Elena Mnayarji

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

ABOUT ELENA MNAYARJI

I\'ve always been good at reading people. Not in a \"party trick\" way. In a \"sat across from someone and knew what they weren\'t saying\" way. I spent years in consulting and business development, time at Calm working to make workplace wellbeing more of an active conversation… not just a nice-to-have. I got an MBA from UC Berkeley Haas where I went deep on leadership, emotional intelligence, and the messy, human side of how people actually work and grow. In the background… I was always studying. Somatic work, cognitive frameworks, emotional intelligence, anything that helped me understand why smart people get stuck. The outcome was a simple but radical realization: the decision isn\'t hard. The emotion you\'re avoiding is. And the work of understanding yourself isn\'t something that just happens on a retreat or in a journal… it\'s in all things, at all times. It\'s in how you talk to yourself after you don\'t get the promotion… because that\'s how you\'ll talk to your team on a hard day. How you lead others will always be a reflection of your relationship with yourself. I know this personally. I grew up between cultures… my dad came from Syria, my mom from Palestine, and I spent a lot of my life grappling with identity, with belonging, with holding complexity without needing to resolve it. That\'s not separate from my people work. It\'s the foundation of it. I help you stop white-knuckling your way through leadership and start making decisions from clarity instead of fear… through curiosity, compassion, and a deep belief that breakthroughs don\'t come from thinking harder. They come from getting honest about what you\'re feeling. And then feeling it. I live in Oakland on Lake Merritt and love everything about the Bay Area. On any given day, I\'m either at the farmers market or making a cat collage on Pinterest (don\'t ask… or do ask). I write about all of it here: https://cominghometoyourself.substack.com/ Say hi: e••••••••@gmail.com