Who do you talk to when everyone around you has a stake?

Why does it get quieter around you as responsibility grows?

Not because you know fewer people. It gets quieter because every new responsibility changes the relationships you already have. People who depend on you weigh what they say. People who sell to you listen with a goal. People who love you listen with worry.

Four reasons the conversation about the real question does not happen:

1. Family has history. Your wife or husband may have given up a career to move to Switzerland with you, and hears what the question means for both of you.
2. Advisers have mandates. Fiduciary, lawyer and bank work for you, often well, but every answer is tied to their brief. Legitimate, not neutral.
3. Employees have careers. Your leadership team, your assistant, the colleague you trust: they all know you have a say in their future.
4. Friends have feelings. Few know what it means to be responsible for a payroll or a large estate, and for many people who moved here the closest ones now live in another time zone.

None of this is an accusation. Interests are normal. The problem starts when you have to decide and every voice around you has a reason to tell you one particular thing.

None of this requires a company of your own. If you have inherited, or share your life with someone who runs a company, you will recognise the situation. The bank wants to keep the mandate, the family office its role, and your siblings have their own ideas about what should happen to the family house or the shares. Each of these voices is legitimate, and each has an interest in the outcome. If what you yourself want stays open, it is easy to sign what others have prepared.

Who in your circle can do what, and what can they not do?

Four criteria: interest in the outcome, reach of confidentiality, cost, and what the conversation is good for.

Almost everyone is good for something specific: the lawyer for the contract, not for whether you want it; the CEO circle listens, but sits in your market; the coach often gives no opinion on principle. The roles are set out in Sparring partner, coach, mentor or consultant: what is the difference?

The last row of the table deserves a plain sentence: a sparring partner is paid too, per conversation, by you, at a fixed fee that depends on the format and the length, never on who you are. What is missing is everything else: no mandate that runs longer if you hesitate, no commission that grows if you sell, no career inside your company. That is what makes every one of your answers worth the same to me. On the legal reach of a coach’s confidentiality: Is coaching confidential in Switzerland? What the law says.

Alone or lonely: what is the difference?

You are alone with a decision when nobody can take it off you. That comes with the role. Lonely is something else: a lasting sense of not being seen, even where people are.

Most of the people who call me are not lonely. They have a family, friends, a team. What they lack is an hour to think aloud without consequences for the company, the mood at home or a colleague’s career. For someone who arrived in Zug two years ago, with the closest friends six time zones away, that hour is harder to find. As a rule it is a structural problem, and a structure can solve it.

If sleep has been missing for weeks, if nothing gives you pleasure any more, or if thoughts of harming yourself appear, the first address is your family doctor or a psychotherapist, not a sparring partner. I do not diagnose, and I will tell you if you need more than a conversation; see also what sparring is and what it is not.

What do surveys of CEOs show?

For an article in the Harvard Business Review of 23 December 2024, 109 CEOs of major Canadian organisations were surveyed and 46 interviewed. The finding is sober: their loneliness stems not from a lack of social connections but from the burden of leadership and decision-making, most acutely in a crisis. What is missing is not people to talk to, but people to decide with.

Two older US surveys from 2012 are often mixed up. RHR International surveyed 100 CEOs; 41 percent had experienced loneliness in the job (Fortune, 29 June 2012). Separately, Thomas Saporito reported in the Harvard Business Review of 15 February 2012 on an RHR survey of 83 US CEOs: half felt lonely, and 61 percent of those saw their performance affected. Both figures are old, small and American. As a rough guide: four in ten to half of the CEOs asked know the feeling. Nothing more.

I know of no comparable Swiss survey; here the question shows in language rather than studies: a German-language podcast for business owners titled one episode simply “Mit wem soll ich reden?”, who should I talk to. Almost word for word, that is how most people who call me put it.

What does a conversation without an agenda look like?

You name the topic; I bring none, no model, no slides. You tell me, in English or German, what is on your mind. I ask which assumption has never been tested and what is missing from the story, then tell you what I see, including the angle you would rather not hear. I spent many years as an engineer on large projects and am used to putting assumptions on the table before anyone builds on them. Push back.

At the end we note what you do next: a decision, a conversation you want to have, or deliberately nothing yet. One conversation is often enough; if a deadline is pressing, read A decision under time pressure: why one conversation is often enough. I come to your home, your office or a quiet place in Zug, Zürich, on the Gold Coast or in Wollerau and Pfäffikon SZ; nobody sees you walk into a practice. By arrangement: mostly in the evening, on Mondays also during the day, and on Saturdays and Sundays. Essentials: What is a sparring partner in business and in private life?; formats and how it works: Sparring.

In short

It does not get quieter around you because people are missing, but because almost everyone around you has an interest in the outcome. Specialists, family and friends are the right people for a great deal, but rarely for the question of what you yourself want. For that you need, once, someone who earns nothing from any particular answer: bound in writing to confidentiality with the three limits named above, paid per conversation and without a mandate.