Future Presence:

Honoring your Past & Designing your Future

“…Future Presence was a unique process of becoming known at deeper levels, allowing myself to be unexpectedly vulnerable yet safe while sharing deeply personal thoughts and feelings with no fear of judgment… The result of my time with Nadia clarified and strengthened my true purpose of service and making a difference in the world.”

- William Spear, Founder and CEO, Fortunate Blessings Foundation

As a visionary leader, you’ve built organizations, shaped industries, and touched countless lives. 

As you enter this next chapter, it’s time to reflect: to celebrate what has been and to lean into what’s next with clarity, intention, and love. The greatest gift of your success now lies in how you share it and live your future. In another day and age, you might be planning for retirement, but you love what you do too much to retire. 

Perhaps you’re feeling:

  • A deep desire to distill your life's work and share it authentically.

  • A calling to realize a dream creative project that’s been on the back burner for decades

  • An urge to contribute to transforming today’s challenges – with the wisdom to do so in a way that’s attuned to you 

Future Presence is a bespoke, three-day experience for visionary leaders, entrepreneurs, and philanthropists ready to design their next chapter and imagine their legacy. It builds upon Nadia’s proven Cartography of Self— a holistic approach that has touched hundreds of lives, blending strategic rigor with creative exploration. Your presence and attention now will empower you to be more present for your own future, and to leave presents for generations to come. Together, we'll create an experience through which clarity emerges naturally and aligned action becomes effortless—so you leave not just inspired, but in motion.

  • The process starts with 360-degree interviews conducted by Nadia with 3-4 people of your choosing. The conversations focus on your strengths, blind spots, habits, and the visions others hold for you. Insights will be synthesized into an anonymized report.

    You’ll choose an inspiring location for the immersion: Nadia's home in the Mill Valley redwoods, the comfort of your own home, or a destination that calls to you.

  • You'll share your life story, starting with your grandparents, going up until today, touching on:

    • Your narrative: Exploring the experiences, relationships, world events, and endeavors, which have made you, you.

    • Your memoir: If you’d like, we can record you sharing your story. The transcript could be transformed into memoir draft using AI or as the foundation for a published book (professional writing support is available, too).

    • Patterns and insights across your life “chapters”: We'll identify what's mattered most, when you’ve felt most alive, the various 'hats' you have worn over time, and any unfinished business that may be weighing you down.

    • Integration and release: Through a blend of deeper work – meditation, somatic practices, and reframing exercises – and concrete action, you'll complete that unfinished business and be free to embody yourself more fully.

    As we go along, throughlines will emerge: you'll connect unexpected dots, play with what’s possible, and put things together in new ways. Your past, present, and future will coalesce into something greater that transcends you and takes on a life of its own.

  • Through thoughtful questioning and unbounded time, you'll integrate your past learnings and talk your way to clarity. In our fast-paced world, spaciousness for reflection and Systems 2 Thinking is a gift. We’ll explore how to invest your time, energy, and resources moving forward, including:

    • Philanthropic legacy: How you'd like to allocate your resources for those close to you and beyond. We'll explore strategic approaches beyond traditional institutional giving, recognizing that giving money away can be harder than making it—with fewer benchmarks, limited institutional capacity, higher stakes, and questions only you can answer.

    • What matters most: Clarifying what you’d focus on or finish if you knew you only had so much time.

      • Creative possibilities: Brainstorming passion and service projects, book ideas, and inspiring ventures.

      • Relationships that nourish: Identifying which relationships energize or drain you, and exploring how you want to show up for, or be with, the people you love. 

      • The art of savoring: Reflecting on how you want to feel, from the little things that spark joy to the magic of being to the profound awareness of existence. 

    • Aging and mortality: Exploring how to navigate this passage with grace and intentionality.

  • On this final day together, we will:

    • Create an actionable roadmap to turn your visions into reality.

    • Define next steps, new habits, and routines for deepening relationships, optimizing your health, pursuing meaningful projects, etc.

    • Tackle the projects and tasks hardest for you to do alone:

      • Reaching out to potential collaborators

      • Outlining your book

      • Hiring an assistant, or setting your current assistant up for success

    • Explore technology hacks and tools to support your daily-to-day life and endeavors.

    You’ll leave having planted the seeds for what’s next, and with enough momentum you can’t help but spring forward.

Unique Elements of Future Presence:

  • 360 Review Conversations: Nadia will speak with 3-4 close people in your life of your choosing (e.g. co-founder, romantic partner, sibling, assistant, etc.) before the intensive. The insights will be shared in an anonymized report.

  • Creative Integration and Ritual: We’ll co-create practices to deepen your experience – past clients have drawn life maps, visited SFMOMA for inspiration, done stand-up comedy in the woods to process difficult moments, and practiced yin yoga under the stars. 

