Angela Soltan | PhD Coach | Founder @ Golden Green Coaching | Guiding Ambitious Professionals to Sustainable Success | 3x Mom
Meet Angela Soltan from Geneva, a PhD coach and founder who helps high-performing ex-pats and mission-driven leaders break free from the burnout cycle while keeping their ambition fully alive. Shaped by her roots in post-Soviet Moldova, two personal burnouts, raising three children, and a decades-long career spanning linguistics, international advocacy, EU-funded AI and language rights research, and founding two ventures, Angela now blends neuroscience, psychology, and hard-won wisdom to guide over 200 professionals toward sustainable success and genuine presence, proving you don’t have to choose between impact and inner peace.
Early Years and Education in a Changing Moldova
Angela Soltan’s story begins in Chișinău, Moldova, during the final years of the Soviet era and the turbulent transition that followed. Born and raised in a multilingual, multiethnic environment, she pursued Romance Linguistics, French Philology, and Literature at the State University of Moldova from 1987 to 1992. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 profoundly shaped her early worldview, as systems dissolved overnight and certainties vanished. She continued her studies in the university’s Doctoral School, focusing on Discourse and Text Theory from 1992 to 1995, laying the foundation for a lifelong interest in language, identity, and communication in divided societies.
Her PhD, completed in 2023 with a Doctoral Thesis of Excellence Award in Sociolinguistics, Language Policy and Planning, Language Acquisition, and Linguistic Alterity, came later in life as a testament to persistent curiosity. Publications such as “Language Education and its Effectiveness in the Republic of Moldova” and “Language Policy Dimensions for Social Cohesion in Moldova: The Case of Gagauz Autonomy” reflect her early academic focus on how language policies influence access, participation, and social unity in multilingual contexts.
First Steps into Professional Life and International Exposure
Angela’s career took off in the mid-1990s amid Moldova’s post-Soviet rebuilding. From 1995 to 1997, she coordinated training programs at the Alliance Française de Moldavie, honing organizational skills in a fast-paced intercultural setting. In 1997, she became Country Representative for the Union Latine in Chișinău, managing cooperation programs in language teaching, translation, terminology, culture, and communication until 2004. This role immersed her in public relations, event organization, and advocacy, working across linguistic and cultural boundaries.
By 2004, she had founded CIMETTIL (Center for Linguistic Engineering, Terminology and Translation) at the State University of Moldova, serving as Executive Director until 2010. She designed projects, provided technical assistance, and prioritized training in translation, interpretation, and IT tools for specialized communication. Concurrently, she worked as a freelance interpreter for the Council of Europe from 2004 to 2017, handling consecutive and simultaneous interpretation in French, English, Romanian, and Russian during official missions across Europe.
In 2005, she launched AQA Event & Project Management, serving as Founder and Managing Director until 2012. The firm organized conferences, congresses, expert missions, and visibility campaigns for UN agencies (UNICEF, WHO, UNDP, UN Women), the Council of Europe, EU missions, and governmental/NGO partners. These early ventures built her expertise in strategic communication, project leadership, and navigating complex international environments.
Academic Career and Contributions to Language Policy
From 2004 to 2017, Angela lectured and researched at the State University of Moldova in sociolinguistics, language acquisition, multilingual education, and language policy. She designed courses, supervised theses, and contributed to curriculum development, always emphasizing linguistic diversity and institutional norms in public education. Her work explored tensions between standardized ideologies and lived multilingual realities, informing later advocacy on inclusive communication and ethical technology.
Entrepreneurship, Family, and Personal Turning Points
Motherhood brought profound shifts. Raising three children while leading projects and organizations tested her limits. Two experiences with burnout revealed that exhaustion stemmed not from workload alone but from a nervous system programmed to fix, help, and prove. A pivotal moment came when her third child, starting school and struggling, said: “Mom, I don’t need you to fix it. I just need you to listen.” This sentence reshaped her approach, sparking curiosity over automatic solutions and teaching her the power of presence.
