Meet Cristina Pop
In a world where women are building businesses at record speed, Cristina Pop is rewriting the rules of how they rise. Based in Zurich, she is the visionary behind Stop Running Your Business Like a Man; a platform, methodology, and movement guiding ambitious women to align with their energy, lead with authenticity and grow without burnout. As a coach, mentor, and podcast host, Cristina works at the intersection of strategy, intuition, and feminine resilience, empowering women across the world to build businesses that support their lives, not consume them. Widely recognized for rethinking how women work, lead, and succeed, Cristina integrates practical business strategy with neuroscience, somatic healing, Traditional Chinese Medicine principles, and embodiment practices. Her mission is simple, yet revolutionary: help women create more revenue, more joy, and more freedom while honoring their natural rhythms.
Early Breakthroughs and the Seeds of a Calling
Cristina Pop’s work has become a lifeline for women ready to lead differently, but her story begins long before she stepped into coaching rooms or international stages. Growing up in Romania and later studying in France, she developed an early fascination with human behavior, communication, and the inner mechanics of decision making. Her Master’s degree in Marketing from the Toulouse School of Management sharpened her understanding of market psychology and consumer insight, but it also revealed something deeper, a curiosity about why people act the way they do, and how women often move through professional spaces carrying layers of pressure that go unseen.
Her first major career step came in Paris, where she joined Harris Interactive as a Research Manager. There, she led research initiatives for French and international companies, uncovering patterns in how businesses operated and how individuals responded to the demands of work culture. She later advanced to Société Générale, where she managed market research for the small business sector. Both roles offered a front-row seat to how entrepreneurs, especially women, navigated expectations in industries shaped by masculine work structures. Without realizing it then, Cristina was quietly gathering the raw material that would later define her global career.
New Beginning: From Corporate Researcher to International Coach
Coaching entered Cristina’s life not as a career strategy, but as a calling. Drawn toward helping others create meaningful shifts, she studied at the Co-Active Training Institute and continued her training at multiple ICF-certified programs, expanding her knowledge through systemic coaching, solution-focused methods, and later, through The Life Coach School.
She immersed herself in neuroscience, somatic trauma healing, Traditional Chinese Medicine, Feng Shui, astrology, and energetic practices. It wasn’t enough for her to understand business; she wanted to understand women; their bodies, their emotions, their cycles, their pressures, and their potential. This combination of business acumen and deep mind-body awareness led her to a groundbreaking insight: women were trying to succeed in systems never designed for them. As she later said in one of her widely shared reflections, “Women are conditioned to people please, to put their needs aside, to wait until they check all the criteria before raising their hand. It’s convenient for patriarchal structures but costly for women.”
When Cristina launched her coaching practice in 2013, she didn’t just start a business. She started a movement.
A Turning Point: When the Hustle Became Unsustainable
What truly changed Cristina’s life was not a corporate promotion or a conventional milestone. It was the experience of moving across countries several times, building a life in unfamiliar cultures, and eventually starting a family while trying to maintain a demanding professional pace. By the time she arrived in Switzerland with her husband and two young children, she was once again rebuilding her business from the ground up. January 2022 became a defining moment. She was working long hours, chasing goals, checking every box on the productivity lists, and still not feeling aligned with the life she wanted.
She recalls the exact moment everything shifted. Her children looked at her and said: “Mom, you are busy, right?” Those six words became a wake-up call. As she later reflected, “I understood that I was over-indexing the masculine energy of doing, doing, doing and never really allowing myself to be present.”
Cristina realized she was living in constant do-go-achieve mode, the traditional masculine model of business that demanded output over wellbeing, consistency over intuition, and structure over humanity. She had been successful, but it came at the cost of exhaustion and emotional disconnection. Cristina wasn’t simply shifting her career. She was stepping into the work she was meant to do.
Stop Running Your Business Like a Man: The Platform That Sparked a Shift
Over twelve years of coaching women across industries, countries, and cultures, Cristina witnessed the same pattern: brilliant, hardworking women were burning out not because they lacked talent, but because they were following models built on constant output, linear productivity, and nonstop hustle. She began asking a question that would define her legacy: How can women bring strategy and structure together with intuition, cyclic rhythm, joy, and ease? The answer became her signature methodology, The THRIVE Formula that would soon become her central philosophy: Stop Running Your Business Like a Man. Explore more here.
It challenged the norms women had been taught and offered a new way to build success, one rooted in feminine energy, cyclic rhythms, intuition, and sustainable growth. The THRIVE Formula blends business strategy with feminine wisdom, integrating mindset coaching, embodiment practices, psychometrics, somatic approaches, and energy alignment. It is both practical and intuitive, structured yet spacious. Cristina describes it as “multiple gateways to return to yourself, reclaim your feminine energy, and lead from both your feminine and your masculine power.”
