About
Aaron Perkins
Executive coach, ICF ACC, and creator of the Threshold Method.
I spent the first half of my career helping leaders perform, in fifty-nine countries, and I never stopped believing in results. What turned me toward this work was seeing burnout up close in people who were still delivering them: the performance kept going long after the person underneath it had nothing left. I saw it in the leaders in front of me, and then I admitted it in myself.
The story
The room in Hangzhou.
Several years ago I was in Hangzhou, leading a leadership development program for a Fortune 500 company. On paper it was the peak of my career: global clients, constant travel, a résumé that read well. The people in the room were as capable as any I had worked with. They were also being asked for more every quarter, more reach and more speed and more resilience, and my program was there to help them find it.
What I remember from that room is not the program. It is the strain in it: the forced smiles, the flat voices behind them, and the defeated set of people's shoulders as they presented confident plans. It took me a while to admit why I recognized it so easily. I was carrying the same strain myself. Leadership at its best is challenge and support in equal measure: it asks a great deal of people, and it gives them what they need to rise to it. Not every company I worked with had lost the second half. Enough had, though, that I could no longer be the person brought in to ask for more.
I wrote about it later, in an essay called Success Without Soul.
I certified as a coach with the International Coaching Federation and founded Chrysalis Leadership Studio. Instead of helping leaders perform harder, I began helping them through the transitions that change who they are: a role lost or reshaped, a company sold, a country left behind, a burnout to recover from. Under each of those sits a question most of us postpone: whether the life we have built adds up to something we would choose again, and whether there will still be something to live for when the title is gone. Most people leave it until retirement, and by then a great deal has been missed. The leaders I work with would rather face it now.
Read Success Without SoulThe pattern
Different lives, and the same shape underneath.
I have now sat with several hundred people at that moment. They came from different industries, different countries, different decades of life. Some were running global teams and some had just been shown the door. Some had achieved exactly what they set out to and could not understand why it felt hollow. The circumstances never repeated. The inner experience did.
Something cracks. The old story stops holding and nothing arrives to replace it. Then, if the person can bear to stay there, a new kind of attention begins, and out of it a new way of acting, and eventually a new sense of self you can settle into. There are five movements. They do not always come in order, and they do not arrive everywhere at once: a person can be cracking at work while entirely settled at home. But I have seen the same five in every life I have watched closely, including my own.
The body often knew first. Long before a person could say what was breaking, they could feel it: a tightness in the chest, a fog once the old story had gone, a sharpening when something new began to surface, a settling when they had grown into who they were becoming. The signals are not the same for everyone, and read from the outside they are easy to get wrong, which is why I do not read them for a client. I help the client learn to read their own. I came to call this Somatic Foreshadowing, and it became one of the central disciplines of the work.
I did not build the Threshold Method from theory. I built it from Hangzhou and from every conversation since, and only later found the research that explained what I had been seeing.
Explore the MethodWhat came of it
A practice, a method, and a way of writing about both.
Chrysalis Leadership Studio is where the work lives. Most of it is private coaching with senior leaders in a crossing, online from wherever they are and in person in Singapore. Some of it is organizational. When a whole team is being restructured, or its work reshaped by AI, I run sessions on resilience and psychological safety, so the group can stay honest with each other while the ground moves.
Since October 2025 I have written Thresholds, a monthly essay on the inner work of change, and I am writing a book, The Threshold Generation, on the five human skills a decade of reorganization will ask of all of us.
Around the Method I have built three small tools: the Threshold Snapshot, which shows you which of the five territories you are in; Naya, a coaching companion for before and between conversations; and Imago, a portrait of who you are becoming. They extend the conversation rather than replace it.
The personal
The crossings I guide are ones I have lived.
I am writing this from Bali, where I live with my partner and our son, Ari. Before Bali there were the United States, France, Spain and Singapore: five countries called home since my twenties, four languages, and more than one life started over from the ground. Each move meant a new identity in a new place, the disorientation of arriving, and learning, slowly, which parts of me travelled and which did not.
So when a client says, usually sideways, that they have not been themselves lately, I do not hear a weakness. I hear someone at a threshold without a map, and I know the terrain.
Credentials
- Associate Certified Coach (ACC), International Coaching Federation
- Certified Organizational Coach, Institute of Executive Coaching and Leadership
- Brain-Based Coaching Certification, NeuroLeadership Institute
- Twenty years in leadership development and executive coaching across fifty-nine countries
- Former faculty, Thunderbird School of Global Management and EAE Business School, Barcelona
- Creator of the Threshold Method™ and of Somatic Foreshadowing
- Creator of Naya and Imago, coaching tools built on the Method
- Author of Thresholds, a monthly essay; writing The Threshold Generation
Leaders I have worked with
Clients across Southeast Asia, Australia, Europe, North America and the Middle East.
His calm, warm presence, coupled with deep listening, thoughtful questioning, and supportive challenge, helped me feel deeply heard and seen, gain clarity on what came next, and connect all of my moves back to purpose. Aaron helped me transition into a new professional identity and practice.
Amanda K. · Entrepreneur · Melbourne, Australia
The crossing is real. So is the other side.
If any of this sounded like where you are, the simplest next step is a conversation. Sixty minutes, online from wherever you are.
Begin with a first conversation