuals: 24 private sessions, twice monthly
Couples: one joint session and one 30-minute individual check-in for each partner, monthly
Includes:
Direct-message access for time-sensitive situations
Family sessions when helpful, with children or other family members individually, or together when the moment calls for it
Priority scheduling
The Household Program
For those who make your home run like clockwork.
When a household finally has the right team, the goal becomes keeping it. The Household Program gives everyone, from the estate manager to nannies, drivers, and kitchen staff, a shared way of communicating, making requests, and resolving problems before they reach you.
It's built on The Art of Mindful Communication, a curriculum Anne-Marie has taught since 2018, adapted for the realities of private service, and delivered in English, French, or Spanish.
Foundation
An alignment session with the principals, to agree on goals and ground rules
Design sessions with the estate or house manager, so the program strengthens their leadership
A confidential questionnaire for all staff
A program day in small groups so the household keeps running, often scheduled while principals travel
A Household Communication Charter: shared agreements for requests, handoffs, and escalation
A written summary with themes and recommendations
Ongoing Development
Monthly team sessions
Leadership coaching for the estate or house manager
Progress surveys, so you can see what's changing
Month to month, adjusted as your household evolves
Also available: individual coaching for staff members, and onboarding support for new team members.
Why Anne-Marie?
“I’ve spent my working life with people performing under pressure, as a dancer, a talent scout, and a coach. Most of us run our lives from the neck up, leaving out the body and the heart. Whether you’re in a boardroom, on stage, or with your children, showing up as a whole person is what lets you be fully present when it matters most.” Anne-Marie Duchêne
Since 1998, Anne-Marie has coached executives at Oracle University, Microsoft, Visa/MC, and was her Silicon Valley firm’s youngest female coach and its highest paid.
For nearly a decade she was Cirque du Soleil’s first “Dance Specialist Artistic Talent Scout”, redesigning its dance auditions and coaching performers worldwide. In 2007 she declined Cirque’s offer to become Artistic Director of its international touring shows to pursue the work she does today.
That year she founded her Manhattan practice, where she has worked for two decades as a Board Certified Structural Integration Practitioner, and later spent seven years training practitioners in master’s-level programs.
Her coaching draws on Nonviolent Communication and emotional intelligence training. She was selected for the founding cohort of Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield’s Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification, coaches TEDx speakers, and has given keynotes for the City of Ottawa, the State of Minnesota, and the National Women’s Health Summit.
She holds a BA in Cultural Anthropology from UC Berkeley, with graduate coursework in medical anthropology. Born in Montreal and raised in the south of France, she works in English, French, and Spanish.
Fiyola Hoosen-Steele
Author; former UN Director for Save the Children; former Head of the UN Office for Plan International
My self-awareness has increased tenth-fold. I have also learned how to set clear goals that support my purpose… Anne-Marie is the voice in my head reminding me to stay in integrity, to be my authentic self…
Valia Glytsis
Inside-Out Leadership Development; Trainer, Facilitator, Coach, Author, Speaker
A truly trusted advisor who can give both tough love and unconditional support.
Anne-Marie is the epitome of what a coach should be.
How It Works
Request a private conversation
Share a little about what's happening, and whether you're inquiring for yourself, as a couple, or for your household.
Speak with Anne-Marie
Discuss what's happening now, what you want to be different, and whether this approach is the right fit.
Receive your proposal
If there's a mutual fit, Anne-Marie recommends a starting point and sends a written proposal with fees.
FAQ
What is the difference between coaching and therapy?
Coaching focuses on present and future communication, awareness, behavior, decisions, relationships, and agreed-upon goals. It is not psychotherapy, mental-health treatment, diagnosis, or crisis care. Anyone who needs mental-health assessment or treatment should work with an appropriately licensed professional, and coaching can work alongside it.
Can I begin couples coaching if my partner isn't ready?
Yes. Many engagements begin that way. You don't need to convince your partner to change before beginning your own work, and that work often changes the dynamic on its own. Your partner can join when it makes sense.
What is somatic intelligence?
It's the ability to notice what your body is signaling (a tightening jaw, a shift in breathing, a knot in the stomach) and use that information before it takes over your judgment. Your body registers pressure before your rational mind does. Somatic intelligence turns those signals into an early-warning system, helping you steady yourself in the moment and, over time, change ingrained patterns like overworking, perfectionism, or reacting defensively.
Does Anne-Marie work with LGBTQ+ couples and clients?
Yes. Anne-Marie works with couples and individuals of every sexual orientation and gender identity. The patterns at the center of her work, such as stress responses, recurring conflict, and how partners steady or escalate each other, show up in every kind of partnership.
Will our staff speak openly with Anne-Marie?
Yes, because the ground rules make it safe to. Staff know she reports themes, not individuals, and that decisions about their employment remain with the principals and the estate manager.
How is the Household Program different from agency staff training?
Agencies train staff in service standards such as etiquette, housekeeping, and protocol. Yet a household can have impeccably trained staff and still feel tense. The people who run a home are people first, each with a private life and pressures of their own that rarely show at work, and that inevitably shape how a household communicates.Tension often arises from how people communicate: a request given in a rush, a concern no one feels safe raising, two principals giving different instructions, a nanny caught between parents. The Household Program treats a private home as what it truly is: a workplace inside a family, where everyone, principals included, shapes how it runs. Principals, managers, staff, and family work from the same agreements, so problems are resolved where they start.
Is the work confidential?
Yes. Confidentiality is built into every agreement, and Anne-Marie is happy to sign your NDA.
Can coaching be done virtually?
Yes. Most of Anne-Marie’s work takes place virtually, with clients around the world. In-person coaching can be available on request subject to scheduling and the terms set out in your proposal.
What are family sessions?
Within the Twelve-Month Concierge, Anne-Marie can hold sessions with the whole family together, so the communication you’re building as a couple carries through to your children and the rest of the household. Parents are always present, and sessions are adapted to the ages of the children involved. These sessions focus on how the family communicates; they are not child therapy or child development guidance.
When the Stakes Are High, How You Respond Matters
The pressure may show up in a leadership decision. It may surface in a conversation with your partner, in the studio, or in the way your household communicates and makes decisions.
You don't have to wait until the situation becomes bigger to begin paying attention to the pattern.
Recognize what is happening earlier. Communicate more clearly. Respond with greater intention.
Steadier leadership. Stronger partnership. A calmer home.
Scope of Practice
Anne-Marie Duchêne provides coaching and educational services. Coaching is not psychotherapy, medical treatment, mental-health treatment, diagnosis, or crisis care, and is not intended to replace services provided by licensed healthcare or mental-health professionals. Household programs are communication and team-development services, not human resources, legal, or employment advice.