Salman Aldukeil

My clients are primarily individuals: leaders, executives, and professionals across a wide range of sectors who are navigating moments of transition, overwhelm, or stuckness. I have worked with people in investment banking, commercial banking, sovereign wealth funds, management consulting, media, health and wellness, education, research, and the nonprofit sector. They range from senior executives and principals at major regional institutions to entrepreneurs and high-performing professionals earlier in their careers.

I also work with couples across a range of relationship contexts and constellations who are experiencing conflict or disconnection and want to find a new way through.

In addition to individual and couples work, I coach teams and have worked with cross-functional groups navigating organizational conflict.

A leader at one of Saudi Arabia’s leading professional services firms came to me at a point of overwhelm. She was performing at a high level but privately running on empty as she was frequently hijacked by stress and increasingly disconnected from what was needed to sustain her performance, thus limiting her evolution within the firm.

Our work began with a structured diagnostic phase, where we mapped her habitual coping patterns and understood how her nervous system and mind were working together to limit what felt possible and amplify what felt threatening. Our work supported her in developing the discernment between protective-stories and facts, as well as an understanding of how to use breath, movement and attunement to the body to create additional capacity for calm.

Consequently, she experienced more calm moments across her days than not, and began allowing herself to experiment with different ways of showing up. What she discovered was that nothing collapsed when she stepped away from the tightness with which she held things prior. She showed up better: more grounded with her team and clients, more able to navigate difficult conversations without reactivity, less defined by how others perceived her and had more capacity to take on more work enjoyably.

She has since been promoted into a more senior leadership role and is on track to become one of the youngest partners at her firm.

I work by creating a space where the whole person can show up, especially the parts they have been conditioned to believe are difficult or have learned to hide. My approach is grounded in curiosity and warmth; assessment and judgment have no place in the container we co-create. I have found the parts people are most reluctant to bring into the room are often the most important to work with.

From that foundation, I listen closely to what someone says, but even more so to how they are making meaning of themselves and the world around them. What the work calls for varies: sometimes it is being fully present with what emerges and letting it come into the light. Sometimes it is gently loosening what is tight or stuck. And sometimes, once things have cleared, it is moving forward with energy and intention.

My work draws on ORSC (Organisation and Relationship Systems Coaching), adult development theory, polyvagal theory, and somatic approaches. In practice this means attending to the body as a source of information, working with the patterns and assumptions that shape perception and behaviour, and building practical capacity for self-regulation under pressure. There is also a teaching dimension: many of the things that drive our behaviour are simply not things most of us were ever taught, and part of my work is helping clients build that understanding directly.

My work sits at the intersection of two worlds I know well: high-pressure, high-expectation environments and the inner architecture of the human being that gets tested inside them. What fractures under sustained pressure, how that plays out in performance and wellbeing, and what it takes to build something more robust underneath.

A career in management consulting and investment banking, and before that an education at MIT, put me close to this. I have found that much of what looks like a performance challenge is actually something happening beneath the surface. The conventional response (usually to push harder or simply endure) rarely addresses the real source; often it makes things worse.

My own experience of navigating questions of identity, belonging, and self-worth in high-expectation environments, and the impact those questions had on my performance and quality of life before I addressed them, is at the heart of why I do this work.

My training in ORSC (Organisation and Relationship Systems Coaching), adult development theory, nervous system awareness, and somatic practice gave that rigour and language. But what continues to shape and confirm this work most is witnessing what becomes possible for the people I work with.

I am a coach and facilitator. My focus is on developmental coaching; working with individuals, couples, and teams on what is underneath their patterns of performance and relating.

I feel most alive in nature, walking for hours, snowboarding, or being by/in the ocean. I find deep pleasure in cooking, even more so when it’s with and for people I care about.

Music enlivens me, and so I tinker with the piano and oud. I am drawn to beauty in all its forms: poetry, theatre, and the artistry of language.

I have eleven nephews and nieces and find fulfillment in being a present, curious elder in their lives. I care about younger people finding their inner compass early, which is something I try to support wherever I can.

I work with the whole person, but I am a coach and facilitator, not a therapist. Where deeper clinical support is needed, I will say so and refer accordingly. My work is most effective with people who desire a different quality of life, who are genuinely curious about themselves and willing to look beneath the surface and step in with compassion and dignity.

I am trained in Organisation and Relationship Systems Coaching (ORSC). My work also draws on adult development theory and polyvagal theory.

I hold a Bachelor of Science in Writing and Humanistic Studies from MIT and an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

Prior to establishing my coaching practice, I worked in management consulting at McKinsey & Company and in investment banking at HSBC and AFG in Saudi Arabia.