Doro Dorsch Coaching

I stumbled across a LinkedIn post by an editor-in-chief, and I wish I could credit her properly. She referenced a study on how essential attention is for mental health, and she reminded us to notice the small signals in others. The quiet sigh. The moment of withdrawal. She called it being a social airbag for someone else. A small moment of attention that can make a real difference.

That line stuck with me. Because I started wondering: if attention is so vital, who is my social airbag these days?

Surprisingly, one of them is my anxious dog, Aqua, named after her blue eyes. On bad days she senses it immediately, walks over, and just looks at me. It works wonders. Another soul noticing, acknowledging and caring. I bend down, cuddle this fluffy whiggle butt, feel her calm breathing, and the day softens.

Of course, I have wonderful people around me too. But sometimes, being truly seen for a moment is already enough.

So I’m curious: who is your social airbag? Let’s share a bit of joy and attention today - and feel free to tag them.

Many senior leaders believe that insecurity should disappear once they reach a certain level. When doubt remains, they assume it must be a personal weakness.

In reality, doubt often increases with responsibility. The higher the role, the more complex the decisions become. Stakeholders multiply, consequences stretch further into the future and honest feedback becomes rare. It would be surprising if certainty remained constant under those conditions.

The issue is not that you question yourself. The issue is when that doubt stays vague and unexamined. When you cannot distinguish between a real capability gap, unclear priorities, political tension or simply the normal weight of leadership, everything begins to feel personal.

That is usually the moment when strong leaders start compensating. They prepare more, work longer and carry responsibility alone, not because they lack ability, but because they lack structure around what they are experiencing.

Clarity changes that dynamic. Once doubt becomes specific, it becomes manageable.

If you would like a structured way to see where pressure and hidden doubt are showing up in your leadership, I have built a short assessment covering five core areas. It is designed to replace vague self-criticism with concrete insight. Link is in the bio.

There is an unexpected pattern in the first discussions I have with senior leaders.
They are all very successful, and still the first thing they ask for in a coaching conversation is an assessment of their leadership skills. My heart always opens up when I see that genuine desire to be a “good leader”, because most managers truly care about their teams. And still, the question remains: what is the mould everybody tries to fit into? How is a good leader defined? And is this not often driven by lack rather than growth, by insecurity rather than curiosity?

Let’s be open. Yes, many people dream about being “on top”, and ideally that comes with benefits. But in the same basket you also find loneliness, exposure, and pressure. A place full of demands, and often nowhere to turn to. Touchpoints with your boss, your peers, and sometimes even your team become rare. And as social beings, we grow and stabilise through feedback. When that feedback thins out, a vacuum appears. That vacuum attracts a ruthless enemy: your own beliefs, inner dialogues, and inner critics, feasting on confidence without mercy.

So what happens when insecurity at the top is translated into measurements and grades instead of honest conversations, especially for people who already feel watched, rated, and compared? Wouldn’t that slowly drip into the lower layers of a company? And if we stopped mistaking certainty for competence, and visibility for leadership, imagine the possibilities and the culture that could grow from that. Who told us that leaders must show up perfect, with “no weakness” as a badge of honour and all this BS, pardon my French bingo.

For me, real leadership is not possible without vulnerability. It opens the door to honest conversations, trust, and connection, with positive effects for teams and for you as a leader. And it allows growth from “I am enough, I am a valuable contributor”, instead of constantly scanning for gaps in the system and in yourself.

Nevertheless, if you want structure, I do have a different leadership assessment tool. It takes eight minutes and gives you an overview of the competencies you already use, and the ones you may want to strengthen. Not because you are broken, but because you want to work from what is already there, from an internal place of power rather than external pressure.

You will find the link in the first comment. And I won’t leave you alone with the result. If you want, we can have a conversation afterwards about what it means, what you want to keep, and what you want to change, tailored to carve out the potential you already have.

I used to think perfectionism made me look competent and in control, until I found myself knee-deep in exhaustion, rework, and on top, my team started waiting for me to approve every comma.

Perfectionism s a survival mechanism, because somewhere along the way your nervous system learned a simple equation: if it is flawless, I cannot be judged, and if I cannot be judged, I do not have to feel shame.

Perfectionism is so sticky, because it works in the short term. It keeps you safe in the meeting, it gives you relief when you triple check the deck at 11:47pm. And it makes you belief that you could avoid the moment where someone might say, “This is not good enough,” and your body hears, “You are not good enough.” Especially in Marketing and Communication we are trained that our whole career can depend on a missed comma or a misspelled title.

But in the long term it quietly taxes everything from your decision speed to your confidence, your team’s ownership, your creativity, and your energy. This is why I talk so much about moving from firefighting into intentional leadership.

Here is a checklist to see if you already are in the prefectionism trap:

📌You call it refining, but it is really delaying, and the deadline becomes your permission slip to stop.
📌You redo things your team could have finished, because it is faster to do it yourself than to tolerate the discomfort of “not perfect.”
📌You ask for more input, more alignment, more certainty, when what you really want is a guarantee you cannot be criticised.

A tiny experiment for the new year, especially if you lead people.

Choose one task and define “done” in one sentence, like “Clear enough that a smart colleague can act without asking me three follow up questions,” then delegate, and when your stickler screams: “but what if they judge,” answer: “They might, and I will still be fine.”

