Align for your Success with Mara Benner

True North Executive Coaching helps professionals achieve success through work that emphasizes leadership development, passion, performance and wellness.

Coaching Trusted by Leaders at Every Level

Mara coaches professionals who lead at some of the most demanding organizations in the country, from Fortune 100 companies to nonprofits, healthcare, and universities. Whatever world you lead in, the coaching is built around one person: you.

Performance Coaching

Leadership Excellence

Sharpen how you lead, starting from who you already are instead of a textbook. Sessions focus on your real situations, helping you identify your leadership style, close the gaps holding you back, and show up with authority you don't have to force.

Navigating Change

Reorganizations, new bosses, career pivots, and roles that shift under your feet. Change is where most careers stall or accelerate. Coaching gives you a steady place to think clearly, weigh your options, and move through transitions with intention instead of reaction.

Creative Problem Solving

When you've been staring at the same problem for months, you stop seeing it clearly. Mara helps you step outside your default thinking, blend analysis with intuition, and find the solutions that were invisible from inside the pressure.

Leadership Development

You don't need a nine-month program to grow as a leader. Month to month, at your own pace, coaching builds the skills your role demands right now: delegating, deciding, and developing others, applied immediately to the job in front of you.

Strategic Forecasting

It's hard to see two moves ahead when the current week is on fire. Coaching creates the space to lift your head, anticipate what's coming for your team and your career, and position yourself for it before it arrives.

Effective Communications

The message you intend and the message people receive are rarely the same. Work on how you present ideas, influence upward, handle hard conversations, and use tone and presence, so what you say finally lands the way you mean it.

Team Dynamics

Every team has friction; the question is whether you understand it. Coaching helps you read what's actually happening beneath the surface, from motivations to tensions to unspoken expectations, and gives you practical ways to turn a group of people into a team.

Wellness Coaching

Meaning & Purpose

Success that doesn't mean anything to you stops feeling like success. Together you'll reconnect your work to what actually matters to you, so your career becomes a source of energy rather than something to recover from.

Work-Life Balance

Balance isn't a schedule trick. It's a set of decisions about what gets your best energy. Coaching helps you set real boundaries, release the guilt that comes with them, and build a rhythm you can sustain for the long run.

Stress Management

High performers rarely notice stress until it's already costing them sleep, patience, and judgment. Learn practical, evidence-informed techniques to regulate pressure in the moment and lower your baseline over time, so demanding seasons don't become your permanent state.

Mind-Body-Spirit

Drawing on her work with the GW Center for Integrative Medicine, Mara brings mindfulness, meditation, and mind-body practices into executive coaching, because your calendar isn't the only thing that determines your performance.

Emotional Intelligence

Self-awareness is the leadership skill underneath every other one. Coaching helps you recognize your patterns and triggers, regulate your reactions under pressure, and read others more accurately, at work and everywhere else.

Whole Person Care

You're not a job title, and coaching that treats you like one doesn't work. Every engagement looks at the whole picture: career, health, relationships, and purpose, because sustainable performance comes from a life that's aligned, not just a role that's managed.