Over time, Angela noticed a striking parallel between her research and her work with leaders. AI, performance culture, and constant optimization were not only reshaping systems. They were reshaping nervous systems. High-performing professionals were not simply managing tasks. They were carrying invisible psychological weight. As Angela observed in her writing, “AI is often experienced not just as a tool, but as pressure.” This insight marked a turning point. Angela transitioned into executive coaching, bringing together her academic rigor, leadership experience, and deep understanding of human regulation. She founded Golden Green Coaching in Geneva, where she now works with global executives, founders, and senior leaders, many of them expatriates navigating complex professional and personal transitions.
Current Role and Lasting Impact
Today, Angela is a Strategic Reset Coach based in Geneva, guiding ex-pat high-performers in international development and mission-driven work through her 6-week program, The Self-First Shift. With over 200 lives impacted, she helps clients shift from depletion to presence. What distinguishes Angela’s work is her focus on the body as a leadership instrument. Long before someone speaks in a meeting, their nervous system has already set the tone. As she writes:
“Leadership doesn’t start when you speak. It starts before you open your mouth.”
Through coaching, writing, and her widely read newsletter Ambition Without Exhaustion, Angela helps leaders recognize how language, posture, breath, and boundaries shape authority and trust. She challenges the idea that kindness requires self-erasure, noting, “True kindness isn’t self-erasure. It’s clarity delivered with calm.”
Her work resonates because it names what many high achievers feel but rarely articulate. The quiet exhaustion. The over-functioning. The cost of constantly proving worth. She frequently reminds her clients and readers as:
“Ease isn’t something you earn after the work is done. It’s something you choose while doing the work.”
She chaired the Language Rights Working Group in the EU-funded LITHME network (2020-2024), co-authoring contributions to the forthcoming MIT Press volume on human-machine era language. Her weekly newsletter, Ambition Without Exhaustion, shares science-backed insights for thriving without burnout.
Angela’s journey from post-Soviet Moldova to Geneva embodies quiet resilience. As she reflects in her writings, leadership begins in the body, with awareness over performance. Through coaching, research, and advocacy, she continues to create space for ambition that breathes, reminding high achievers that true success includes peace.
The Nectar of Wisdom from Angela Soltan’s Journey
- “Mom, I don’t need you to fix it. I just need you to listen.” – Her third child’s simple words became the turning point that shifted Angela from automatic problem-solving to genuine presence, teaching her that true leadership begins with listening rather than fixing.
- “You don’t have to choose between impact and sustainability. You just need a different operating system.” – After two burnouts, she discovered that exhaustion stems not from ambition itself, but from a nervous system wired to over-function; sustainable success requires recalibrating how we lead ourselves first.
- “Leadership starts before you speak. Your body already knows.” – Years of high-stakes roles revealed that presence and regulation in the body shape influence long before words are spoken; calm authority comes from internal steadiness, not external performance.
- “Zero isn’t the end. It’s the cleanest slate you’ll ever receive.” – Rebuilding after the 1990s collapse in Moldova and her own personal resets showed that moments of total breakdown offer the clearest opportunity to redefine identity, purpose, and success on your own terms.
- “Ease isn’t something you earn after the work is done. It’s something you choose while doing the work.” – Through coaching hundreds and her own journey as a mother and founder, Angela learned that true high performance includes deliberate pauses and nervous-system care in the midst of pressure, not only after it ends.
Editorial Note
Angela Soltan’s journey is a quiet masterclass in graceful reinvention. From the ashes of systemic collapse in 1990s Moldova to the calm precision of her Geneva coaching practice, she has shown that true strength lies not in endless endurance, but in the courage to pause, listen, and rebuild from the inside out. Her work reminds every high achiever that ambition can breathe deeply and sustainably when we stop proving and start simply being. In a world that rewards constant motion, Angela offers something rarer: permission to lead with presence instead of pressure. We are better for it.