It was through a reflective exchange with her friend and peer Amel Derragui that Cristina’s body of work was distilled into the phrase Stop Running Your Business Like a Man, a line that powerfully captured what she had been teaching women for years. Her message resonated instantly. Women around the world began repeating her words, sharing her insights, and joining her programs. She developed courses, led intimate group masterminds, delivered corporate workshops, and guided hundreds of women through transformations that changed not only their businesses but their lives.
The Podcast: Bringing Feminine Leadership to the Global Stage
As her voice gained global traction, Cristina launched the Stop Running Your Business Like a Man Podcast, a weekly companion for women seeking a more intuitive, grounded approach to leadership. Since 2023, the podcast has unpacked themes such as winter energy, the Yin season, feminine creativity cycles, office energy flow, and the myths that keep high-achieving women stuck.
Each episode blends practical tools with energetic guidance. She speaks directly to women who are tired of hustling, offering them a space to pause, breathe, and listen to the inner CEO they’ve been ignoring. Listeners often describe her podcast as a weekly reminder to trust their rhythm rather than force results. It has become one of the core channels where her movement continues to grow. Discover more here.
Programs That Redefine Women’s Leadership
Cristina’s body of work extends beyond coaching and reflects her commitment to helping women lead in ways that honor their energy and ambitions. Her signature THRIVE private coaching offers high-touch mentorship for women ready to grow without self-sacrifice, while Inner Flow provides a group experience centered on cyclical alignment. She also partners with organizations through Emerge, a leadership program designed to support women rising within corporate structures. Her courses Magnetize Success and Program Your Office for Abundance weave community, ancient wisdom, and energetic alignment into practical growth.
She also leads Sacred Gardens, a series of women’s circles grounded in ancestral wisdom and contemporary ritual. Held in Zurich, these gatherings invite women to soften their nervous systems, reconnect with intuition, and experience the power of sorority in a sacred space shaped by the five elements and feminine ceremonial practices. She is also the creator of the 12 Magic Nights Ritual, a modern interpretation of an ancient European tradition that guides women through reflective practices during the transition between years. These offerings highlight her ability to blend strategy, energy work, somatic healing, and ancestral knowledge into modern leadership development. Across her programs, the impact is unmistakable. Explore more here.
Women often describe her work as clarifying and restorative, with many reporting renewed creativity, greater confidence, and measurable business growth. As one client shared, the experience felt like “unleashing a power that was within me.”
Keynote Speaking: A Voice for Women Leading Differently
Cristina’s expertise also reaches stages across Europe. A sought-after keynote speaker, she brings a fresh perspective on feminine leadership to women’s summits, corporate leadership programs, entrepreneurship events, and global organizations.
Her signature talks including “Stop Running Your Business Like a Man,” “Stop Running Your Career Like a Man,” and “Aligning Your Business With Your Creative Cycle” challenge audiences to rethink how they relate to their energy and self-leadership. Event organizers consistently praise her ability to blend warmth, insight, and actionable frameworks with embodied exercises that leave audiences transformed. One organizer noted, “Participants shared that they felt seen and understood by Cristina, and appreciated her hands-on approach that allowed them to implement her wisdom in their day-to-day lives.” Her presence on stage is both grounding and energizing, making her one of the most influential voices in feminine leadership today.
Looking Ahead: A Future Built on Alignment, Not Exhaustion
Looking ahead, Cristina continues to expand her programs, workshops, circles, and corporate engagements, but always in ways that honor her values. She models what she teaches, leading with intuition, resting as needed, and designing work that supports life, not the other way around.
Today, she stands as one of the most influential voices in feminine business, guiding women around the world to lead with clarity, confidence, and their full energetic power. Her vision is clear: a world where women no longer abandon themselves to meet impossible standards, but instead build businesses rooted in joy, alignment, and self-trust.
In Cristina’s words, “You can create more success and still have time for what you love.” And through her work, she is proving that women don’t have to choose; they can lead fully, powerfully, and on their own terms.
Empowering Lessons from the Path of Cristina Pop
- “Success isn’t about pushing harder. It’s about aligning your business with your energy so you leverage your full power not just half of it.”
- “Your feminine energy isn’t a weakness; it’s the missing strategy you’ve been looking for.”
- “It is in doing less that we actually create more.”
- “When you shift from forcing to flowing, everything changes.”
Connect with Cristina Pop
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cristina-pop-thrive/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cristina.thrive/
Website: https://www.cristina-pop.com/
Editorial Note: A Call to Reimagine What Success Looks Like for Women
Cristina Pop stands at the forefront of a new era of feminine leadership. Her journey reminds us that success does not require self-abandonment, that ambition and ease can coexist, and that intuition is not a luxury, it is a strategy. As women across the world continue to question the systems they once accepted, Cristina’s work offers a roadmap back to themselves.
Her message is not just a philosophy; it is an invitation. A call to build businesses that honor the whole woman; her rhythms, her energy, her joy, and her power. For every leader ready to redefine success on her own terms, Cristina’s journey is both a guiding light and a beginning.
