Redefining Success Through Emotional Intelligence: How Iryna Kutova Helps Leaders Unlock Authentic Drive
What does it mean to be successful? For decades, leadership was measured in titles, stock prices, and the velocity of decision-making. But Iryna Kutova, a corporate coach and emotional intelligence strategist, has a different perspective—one that’s as radical as it is refreshingly human. In her approach, success is not about control or performance alone; it’s about alignment. Alignment with your inner truth, values, and relationships. “When we understand ourselves,” she often says, “we no longer push—we move.”
Kutova, originally from Ukraine and now based in the U.S., has spent over a decade guiding business owners, executives, and management teams toward this inner alignment. Her corporate coaching doesn’t start with goals—it starts with emotional honesty. In an era when burnout, disconnection, and corporate toxicity are rampant, Kutova’s methodology offers something rare: space for leaders to remember who they are before they were managers.
The Road to Emotional Intelligence
Iryna’s career began in recruitment—first in a local agency, then at Danone, where she worked in HR and adaptation strategies. It was there that she began to notice something deeper. “People weren’t leaving companies just for higher pay. They were lost. Disconnected,” she recalls. That realization sparked her transition into coaching in 2014, when she received her first professional certification and began her own practice.
Her early work involved organizing business breakfasts for entrepreneurial mothers in Kyiv—a place where identity, business, and motherhood collided in honest, messy ways. This would become a theme in her future work: coaching not for output, but for integration.
Between 2014 and 2016, she began working with entrepreneurs across the post-Soviet space, helping them trace the subtle links between their businesses and their internal states. “You can’t scale a company if you can’t feel yourself,” she says. Her tools evolved from classical coaching models to include elements of positive psychotherapy, which she began studying in 2017.
Emotional Intelligence in the Boardroom
While many coaching programs teach leaders how to optimize performance, Kutova teaches them to tune into something far more elusive: themselves. She focuses on how emotional awareness shapes decision-making, team dynamics, and even product vision.
“In the boardroom, no one wants to talk about fear or shame. But it’s there—under every ‘strategic misalignment’ or sudden resignation,” she explains. “If you don’t learn how to work with your own emotional blocks, you start projecting them into your company culture.”
Kutova’s coaching process often includes deep reflection, self-mapping, and confronting inner contradictions. Leaders come to her not just when KPIs drop—but when they feel a lack of meaning or emotional presence in their role. It’s not unusual for her sessions to touch on childhood wounds, relationship patterns, or unresolved grief.
And that’s exactly the point.
Tools That Build Inner Architecture
In 2018, Iryna created her first published coaching product: the Owner Balance Journal. Part planner, part therapy workbook, it was designed to help individuals explore their values, priorities, and emotional rhythms while still tracking practical goals. It became a quiet success, particularly among female entrepreneurs and team leads.
She followed that up with her first book, “Living for Later,” in 2019—a raw, honest guide for those who felt stuck in cycles of postponing their life until some mythical “after.” That same year, she developed the now-renowned transformational game “Family Knots,” a card-based tool used by coaches and therapists across Eastern Europe to help couples navigate hidden patterns in relationships.
Her tools don’t dictate—they invite. “The purpose of my work is not to tell you how to live,” she says. “It’s to help you hear what your life has been whispering all along.”
Coaching Through Crisis
During the war in Ukraine, Kutova emigrated to the U.S., where she continued to build on her qualifications, having started her training with John Gray’s Mars Venus Coaching in 2021 and received her certification in 2022. She is now a corporate coach for a major U.S. mortgage company, working with teams on emotional intelligence, communication, and leadership dynamics.
Her focus remains on the unseen: the emotional undercurrents that shape strategy, connection, and loyalty. “Companies invest in systems,” she says, “but they forget that every system runs on human emotion.”
In this new chapter, Kutova is developing a new transformational game on relationship dynamics for the Mars Venus Coaching program. The game is designed to be facilitated by certified coaches who have completed the school’s training—a fusion of her psychological roots and business acumen.
Toward a New Definition of Success
For Iryna Kutova, emotional intelligence is not a skill—it’s a compass. Her work challenges leaders to redefine ambition, not as a race toward profit, but as a return to authenticity. Her clients may not always get faster results—but they get truer ones.
Success, as she defines it, is quiet. It’s a team that communicates with care. A founder who trusts their intuition. An executive who leads without abandoning themselves.
And perhaps, most radically, it’s knowing that leadership starts inside.
