Anna
Andrusova

DOING ALL THE RIGHT THINGS

In the society I grew up in — post-Soviet Russia in the years after the collapse — looking inward was not customary. Asking questions was considered a sign of mistrust: children questioning adults, employees questioning managers. Looking back, it is understandable. Everyone was trying to make sense of a new world and provide for their families. There was little room to look inward. Only outward.

So, as a child, I kept my dreams inside — thinking I was protecting them from others, when in reality I was protecting myself from them. Occasionally they would burst out, only to be laughed at and buried even deeper. I grew up doing all the right things: excellent grades, a financial degree that promised stability, staying in my home town for university. Because it felt safe. Because it felt familiar.

But then came the moment I could no longer ignore — I was doing everything right, and there was no "me" in any of it.

I was fortunate to meet people who saw this too — people I regard as my first mentors. Through their curiosity and questions, those buried dreams came to light. And once they did, I could not unsee them. Something had to change.

I was uncertain when I took the first steps towards those dreams. But living a life that felt genuinely mine gave me something I had not expected — confidence, slowly and unevenly, but mine. I changed universities, pursued an internationally oriented degree, and moved to Moscow to begin building a life that felt increasingly my own.

THE QUESTION I KEPT ASKING OTHERS

What I did not realize at the time was that those early conversations with my mentors had shaped something in me — a belief, before I had words for it, that people deserve the authority to make decisions that work for their own lives. I would later discover that not everyone saw this as a strength.

My first role in Moscow was in sales for one of Russia's leading shoe manufacturers. Cold sales were the dominant approach, but it did not resonate with me. Instead, I turned my attention to the client — asking myself how I could help them grow their business, serve their customers, and reach their own goals. I did not know the answers. So I started asking questions.

What I discovered was that my clients knew their business and their customers better than anyone. They did not want to be told what to buy. They wanted to understand the bigger picture — how our products could help them build a collection that served every customer, where trends were heading, what their sales data was actually telling them. I did not know how to give them any of that. So I started learning alongside them. The appreciation I received surprised me. The satisfaction of genuinely serving someone did not.

When I moved to the United States, I pursued analytics professionally — partly to acquire the skills I had been missing in that previous role. I became competent at answering the tactical questions my clients were buried under, using data to surface what they could not see. But as we decluttered those questions, something else emerged. With the tactical noise gone, there was space for the strategic ones — questions of vision, direction, decision-making under uncertainty, and what came next. And again, I found myself without a ready answer. So again, I got curious, asked questions, and began to realize that the answers were already inside them. I simply needed a different set of tools to help them find their own way there.

I found those tools, unexpectedly, in coaching.

THE QUESTION I FINALLY ASKED MYSELF

Helping others navigate uncertainty clarified my professional path. My own growth came from the opposite direction — from the moments when I found myself stuck, feeling as though I had deviated from my own path or simply did not know what came next. There was no answer to be had from the outside. I had to turn inward.

Moscow was the first leap. Staying in my home town felt safe — but safety was not going to get me where I wanted to go. So I left. I worked hard, learnt a great deal, built new relationships. Within three years I was in a leadership role — and then the feeling came. Stuckness.

I had mistaken a stage for a destination. I dusted off my vision, made a new plan, and began looking at what came next. What came next, unexpectedly, was the United States. A different move, similar circumstances, and ten times harder — navigating a new culture, a new language, and a Master's in Business Analytics simultaneously. It was genuinely difficult. It also felt right. And then — just when I reached the Data Scientist position I had worked so hard towards — the feeling came back.

I was just turning inward to examine it when Covid arrived, followed shortly by motherhood. There was no shortage of advice on how to navigate either. The more I followed it, the further I felt from myself. What followed was a personal crisis — the most honest conversation with myself I had ever had.

I made one decision first: to step back and be present for my daughter during the years she needed me most.

Then I sat down and took full inventory. I examined my life until that point, clarified what I actually valued, and built a vision for what came next. It took time. It required patience. But it was mine. I had done this before — built a vision, taken steps, and stopped looking at it until the stuckness forced me back. This time I understood why. And I did not want to keep learning it the hard way.

And then, gradually, it began to make sense. The system emerged. The focus became clear. The rest of the decisions followed.

WHERE BOTH QUESTIONS MEET

What I kept encountering could not be answered with data alone. The question I was trying to answer was always larger — I wanted to give people tools to navigate their lives in their entirety, not just a single decision or a single moment. I did not have those tools yet. So I set out on two searches simultaneously — one outward, for the tools. One inward, to understand what I was best placed to offer.

What I kept noticing across fields, across seniority levels, across very different kinds of decisions — was the same pattern. Clear the urgent tactical questions and strategic ones immediately surfaced. Answer the strategic ones and they informed the tactical. And underneath both: the person sitting across from me already knew. Not always consciously. But the answer was there. I was not the one who had it. They were.

I spent years looking for tools that could work across all of it — the tactical, the strategic, the personal. I explored multiple disciplines and found that each had been designed for something specific. None brought it all together.

Until I encountered coaching — which I did not start studying until I experienced it myself, as a client. I wanted to understand what clients experienced. That work continues to this day.

Now I work with people who sense that the way they have been operating no longer fits. They take responsibility for their lives, even when they do not yet know what comes next. They are willing to examine both the internal and external forces shaping their decisions, seek help when they need it, and keep moving forward — even when the path is unclear.

I approach coaching as a partnership. I will offer you tools to gently explore multiple facets of your situation — encouraging you to look where it may feel uncomfortable, trusting you to make your own decisions about the path forward, and supporting you along the way.

If you have noticed that your old self no longer fits, or that your old ways no longer work — I  invite you to take this journey. You choose the destination. Together we explore the terrain and map the path, take stock of what to carry forward and what to leave behind, and take the first steps side by side — until you are ready to continue on your own.

Not because the journey ends. But because you will know how to navigate it.

So that when life pulls you off course, you know how to find your way back.