“Marina is a truly exceptional leader, coach, and mentor. My life has profoundly and positively shifted because of her incredible wisdom, insight and deep presence. She’s the shining example of the loving powerhouse coach I hope to embody one day.” —Kim Trajano
Marina Illich is a Columbia and Oxford University trained educator and leadership coach dedicated to helping leaders develop the agility, vision, integrity, and authenticity needed to add genuine value to the global community while succeeding in today’s global marketplace. Her expertise includes helping clients identify and align with their values and adopt new frames of reference to optimize individual and team performance. Marina teaches a unique combination of emotional, social and somatic intelligence designed to integrate head, heart and body and help clients become exemplary leaders, influencers and innovators. An Asia expert with global work experience, Marina brings deeply human solutions to business challenges, believing that personal mastery is the key to modeling and embodying transformational leadership.
Read some of Marina’s writing on the Huffington Post.
Prior to her work as a leadership coach, Marina was a scholar and professor of religion. As part of her doctoral research, Marina examined how contemporary Tibetan leaders align the intelligences of head, heart and gut to generate resilience, strategic vision, and effective communication under highly volatile political and social conditions. Through her studies of Tibetan leadership models with the Dalai Lama and Tibetan leaders across China, Tibet, India, Nepal, the UK and Belgium, Marina gained firsthand experience of how transformational leadership emerges from personal mastery, integrity and empathy.
An experienced facilitator, she has designed and led dozens of seminars on transformational leadership to culturally diverse audiences. A former visiting professor at New York University and teaching fellow at Columbia University and Barnard College, and a cross-cultural mediator and interpreter for the Federal Immigration Courts, Marina brings a passion for communicating complex ideas to culturally diverse audiences.
“Marina is an incredibly spirited and insightful coach. One of the things I admire most is her masterful ability to get to the heart of the coaching topic and walk empathically alongside her clients and students in a way that facilitates their development. Her warmth and attentiveness helped me to discover things about myself I did not believe possible. Her recognition of me as unique and important human being opened me to the possibility of seeing that in myself.” —John McCarthy