I work with women who have arrived somewhere and are not entirely sure it is where they intended to go.
The women I work with are accomplished. They have built careers, led teams, navigated complex personal landscapes with intelligence and, usually, with some grace.
What they share — the thing that brings them to this conversation — is a very specific quality of awareness. The sense that something, at the level they are now operating, is not quite right. Not wrong enough to name easily. Not obvious enough to explain to anyone else.
I know this from two directions. For several years I moved inside the international creative and fashion industry, watching women of considerable talent manage exactly that disconnect — the gap between the life they had built and what it was costing them. And then I lived my own version of it.
Author of three books, including a Spiegel Bestseller · Featured in Vogue Germany, Der Spiegel, Die Zeit
The most interesting questions available to accomplished women are the ones they don’t yet have the private space to ask properly.
— Martina Rink
I have always known what it is to inhabit a life that was not quite built around you.
I was born in Persia and adopted by German parents shortly after birth. I grew up between Germany, London, Paris, and eventually Ibiza — a life shaped by code-switching, by belonging nowhere and everywhere at once, and by the interior work required when the circumstances of your life do not quite fit.
What that produced, in me, over time, was anxiety, depression, and a social phobia I managed with considerable skill for years. The management, as it tends to, became its own thing to examine.
I have lived, from the beginning, with a particular kind of question: who am I, underneath the circumstances I was placed in? It is a question that does not have a final answer. But it can be lived in a great deal more consciously than most of us manage.
My own re-examination of alcohol began not from a crisis but from a question. I was, by all external measures, doing well. I had a life, a body of published work, a set of relationships I valued, and a daily glass of wine that had quietly become a different thing from what it started as.
I did not need a programme. I needed a conversation — precise, private, conducted between equals. I did not find one that was right for me. So I built it.
Choosing sobriety was not a treatment. It was the moment I stopped running from myself — and the moment this work was born. Not from theory. From what I lived.
Before the practice.
I spent several formative years working as personal assistant to Isabella Blow in London. Isabella was, by any reasonable account, one of the most extraordinary women of her generation — a creator, an instigator, a woman who lived entirely from her own vision.
What I observed, working closely with her, was something that I have spent the years since trying to articulate: the particular cost of being fully, unapologetically yourself in a world that finds that either inconvenient or consumable. The commitment to one’s own interior, even when the exterior is being dismantled.
It was an education that no institution offers.
Isabella collected people the way she collected hats — with absolute precision, and an instinct for who could carry weight. She placed McQueen, Treacy, the entire generation. What I learned was not how to be like her. It was how to read a room the way she read it.
— Martina, on her years at Isabella Blow’s side, London 2004–2007
The work before the work.
I have published three books: Isabella Blow (a Spiegel Bestseller, written from unique proximity as her personal assistant), People of Deutschland (a documentary portrait of contemporary Germany, covered extensively in national media), and Fashion Germany.
I mention this not as a credential list, but because context matters: the women I work with are at a level where they need someone who has operated in complex, high-visibility environments — and who has written, publicly and carefully, about what those environments cost.
My practice draws on formal training across coaching, NLP, hypnotherapy, sobriety consulting, Transcendental Meditation, and Ayurveda — each chosen not for its certificate but for what it adds to the room. The sobriety work operates under a distinct name: The Sober Muse. A private method, built from the inside.
The clinical knowledge.
For Sober Muse clients, I maintain a close professional relationship with Mrs. Nürnberger, Head Physician at the My Way Betty Ford Clinic — one of Germany’s leading addiction clinics. She was formerly my own doctor, and has since become a trusted advisor to this work.
The methods I use were shaped through that experience. What I bring is not theory — it is a framework I have lived, tested, and refined over six years of practice with women navigating the same question.
The situation is usually recognisable before the words are.
A founder who has exited successfully and cannot understand why the arrival feels nothing like she imagined. The metrics are right. Something else is not.
A senior executive at the top of the right career who has quietly begun to suspect it may be the wrong mountain. The question is not what to do next. It is who she is without the title.
A woman who has been re-examining her relationship with alcohol — not dramatically, not in crisis, but with the growing clarity that one chapter has ended and she has not yet found the language for what comes next.
I work with a small number of women at a time. Privately.
Martina doesn't coach you toward an answer. She asks the question you didn't know you were avoiding — and then she waits. That quality of attention is genuinely rare.
Accreditations
International Association of Coaching Institutes
International Association of NLP Institutes