Daniela Aneva, MCC

Executive coach, team coach, coaching supervisor, author — and a lifelong student of the patterns that run us.

What I Love

I love the moment a pattern becomes visible. It happens in almost every engagement — with a CEO, a leadership team, a coach in supervision — and it always looks the same: a pause, a slight widening of the eyes, and then some version of “I have been doing this my whole life, haven’t I.” Everything I have built — the coaching practice, the models, the books, the programmes — exists to create that moment, and to make sure what follows it actually holds.

I love it because I know what is on the other side of it. Not a better technique. Freedom — the first real choice a person gets about a pattern that has been choosing for them.

My Story

I grew up in Bulgaria, and I have been asking the same question since before I had words for it: why do people do what they do — especially when it costs them? I chased that question through two master’s degrees at once, in Psychology and in Economics of Trade, because I refused to choose between understanding people and understanding the systems they work in. It turned out that refusal would define my whole career.

I spent 25+ years living in both worlds. I opened new markets with IHG, where a business culture had to be built from the first hire. I served as CHRO, and then as Global Head of Talent at AmRest, responsible for people across twenty countries and 19,000 employees — building franchise models, running integrations after acquisitions from both sides of the table, the acquirer’s and the acquired’s. I moved into technology as VP at Endava, running North American delivery for Citibank and Morgan Stanley, and Senior Director at Globant, leading an $80M, 500-person portfolio — Agile transformations, platform modernizations, growth that never slowed down long enough to be comfortable. I have been a COO, a VP of Operations, a Chief People Officer. I have sat in the rooms my clients now describe to me, at 11 p.m., with the board waiting.

And in every one of those rooms, across every industry and country, I kept seeing the same thing: the strategy was rarely the problem. The pattern was. Brilliant executives making the same costly move under pressure, again and again, and calling it personality. Teams agreeing in the meeting and diverging in the corridor. Cultures that resisted every change programme sent at them. My psychology training told me these were not random failures — they were schemas: deep, early-formed blueprints, running quietly underneath every decision made under pressure.

So in 2009, I began coaching — first alongside my executive roles, then through my consultancy in Europe, and eventually as my life’s work through MentorsPro, the firm I founded and lead from New Jersey. I went deep into the clinical foundations most coaches never touch: formal training in Schema Therapy, CBT, DBT, EMDR, the Gottman Method, and clinical hypnotherapy — because I wanted to work at the level where change actually holds, and to do it responsibly. That work became my book, Schemas in Leadership: The Hidden Architecture Behind Executive Performance, Culture, and Happiness, and later The Anatomy of Panic — written, as its subtitle says, from the inside out.

Since then, I have supported the growth of more than 3,000 managers, leaders, and teams around the world. I coach at Amazon, Google, Walmart, Capital One, Takeda, and many more. Two things make me proudest: my clients keep working with me wherever their careers take them — and the teams I coach learn to coach themselves, until they genuinely no longer need me. I consider that the truest measure of the work.

What I Have Built

I create models because I believe good thinking should outlive the person who thought it. I co-created the HexHelix Team Coaching Supervision Model (with Monica Guevara and Inga Bielinska), published in Becoming a Coaching Supervisor and Coach Mentor (Passmore et al., 2025) and now the subject of a multi-year research study. I co-authored Succeeding in Business in Any Market with Brian Tracy. I design and teach accredited programmes in team coaching, coaching supervision, and mentor coaching — and I develop the team coaching curriculum as Faculty and Mentor Coach at Rice University’s Doerr Institute for New Leaders.

I also give back to the profession that gave me a second career: I am a Co-Founder of EMCC USA, one of three leaders of the ICF Community of Practice for Coaching Supervision, practicum leader on the Hawkins/Carr Team Development Essentials systemic team coaching programme, a Forbes Coaches Council member, and a former Advisor to the Strategic Leadership program at Seton Hall University. Along the way I was named one of North America’s Top 40 Leaders Under 40 (2020) and received the Global Leadership and Legacy Award for Thought Leadership in Consultancy Services (Dubai, 2026).

The Credentials — the Full Toolbox

I collect credentials the way some people collect tools: each one because a real client, somewhere, needed it.

Coaching mastery: ICF Master Certified Coach (MCC) — the profession’s highest credential — and ICF Advanced Certification in Team Coaching (ACTC), among the first team coaches accredited globally; trained in team coaching by David Clutterbuck and Peter Hawkins

Supervision and mentoring: EMCC ESIA Accredited Coaching Supervisor, EMCC EIA accredited coach and mentor, and ICF-aligned Mentor Coach

People and HR leadership: Chartered MCIPD — the UK’s highest recognition of HR mastery — and SHRM-CP

Clinical foundations: formal training in Schema Therapy, CBT, DBT, EMDR, the Gottman Method, and clinical hypnotherapy; NBC-HWC board-certified health and wellness coach

Change and agility: APMG-accredited Change Management Practitioner, PRINCE2 Agile Project Manager, Scrum Product Owner, and Lean Green Belt

Assessment depth: Certified DISC Analyst and Trainer, certified MMPI practitioner — one of the few coaches qualified to use it — plus extensive assessment-center and organizational development instruments, and Lifebook Certified Leader for whole-life design work

The Person Behind the Credentials

I live in New Jersey with my family, and I carry Bulgaria with me everywhere — two homes, two languages, and a career built across rooms on two continents where I was, more often than not, the one who was different. That experience is in everything I do: I know what it takes to reposition yourself, because I have done it, repeatedly, in twenty countries.

When I am not coaching, I am usually in the kitchen. I bake, and I cook the Bulgarian food I grew up on — and I have come to think baking and coaching are the same discipline: you cannot rush the rise, you work with what the dough is doing rather than what the recipe promised, and the transformation happens quietly, from the inside. I renovate things around the house. I read psychology the way other people read novels. And I am raising a young child, which is the most honest daily supervision of my own patterns I have ever received.

Work With Me

If any of this sounds like the kind of depth you have been looking for — for yourself, your team, or your organization — the first step is always the same: a conversation. Fifteen minutes, no pitch. Tell me what you are carrying, and I will tell you honestly whether I am the right person for it.