Real freedom is not in producing work that cannot be attacked, it is in being able to be seen, do your best, and not collapse if someone has an opinion.

Where does perfectionism show up for you most, in writing, presenting, delegating, or decision making, and what feeling are you trying to avoid in that moment

At the start of my coaching training, we had to fill in a survey. One question stopped me: At the end of your life, what has to happen for you to consider it well lived?

My first thought was: is this Disney now?

But I wrote it down anyway. I want to live by the sea for a while. I want time for friends. I want to enjoy my work. I want to have published a book to support women in their careers.

And then immediately, my brain did what brains do. It started negotiating against me. Living by the sea means a house by the sea. A house by the sea costs a fortune. Time for friends only happens after retirement, or winning the lottery. And working differently — well, I'd burned that bridge years ago, hadn't I? So I filed it under "nice idea" and moved on.

Three years later: we own a beat-up camper on a plot by the sea. We didn't go looking for it. Someone offered it to us and we fell in love with it before I'd even realised what was happening. I coach, and I love it. Remote comms work, something I thought I was completely done with, doesn't sound impossible anymore. The book is not entirely off the table.
It's not perfect. Certainly no film crew will ask to hire our space to make a movie. I hate emptying the toilet. Being self-employed is not roses and sparkles. But something shifted when I wrote that answer down honestly. I had confused the dream with the version of the dream I thought was socially acceptable.

The fancy house by the sea was not the dream. Being by the sea was the dream. And being by the sea turned out to be possible in a way I never would have found if I'd kept waiting for the expensive version.

We do this constantly. The career or the life. The hamster wheel first, the good stuff later. Serious business people don't have feelings. The dream is only valid if it comes in the premium package.
What if some of it is actually closer than you think?

Not because you've manifested it. But because you wrote it down and stopped telling yourself it was ridiculous before you'd even started.

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Hi, I am Doro Dorsch, I guide senior managers in engineering and tech navigating change to find their authority.

I had waited for that concert for a long time. The excitement when I finally got my hands on two tickets after an evening battling a ticket platform. I had listened to the songs, learned the lyrics, decided what to wear. And then I sold them to a friend because my company needed me on a business trip two months, three days and 11 hours before Robbie was due on stage.
I complied. Because that's what you do as a good employee. Don't be foolish. Don't ask for something as trivial as a concert to get in the way of a business trip.
Shortly after, a close friend died. Standing at his funeral, watching his kids sob, I kept thinking: he was just like me. Always putting the job first. Always talking about later. And then later never came. You continue. Because everyone else does.
Most of us carry a story about what a serious career is supposed to look like. And the belief, rarely examined and rarely questioned, is that the moment a small part of you doesn't fit the mould, you drop to the second tier. So we pre-emptively comply. We don't ask. We sell the tickets.
But is the fear actually accurate?
A coachee of mine trained for two years for a marathon. Got drawn in the lottery for the race in his favourite city. Then, four months before race day, his company decided he needed to be in the US for a meeting that required travel on the Sunday before. He nearly pulled out of the race without saying a word. Instead, we talked about it and he asked whether he could fly to Houston directly after the race, arriving for the second half of the first day. His manager realised they could simply move the meeting by a day. Nobody had to sacrifice their weekend. Her colleagues thanked him afterwards.
The thing he had been terrified to ask for made everyone's life slightly better.

When I asked why he hadn't even considered asking in the first place, he said: I don't know. We have forgotten how to ask for things we actually want. Because nobody does. So we all just continue doing what everyone else does.

If any of this sounds familiar, I have one small thing to try this week. Notice the signals. When your body registers that quiet contraction, the one that says I have to give this up, I can't ask for that, this is just how it works, don't do anything with it yet. Just notice it. Write it down if you can. You cannot negotiate with an autopilot you haven't spotted yet. And most of us have been on autopilot for a very long time.

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I am Doro Dorsch. I work with senior marketing leaders in tech and engineering navigating change so they can find their board room voice.

You did not build a 15 year career in digital marketing to stay in the second row. You want to be in the board room. Not as the slide supplier or note taker. As the strategic voice.

I am Doro Dorsch. I work with senior marketing and communication leaders in engineering and tech who are ready to Rise & Roar into board level impact.

Rise means stepping out of operational overload and into strategic clarity. It means thinking beyond campaigns and into commercial value. It means speaking the language of revenue, risk and return, not just reach and engagement.

Roar means showing up with executive presence that holds in rooms full of engineers, finance directors and strong egos. No over explaining. No shrinking. No waiting to be invited.

Clarity is not soft. It is strategic leverage. When your decisions are sharper, your positioning is stronger. When your positioning is stronger, your influence grows.

In our work, we strengthen three things:
🔋Your strategic narrative.
🔋Your boundaries under pressure.
🔋Your authority in high stakes conversations.

The result is not just better meetings. It is visibility at the level where direction is set.

I bring over twenty years of global leadership experience in digital transformation in multinational engineering environments, combined with accredited executive coaching aligned with EMCC and ICF standards.

If you are ready to move from high performer to board ready, send me a DM to set up a free initial meeting to discuss how I can support you in your ambition.

The board room is not reserved for louder people. It is reserved for clearer ones.