  • Artifacts: You’ll receive talismans to take home with you. This could include a memoir co-created with AI, recorded meditations, an abstract expressionist portrait (Nadia’s also an artist), a how-to manual for technology hacks, or a visual roadmap with your goals.

  • Integration Sessions: Six follow-up calls to check in on your priorities and progress, refine your routines, and troubleshoot obstacles.

Frequently Asked Questions:

  • This offering is designed for visionary individuals who:

    • Have reached a significant level of personal and professional success 

    • Are at a meaningful life transition, ready to consciously shape their legacy with thoughtfulness, clarity, and love 

    • Are open-minded, growth-oriented, and compelled to action

    • Embrace their quirkiness, intuition, and innate body wisdom 

    • Have a desire to balance strategy with emergence and synchronicity

    • Are devoted to creating meaningful impact, guided by our interconnectedness and the belief that a more beautiful world is possible

  • When I (Nadia) was 25, I worked with a hedge fund founder in New York who had worked with some of the world’s best coaches. His top goal? To quit his job and pursue his passion.

    His primary blocker was financial, so I asked him what his net worth was to run the numbers. He balked, saying he had never told anyone, not even his wife. As we worked backwards together, it became abundantly clear that he had more than enough resources to fund a new company, his dream non-profit, and a comfortable lifestyle, for generations to come. He quit his job the next day. 

    He literally made his fortune helping others make money, but was so caught up in stories around safety and opportunity costs that it didn’t occur to him to run the numbers. Oftentimes, the answers are in front of us; we just need to talk things out and use the tools at our disposal to get out of our own way.

    My goal is to ask you the right questions, at the right time, for your truth to unfold naturally. I’ll be your thought partner as you design your life around what matters most.

  • Nadia is an executive coach, life designer, strategist, and artist. She's developed an innovative coaching and leadership development methodology, The Cartography of Self. It’s designed for visionary entrepreneurs to reflect on their lives - past, present, and future – and she has guided more than one hundred leaders through it one-on-one. Beyond that, Nadia does ongoing coaching and consulting work with leaders and their teams.  Her clients have included executives at Stanford University, The White House, Gladstone Institute, Asana, The Center for Humane Technology, Neurohacker Collective, Andela, Lionheart Ventures, and numerous YC-backed entrepreneurs.

    Previously, Nadia co-founded and designed the curriculum for the Hive Global Leaders Program; was a business strategist for Kuli Kuli, a superfood social enterprise; and launched a fellowship program for Ashoka, leading the non-profit's junior recruitment and talent development. Nadia graduated from Stanford University, where she studied international relations, entrepreneurship, behavioral sciences, and design.

  • The overarching arc of the Future Presence and The Cartography of Self are similar; however, the Future Presence is designed for individuals reaching the pinnacle of their careers, wanting to imagine what’s next and focus on their legacy. It includes unique elements like capturing your life story and turning it into a memoir, learning to leverage AI and technology tools, and strategic support thinking through your philanthropic strategy and legacy.

“The most powerful gift of my time with Nadia was the depth of her presence and the poignancy of her questions. It's rare to feel so deeply connected to myself while simultaneously grounded in connection with another. I loved our time together, and her invitation to work together validated the importance of my teaching for her generation.

The process of articulating thoughts out loud—ideas and feelings I'd kept to myself—brought clarity. We talked about my writing aspirations, and suddenly the book I'd been working on intermittently became real and tangible; it was grounded in a higher-level frame that brought my story into focus. As a result of our time together, I started a writing group, shifted my collaboration with my assistant, for example, helping her gather all my work so she can uplevel her participation, learned technology hacks that increased my effectiveness, and gained clarity on how I can better impact projects that matter deeply, both to me and beyond me. For example, I had been planning to enter a dangerous conflict zone in Bolivia as an UCP (unarmed civilian protector) with a young activist friend, and realized I could support her better by fundraising to support her whole team - and work smarter myself by staying focused on my own projects (and not risking my life).  This decision was freeing and wise, and contributed to my clarity of purpose and momentum with my writing.  

Connecting with Nadia and her community helped me see the real hunger for knowledge from our generation. It gave me hope—a deep sense that the future will be better. Nadia and her colleagues and friends are - and will be - caring for the metacrisis with loving, capable hands.”

- Trudy Goodman, Founder, InsightLA Meditation

“Any successful relationship with a professional coach or expert must evolve into a deep emotional connection characterized by mutual trust, understanding, and deep listening. My brief time working with Nadia accomplished that and much more, going far beyond the predictable work of a skilled facilitator…The level of intimacy that emerged through working with Nadia gave me access to the most important parts of my inner landscape as together we identified and refined aspects that mean the most in my life.”

- William Spear, Founder and CEO, Fortunate Blessings Foundation