Marina Kruk
Executive Coach and Resilience Strategist. Twenty years in enterprise leadership, three businesses built, and one life rebuilt twice.
I spent twenty years in enterprise leadership across IT, healthcare, utilities, insurance, and government — finishing as an Expert Enterprise Program Manager running portfolios of up to $300 million and leading teams of fifty.
Alongside that, I built and ran three businesses in three different industries: a vocational training centre approved by state government and multiple federal agencies, a geriatric adult day centre that won a Department of Aging contract, and the first internet café in Skokie, Illinois — which required overturning a city ordinance to open.
I hold an EMBA and a BA in Education, and I am certified as a PMP, a Lean Six Sigma Green Belt, a Certified ScrumMaster, and a Certified Scrum Product Owner.
None of that is the reason I do this work.
I came to this country as an immigrant and lost my father to cancer when I was 21. I built a profitable life from nothing and lost every part of it in the 2008 recession — my home, my business, my car, my money.
Then I rebuilt myself completely, back to the top of the corporate world. And when a multi-year contract disappeared over corporate politics, I finally understood what I had been avoiding: I had done everything right, twice over, and my life still was not mine to direct. I was not living my life. I was living the one I had been programmed to want.
So I left, with no backup plan, and became a coach. Today I am living in my purpose — the best life I could ever have imagined.
That is why I do not help people fix what is broken. I help them decide who they want to become. I have had to rebuild myself twice, and the second time I did it on purpose.
How I work
I am direct.
I am always completely honest in my feedback, and I am not afraid to say the true thing regardless of how it lands at first. What makes that survivable is that I stay in the room while it lands. I am strong enough to go through the hard part with you and hold your hand.
I give you tools, not just questions.
Most of my clients come to me after years with therapists and other coaches. They tell me the same thing every time: they were allowed to talk, they were asked good questions, and nobody ever handed them an instrument. What you learn here — how to pause, how to hear which voice is yours, how to release shame and guilt, how to change a behaviour that no longer serves you — you keep for life.
I reframe.
Clients tell me this is the thing they value most. What you have been calling weakness was usually survival. That is not a kindness; it is a more accurate reading of your own history.
I measure.
You complete questionnaires before we begin and the same questionnaires at the end, so change is documented rather than merely felt. Every session has a survey before it and two questions after it. I bring twenty years of enterprise programme management to inner work, and it shows.
My job is to become unnecessary.
The programme closes by handing you the tools to steer yourself. More than seventy-five percent of my clients renew each year — not because they need me, but because they want to go further.