Philippe Turrian.
Still in it. Every day.

A senior executive, still in the role

I'm Philippe Turrian. Senior Executive at a private bank in Geneva. I've been in high-demand executive roles for over ten years. I work minimum twelve hours a day and I'm rarely fully disconnected from work. I travel frequently. I'm the father of two children. I track my sleep and my HRV every morning. I manage my energy with the same discipline I bring to anything important.

Unlike most people giving advice on this subject online, I'm not someone who left the corporate world to coach others about it. I'm still in it. Every day. Every system, every protocol, every framework on this channel was tested first in my life, and refined until it actually worked.

And here's something I want to say upfront, because the rest of this page might suggest otherwise: I love my job. I have two intrinsic drivers, human relationships and impact, and my work feeds both. My leadership role lets me grow people, professionally and sometimes personally, and build a culture where teams deliver in the pleasure of working together. Sitting on the executive committee of a human-sized family bank means I have real weight on the strategic and financial trajectory of the firm. The career isn't a tax I pay so the rest of my life can exist. It's part of what makes me me.

You can find me on LinkedIn.

What I have built. And what I have not.

I have not figured this out perfectly. The system I share here is the one I run on myself, refined over years. It works most of the time. But sometimes, work runs late, sleep collapses, the architecture cracks. When that happens, I notice what broke, name it, and rebuild.

What you will find on this site and in the videos are the convictions I have arrived at, and the systems I have built, for living this stretch of life as well as I can. They work for me.

If you have built something that works for you, send it my way.

Four lives, four moments. Then one year that pulled them all together.

Each of the four pillars in this method came from a specific moment in my life, when something broke and I had to pay attention. The first one started before I was even old enough to understand what I was watching.

The divorce I refused to repeat.

My parents divorced when I was in my early twenties. My mother left my father with words I have never forgotten: "I was happy as a mother. But now that you and your sister are taking your independence, I realize your father and I have walked roads too different to be happy as a couple."

Their marriage had been swallowed by their roles as parents. The couple had dissolved into the family.

I never wanted that to be my marriage. So when I felt the same drift starting years later, weekends that had become logistics, a partner who had become a co-parent, it was not an abstract problem. It was the path my parents had walked. And I knew where it ended.

That is why the marital pillar stands as its own pillar in this method. Not as an accessory to the family. As its own life, deserving its own architecture.

The body that started to break in a hotel room.

I grew up doing a lot of sport. Tennis, football, skiing, all at competition level, more than ten hours of training and matches every week. My body was the first thing I knew how to take care of. It was instinctive.

Then in 2006 I started my career at McKinsey. The intensity was unlike anything I had known. Fifteen-hour days. A lot of coffee to get through them. A few drinks with colleagues when we had the time. Nutrition became an afterthought too: hotel breakfasts grabbed in five minutes, lunches eaten at the desk between two slides, dinners ordered late and high in everything that was easy and wrong. The sport stopped, slowly at first, then completely.

One evening in 2010, we wrapped up earlier than usual. I went back to the hotel and decided to use the spare time to go for an easy run. After ten minutes, I cramped. Both legs. I could not continue. I walked back to the hotel humiliated.

That was my first real signal that the body I had taken for granted was paying for everything I was not giving it. Four years of high performance at work had silently destroyed an athletic foundation built over twenty. That is when I started understanding that the personal life is not optional. It is the substrate that makes every other life possible.

The year I was succeeding at my career and failing at my life.

2016. I had been a manager for two or three years. My career was taking off. I was working like a madman. Nights, weekends, holidays cut short. I was, by every external measure, on the trajectory I had wanted.

At the end of the year, I received my performance review and my bonus. Both were good. Both were less than I had expected. I went for a run along Lake Geneva to clear my head. Halfway through, I sat down on a bench and broke into tears.

It was not the review or the money. It was the realization underneath. My friends were getting married, having children, building lives. I had nothing but my work. And the only reason I was so devastated by an end-of-year review was that work was the only thing I had to be devastated about. My professional life had eaten everything else, and there was nothing left to absorb the disappointment.

That afternoon I understood something that had been hiding in plain sight. A career that consumes everything is not a career success. It is a category error. From that day, I started rebuilding the professional pillar so that it would stop being the only one.

The Friday night I treated bedtime as one more task.

A few months after my first child was born, I came home one Friday evening, exhausted from a long week. The last bottle before bed was a ritual I had taken on. It was usually mine. That night, I asked my wife to do it instead. I told her I was too tired.

While she fed our child and I took a shower, something hit me with quiet sadness. I had just treated one of the rare moments I got with my child during the week as a task to offload. Not a moment of joy. Not a moment of presence. A line item I wanted to take off my list before collapsing on the couch.

I had become so depleted that I was outsourcing the very things I had said I would never miss. The job had not stolen my evenings. I had handed them over.

That night I understood that being a present father is not a function of love or of intention. It is a function of energy. If the rest of your life burns the energy out of you, the moments with your children turn into chores even when nobody else is asking you to drop them. That is when the father pillar started to become a real pillar in this method, with its own architecture and its own protections.

The four lives, all at once.

Then everything came at the same time. A wedding to prepare. A new role at the bank, in fact three roles in parallel, including the COO position. My father going through emergency open-heart surgery. COVID hitting the world in the middle of all that, with my teams to manage, our colleagues to send home, an entire business line to keep running under conditions nobody had been prepared for. A first pregnancy, lived in fear that I would bring the virus home and we would lose the baby. The birth of our first child. A new house with all the financial pressure that comes with it.

And I managed it. All of it. On paper, my life looked like a magazine cover. A senior role at a top private bank. A new home. A first child, healthy and wonderful. A wife who is a brilliant doctor, building her own medical career. By every external measure, I had made it.

But inside, I was empty.

For two years, I had only taken care of others. My father through his surgery. The wedding, to give my wife the day she dreamed of. The pregnancy, so everything would go right. My colleagues, so the bank would survive COVID. Our child, from the moment they were born. And in doing all of that, I completely forgot myself. No time for me. No more sport. No small pleasures that were just mine. I believed that the happiness of the people I love would be enough to make me happy. I neglected myself. And then I noticed something I am not proud of. I started to almost resent everything I had been sacrificing myself for, my family, my work, the life we had built, for having "deprived" me of my own. When in fact, it was me. I was the one who had decided I had to sacrifice myself for them. They never asked.

In that moment I understood something I should have learned earlier. The lessons from my parents' divorce, from the cramp in the hotel room, from the tears on a bench by the lake, and from the Friday night I outsourced the bottle, were not four separate lessons. They were one lesson, repeated four times, that I had refused to fully absorb. The four lives are not four problems. They are one system. And if you do not architect them deliberately, the whole thing collapses.

That is the moment I started building. Slowly. Across all four lives at once. The systems on this channel are what came out of that work.

Who this is for, broadly defined

This content is built for people operating in a high-pressure environment. The default profile is someone like me: a senior executive, an entrepreneur, a partner in a firm, an investor or trader, a director or VP, with young children and limited control over their schedule.

But the door is wide open. You don't need a C-level title to live this. If your work consumes you and you have young children at home, this method applies. Whether your week is shaped by board meetings, market opens, deadline-driven client calls, hospital rounds, or a tough team review on Thursday, if you recognise yourself in this pressure, you're welcome here.