Meet Anna
Anna Moretti is a leadership coach and founder of The Highly Sensitive Coach, based in Basel, Switzerland. A pharmacist by training, she spent more than two decades in global pharmaceutical companies, building a career in Regulatory Affairs and eventually moving into senior leadership. Today, she combines that experience with her coaching certification to support highly sensitive women who want to lead authentically while understanding and embracing their sensitivity.
When a Successful Career Began to Ask Different Questions
For more than 20 years, Anna Moretti worked in the global pharmaceutical industry, a world where precision, responsibility and careful decision making were part of everyday life. Trained originally as a pharmacist, she built her expertise in Regulatory Affairs and progressed into senior leadership positions. Her career gave her a deep understanding of organizations, people and the demands that come with leading others.
But alongside the professional path she was building, another interest was gradually taking shape. Anna had always been drawn to people development, leadership and organizational culture. She was curious about what helped people grow, what allowed teams to work well together and how leaders could create environments where people did not have to leave parts of themselves at the door.
That curiosity eventually led her toward coaching.
While she was still working full time as a people leader in the corporate world, Anna decided to invest in coaching training and became a certified coach. It was an important step, but at the time it did not necessarily signal the end of her corporate career. Instead, it opened another door and gave her a different way of understanding the people she worked with and the questions that mattered to her.
Then came a more personal discovery.
Anna learned about the concept of high sensitivity and recognized herself as a Highly Sensitive Person, or HSP. Suddenly, experiences from her own career could be viewed through a different lens. Things she may once have simply accepted as part of being herself began to make more sense.
The discovery was not only personal. It became the foundation for the work she would eventually choose to do.
Seeing Her Career Through a New Lens
Discovering that she was highly sensitive prompted Anna to look back at her years in pharma with fresh eyes. She began thinking more deeply about the experience of highly sensitive people in corporate environments, particularly those who move into positions of responsibility and leadership.
She became interested in an important question: what if sensitivity is not something that leaders need to overcome?
For Anna, the answer was worth exploring.
She began to see that the qualities associated with high sensitivity can also contribute meaningfully to leadership. Awareness, reflection, empathy, attention to nuance and an ability to notice what is happening beneath the surface can all have value in the workplace. Yet highly sensitive people can sometimes interpret their differences as weaknesses, particularly in environments where confidence is associated with being forceful, fast paced or constantly outward facing.
Anna felt there was a gap between the way sensitivity is often perceived and the contribution highly sensitive people can actually make.
That realization gradually became a calling. She wanted to understand the subject more deeply, connect research on high sensitivity with what she already knew about leadership, and help create a more balanced conversation about what effective leadership can look like.
Eventually, she made the decision to leave corporate pharma and build her own coaching business.
It was a significant change. After years of professional experience and the security of a senior corporate career, stepping into solopreneurship required Anna to redefine how she understood herself. Two particular challenges stood out: separating her sense of worth from her salary and becoming comfortable with being visible through personal branding.
Neither was solved overnight.
Anna describes overcoming both through deep inner work, while also acknowledging that the process is still unfolding. That honesty is revealing. Her story is not presented as a neat transformation in which every uncertainty disappeared once she made a decision. Instead, it reflects the reality of changing direction after many years of building a particular identity.
Leaving corporate life meant asking herself what remained when the title, salary and familiar structure were no longer there.
The answer had to come from within.
Reclaiming Sensitivity as Part of Leadership
Today, Anna works with highly sensitive women who want to lead in a way that feels authentic and sustainable. Her work is rooted in two connected ideas. The first is that society and organizations need to reconsider the assumption that high sensitivity is a weakness. The second is that highly sensitive people themselves need the knowledge and self awareness to understand their sensitivity rather than constantly trying to suppress it.
For Anna, one cannot happen without the other.
She wants to contribute to a cultural shift in how sensitivity is understood, particularly when it comes to senior leadership. At the same time, she recognizes that simply changing the external narrative is not enough. Highly sensitive women also need space to understand their own experiences, accept who they are and learn how to integrate their sensitivity into the way they lead.
This balance is central to her approach.
Rather than asking highly sensitive women to become less sensitive, Anna encourages them to understand what their sensitivity means and how it can be used consciously. Her work draws on research from both high sensitivity and leadership, bringing the two fields together in a practical framework designed to help individuals and the organizations around them.
There is a wider social dimension to this work, too.
Research estimates that around 30 percent of the population is highly sensitive. Anna is concerned that many people within that group spend years feeling different or misunderstood. Some may hide aspects of themselves because they believe their sensitivity makes them less suited to certain environments or positions.
