Hi! I’m Sima
I'm the founder of Executive Reflections, and I coach women leaders and executives across STEM, finance, law, academia, and other analytical fields to get the recognition, influence, and advancement their results deserve.
How I got here
I started my career as an electrical engineer. For the best part of a decade I worked my way through increasingly senior technical and leadership roles, until I landed at the United Nations Joint Programme on HIV/AIDS in 2004. Within three years I was global CIO, leading IT strategy across 90 country offices, managing a team of 34 across seven regions, and overseeing a CHF 20 million budget that I'd secured through a single well-prepared conversation with a key influencer.
That conversation changed my understanding of leadership. I realised that the skills that get you promoted to director level are not the same skills that get you recognised and valued beyond it. Output stops being the main currency. Influence becomes it.
I also navigated the harder side of institutional life. I was harassed by a supervisor, reported it, and won my case in front of the International Labour Office Tribunal. I know what it takes to hold your ground inside systems that were not designed to support you.
When I left the UN, I immersed myself in coaching, neuro-linguistic programming, and Ericksonian hypnosis. I wanted to understand why the techniques I had evolved naturally throughout my career actually worked. What I found changed everything.
So much of what holds ambitious, high-performing women back operates at the subconscious level. The bias they face from others, yes, and also what they carry inside themselves: "Don't shine too bright." "Don't be the tall poppy." "Don't stand out too much." These beliefs run deep, often from childhood, and they shape how a woman communicates, how she positions herself, and how far she allows herself to go.
The small percentage of women who make it to the C-suite have either never carried these beliefs, or they've done the work to let them go. That process is transformational. It's an identity shift that goes deep.
It's also why a one-week course won't cut it. If this were a simple skills gap, I promise you my high achievers would have closed it already. They're brilliant at learning skills. This goes further. It's about shifting the patterns that run underneath the skills, the ones that determine whether those skills ever get used at full strength.
That's what I built Speak Up & Stand Out to do. And that's why it works when other programmes haven't.
Professional Bio
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Sima Newell is the founder of Executive Reflections and creator of the Speak Up & Stand Out method for women leaders in analytical and male-dominated fields.
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She is a former global CIO of UNAIDS (the United Nations Joint Programme on HIV/AIDS), where she led IT strategy and operations across 90 country offices and managed a team of 34 across seven regions.
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She holds a Master's of Electrical Engineering from McGill University and is trained in NLP language patterns, neo-Ericksonian hypnosis, and executive coaching.
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Sima has coached over 130 women through her Speak Up & Stand Out programme and trained more than 1,300 women leaders through her leadership development series. She maintains a private coaching practice working with 6-8 senior leaders at any given time.
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She is a contributing author of We the People: the UN Whistleblowers, and has written for and conducted CEO interviews for Coach Magazine Global. Her work has been featured in The Guardian, The Lancet, and DevEx.
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Her personal vision is a world with healthy, ethical leadership, fostering connected, innovative, high-performance, and inspiring workplaces.
Personal
Originally from Montreal, Canada, Sima now lives in Switzerland with her husband and daughter. Outside of coaching, she hikes, skis, paints watercolours, sews historical costumes, and reads more books about the brain than most people would consider reasonable.
Ready to have a conversation?
Because the reality is, you are one conversation away from the recognition and the resources you desire and deserve. The question is how to make that conversation land.
