You can become very successful and still lose touch with what you actually want.

Stories Work is an executive coaching and advisory practice for people deciding what comes next and why.

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For People Rethinking What Comes Next

Maybe it’s been a few months since your last day. You’re taking calls from your favorite executive recruiters. You’re considering a board seat. You finally have time for the things you kept putting off. You don’t have to rush to find the next thing.

Or maybe you haven’t made a move yet, but you’ve started dreaming about it.

Either way, you have a feeling that something’s off.

You’ve built a career solving difficult problems and making consequential decisions under pressure. You know how to read the room, solve the problem, earn trust, recover quickly, and create value. You know how to succeed.

And because you’re capable of making a lot of things work, it can become hard to tell the difference between an opportunity you actually want and one you simply know how to get.

Success gives you more options. It doesn’t necessarily make the next choice easier.

You didn’t become successful overnight.

You’ve learned what gets rewarded, what you’re good at, and what has worked.

Eventually, those ways of moving have become so familiar they’ve stopped feeling learned. They just feel like you.

After more than two decades working inside institutions that reward ambition and performance, I began examining what shaped how I learned to move through the world.

What began as a personal inquiry evolved into the Architecture of Advantage™: a lens I developed for understanding how confidence, opportunity, ambition, and institutional fluency are shaped long before success becomes visible.

Once you see how your success was formed, you can’t unsee it.

What you do next is the question.

At this stage, the challenge often isn’t finding the next opportunity.

It’s deciding which opportunities are actually worth choosing.

You can make a compelling case for more than one path. You know you could succeed in any number of them. But your ability to succeed at an option doesn’t tell you whether it deserves your time, energy, and ambition.

That’s where our work begins.

We look closely at how your success has been built, what is still serving you, and what is no longer working to your advantage.

From there, we develop the criteria you’ll use to decide what comes next, whether it’s another operating role, a board seat, a portfolio career, or something you haven’t considered yet.

You don’t need more options.
You need a clearer way to decide which ones are worth choosing.

Ways to work with me

Our work can take different forms, depending on your needs.

Clarifying Conversation

A session focused on a specific decision, transition, or moment of uncertainty.

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Architect Your Advantage™

A structured, multi-session engagement for people who want to understand how their success was formed, what matters now, and what may be getting in the way.

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Select Advisory

Longer-term work for people navigating a sustained period of change, a series of consequential decisions, or ongoing professional evolution.

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Select Client & Colleague Reflections

Working with Ara feels like being seen by someone who understands you completely — not just what you do, but how you move through the world. She has an uncanny ability to find the heart of an idea and reflect it back in a way that feels both authentic and revelatory.

Ara doesn’t try to impose a system or a framework; she listens deeply, meets you where you are, and builds from there. Every conversation leaves you with more clarity, more space, and a deeper connection to what actually matters. It’s rare to find someone who can hold both the creative and the strategic with such ease.

Globally renowned artist whose work bridges visual storytelling and intellectual rigor

Ara is the kind of leader who elevates people, teams, and entire organizations. She empowers others with clarity and trust — creating the conditions for high performance, deeper engagement, and real growth.

Her coaching mindset is a true differentiator. Ara asks incisive, generative questions that widen perspective, spark connections, and help people navigate complexity with confidence. I’ve seen her strengthen leaders, unlock capability, and catalyze meaningful change across functions and levels.

Global Talent & Leadership Development Leader with deep expertise in organizational capability, talent management, and executive growth

Ara is a thoughtful, practiced, and deeply learned advocate for mentoring, guiding, and advancing human skill development across industries. An attentive listener with a calm, confident presence, Ara brings a rare blend of insight, experience, and empathy — drawing on a lifetime of leadership, learning, and observation.

I’m proud to serve alongside her on two boards and have learned a great deal from both our collaboration and friendship.

Board director and private investor with extensive leadership experience across multiple industries

Ara Tucker

Ara Tucker, Founder and Principal

Across more than two decades in law, higher education, finance, media, health tech, and cultural institutions, I’ve worked as a corporate attorney, C-suite executive, board director, writer, and advisor.

I’ve held executive leadership roles at Flatiron Health, Cityblock Health, and Audible and currently serve on the boards of MoMA PS1, The Dermot Company, and Meditation4Leadership.

I’m the host of the I’m Here Too podcast and the creator of the limited audio series Nepo Baby: The Architecture of Advantage.

I’m also an ICF Associate Certified Coach and Hogan-certified coach, with an A.B. from Princeton University and J.D. from NYU School of Law.

Speaking & Organizational Engagements

For institutions rethinking leadership, talent, culture, and innovation.

I partner selectively with leadership teams, corporate clients, universities, and cultural institutions through keynotes, facilitated conversations, workshops, and executive advisory.

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