She sees an opportunity in changing that experience.
When people understand themselves better, they may no longer need to spend so much energy trying to fit an image of who they think they are supposed to be. That can create room for stronger relationships, healthier ways of working and a more grounded form of leadership.
For Anna, this is ultimately about creating conditions in which people can thrive rather than simply survive within systems that were not designed with their differences in mind.
The Meaning of Impact
Anna’s definition of success is strikingly personal.
It is not centered on the size of her business, the number of clients she works with or the visibility of her brand. Instead, she measures the meaning of her work through the moments when someone feels understood for perhaps the first time.
She describes success as hearing a client say,
“Thank you, for the first time in my life I feel seen. I am not crazy!”
That response captures the emotional heart of her work.
Behind the coaching frameworks and research is a simple human need: to feel that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with who you are. For someone who has spent years questioning their reactions, needs or place in a professional environment, being able to understand sensitivity differently can become a deeply affirming experience.
Anna wants that feeling to reach many more people.
Her work also reflects a belief that individual wellbeing and organizational culture are connected. When people are able to work and lead without constantly hiding important parts of themselves, the benefits can extend beyond the individual. Teams, workplaces and wider communities can become more accepting of different ways of thinking, communicating and responding.
That is why Anna sees her role as both educational and supportive. She wants to share knowledge that challenges old assumptions while giving highly sensitive women practical support as they develop their own leadership identities.
Building a Future Beyond the Coaching Room
Anna’s vision extends beyond one to one coaching.
Writing a book is part of her long-term vision. She aims to bring together her knowledge and perspective in a form that is organized, accessible, and useful to a wider audience. The ambition makes sense within the broader arc of her journey. Her work is not only about helping individuals navigate their own sensitivity. It is also about contributing to a larger conversation about leadership and human difference.
She is particularly interested in continuing to work at the intersection of research and practice. Bringing together insights from high sensitivity and leadership allows her to explore questions that are relevant both to individuals and to organizations.
There is a sense of patience in this vision. Anna is not describing change as something that can be achieved through a single message or a quick shift in workplace culture. Her own journey has taught her that meaningful change often requires deeper reflection.
The values she returns to are simple: authenticity, connection and love.
They also shape how she takes care of herself while building a new professional life. Anna practices meditation, works with a coach, stays connected to people close to her and reminds herself of the larger vision behind what she is doing. These practices give her a way to remain connected to herself while navigating the uncertainty that comes with creating something independently.
Recently, she found inspiration in Michelle Obama’s autobiography and Sheila Gujrathi’s book The Mirror Effect. Both, in different ways, have contributed to the reflection and learning that continue to influence her.
Listening More Deeply to What Is Already There
There is something fitting about Anna’s decision to build a career around authenticity after spending much of her professional life in a structured corporate environment.
Her story is not about rejecting everything that came before. The years she spent in pharma remain an important part of what she brings to her work today. Her leadership experience, understanding of organizations and knowledge of professional environments give her a practical foundation for supporting the women she works with.
What changed was the way she understood those experiences.
Her discovery of high sensitivity gave her a new perspective on her own career and opened questions she could not ignore. Coaching gave her another way to support people. Leaving corporate life gave her the opportunity to bring those two strands together.
The result is a professional path shaped as much by self discovery as by ambition.
Anna’s message is ultimately broader than high sensitivity alone. She believes that everyone has something distinctive to contribute, but that contribution can become difficult to access when external expectations become louder than one’s own inner voice.
Her advice reflects that belief:
“We all have something special and unique to share, get rid of the external noise and listen deeply inside.”
For Anna, listening deeply was not simply a personal exercise. It became the beginning of a new chapter.
She is now using what she learned through decades of leadership, coaching and self exploration to help others recognize that they do not need to become someone else in order to lead well. They may simply need to understand themselves more fully.
That shift, from hiding sensitivity to understanding it, is at the heart of her work.
And perhaps that is what makes Anna’s journey especially meaningful. She did not leave one career merely to start another. She stepped away from a definition of success that had once been closely tied to external measures and began building a life around a more personal understanding of purpose.
Her work asks highly sensitive women to consider a different possibility: that sensitivity can belong in leadership, that authenticity does not have to come at the expense of effectiveness, and that being deeply attuned to people can be part of what makes someone a thoughtful leader.
For Anna, the future seems to begin with that quiet recognition. Sometimes the quality we have spent years trying to manage is also the quality that has been waiting to be understood.
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