What It Actually Takes to Operate at the Highest Levels of Power: Lessons from Geopolitical Strategist Vlada Galan

Jun 8

The people who shape global outcomes rarely announce themselves. They don’t show up on CNBC panels debating quarterly earnings. They show up in hotel suites in Paris, in emergency cabinet meetings at 3 a.m., and in rooms where a single conversation can shift a nation’s foreign policy.

Vlada Galan operates in those rooms.

As the founder of Oracle Advisory Group and a crisis management consultant who advises Heads of State across five continents, Vlada has built one of the most consequential—and least visible—careers in global power. She’s managed election campaigns and political crises in over a dozen countries, from Austria to Zimbabwe. She founded the International Ukrainian Crisis Fund.

In 2023, the Ukrainian government awarded her a medal for her service to her home country, a country she left at age six with her mother, a cardboard sign, and two words of English.

That origin story matters because understanding how Vlada Galan became who she is reveals something most leadership development content skips entirely: performance at the highest level is not a function of talent or pedigree. It is a function of identity, discipline, and a specific set of mental habits that most people have access to but never fully develop.

Vlada joined me for an extended conversation on the Executive Health and Life podcast, and what follows is the distillation of what she shared about operating at the top of a demanding, high-stakes world, and what leaders at every level can take from it.

Prefer to watch or listen? The full episode is below. Otherwise, keep reading for the complete written framework.

The Foundation Is Always Identity

Before we got into geopolitics, crisis strategy, or the mechanics of back-channel diplomacy, Vlada made one thing clear: everything starts with knowing who you are.

When I asked her what separates the world leaders and high-performing executives she advises from everyone else trying to reach that level, her first answer wasn’t strategy, access, or intelligence. It was identity.

“They certainly know who they are. They’re not confused about their identity; they’re not confused about where they’re going.”

This sounds simple, but it isn’t. Most executives operate with a contextual identity: they know who they are relative to their role, their company, or their current season of success. Strip away the title, the revenue, the team, and that certainty evaporates. The leaders Vlada works with don’t have that problem. Their sense of self is load-bearing and holds under pressure.

For high-performing founders and CEOs, identity is the first lever worth examining. The clearer you are about who you are at your core, independent of external validation, the more effectively you’ll perform when the environment turns hostile. And in business, as in geopolitics, the environment eventually turns hostile.

Vision Is a Precise Instrument, Not a Motivational Concept

The second trait Vlada identified in the top-tier leaders she advises is vision, but she means something specific by it. She’s not talking about aspirational language on a website. She means surgical clarity about what you are building and how you intend to build it.

“Someone who wants to run for Congress tells you, ‘I’m running to be the next congressman.’ Someone who wants to become a head of state tells you, ‘I’m running for the prime ministership.’ There’s not a confusion there.”

This level of specificity is worth sitting with. In executive health and performance coaching, one pattern I see most consistently among high-capacity operators is that their goals are declarative rather than tentative. They state what they’re doing, not what they’re considering. That linguistic precision is both a symptom and a driver of clarity, as it creates real-time accountability to the vision.

Vague vision produces vague execution. The leaders and founders who perform at the level Vlada works with have eliminated the qualifier from their internal language. They know exactly what they’re building, and that clarity compounds.

Discipline Is the Mechanism. Motivation Is Irrelevant.

One of the most useful things Vlada said in our conversation, and something that aligns directly with what the research on high performance consistently shows, is that the highest-level operators do not rely on motivation. They rely on discipline, specifically a set of non-negotiable daily principles that function regardless of how they feel.

“Nobody gets up every single day and thinks, ‘I’m so motivated, I’m so excited.’ There are days you get up where you’re not excited, where you’re not motivated—and they rely on a very consistent set of disciplinary principles to get them through those days.”

This is the part of the performance conversation that is most often lost in mainstream content. The mythology of motivation, the idea that high performers are more energized, more inspired, more driven, is not accurate. What distinguishes them is that their systems don’t depend on their emotional state. The work happens whether they feel like it or not.

Vlada specifically noted time-blocking, intelligent delegation, and goal markers as tools that the leaders she works with use routinely. These are not exotic strategies. They are basic operational disciplines executed with consistency. The gap between people who talk about these practices and people who actually run their lives on them is enormous, and it shows up directly in their output.

Imposter Syndrome Doesn’t Disappear. You Build a Protocol for It.

One of the most honest moments in our conversation came when Vlada described standing outside a private city club early in her career, frozen at the door in a new dress, the thought running through her: you’re just a poor Ukrainian girl. She walked in anyway.

What’s notable is that she still has versions of that experience today at the top of an extraordinary career, with a roster of Heads of State as clients. The feeling doesn’t go away. What changes is how quickly and systematically you move through it.

Vlada outlined a three-step framework she calls the three A’s:

Accept. Acknowledge the feeling without resistance. Don’t tell yourself you shouldn’t feel what you feel. Trying to suppress imposter syndrome typically amplifies it. Naming it clearly tends to reduce its grip.

Affirm. Run a rapid, specific inventory of why you have earned your place. Not generic self-talk, but a direct accounting of the actual work, sacrifice, and evidence that qualifies you to be in the room. Vlada’s version: “You came here. You learned a new language. You put yourself through school. You graduated with no student loans. You got a job on your own accord, with no connections, no family money. You deserve to be here.”

Act. Push through and take the action. Walk into the room. Introduce yourself. Lead with your presence. The evidence you just recited is sufficient, and now you move.

For founders and executives operating in unfamiliar environments, high-stakes deals, or rooms above their previous ceiling, this sequence is worth internalizing. The protocol doesn’t eliminate the discomfort. But it does make the discomfort irrelevant to what you do next.

Aggression Is a Tool. Know When to Use It.

Vlada has worked across cultures and political environments where American professional norms—the emphasis on consensus, diplomacy, and collegial restraint—are not the operating standard. In those environments, what the professional world often labels negatively in women, she learned to recognize as a competitive asset.

She told a story that makes the point more precisely than any framework could. While working in Africa on behalf of a client, she discovered that a senior government official—a bank governor—had issued a fraudulent wire confirmation and presented a fake SWIFT document to a sitting president. She was alone, female, in a foreign country, with millions of dollars at stake. The implicit expectation in the environment was that she would absorb it.

She didn’t. She called an emergency meeting with the president. She called out the fraud directly, publicly and privately, and saw the situation resolved.

Her reflection on it: “People will test your boundaries. The more you allow them to cross those boundaries and steamroll you, the more they’re going to take advantage of that.”

The lesson here extends well beyond conflict zones. In any high-stakes professional environment, whether in a boardroom, during a negotiation, or in a partnership that’s going sideways, there is a threshold beyond which being measured and diplomatic stops being a strategy and becomes a liability.

High-performing executives know where that threshold is and can cross it without hesitation when the situation demands it.

Aggression, deployed with precision and clarity, is not unprofessional. It is sometimes the only tool that works.

Be the No Person in the Room

One of the most practical insights Vlada offered, and one with direct application for anyone advising senior leadership or building their own organization, concerns the difference between short-term job security and long-term professional value.

“If you want to hang on to a job for the short run, be the yes person. If you want to hang on for the long term and develop a reputation for actually bringing change and bringing results, be the no person because that is the person in the room who is the most courageous to say what they actually think, no matter what the consequences might be.”

Vlada has been thrown out of presidential palaces for saying what she thought. She has also been invited back. Because when the room eventually settles, and the consensus-driven decision turns out badly, someone has to account for where the dissenting voice was. If it was never there, the advisor who should have provided it shares the consequences.

For high-level operators building their own teams: your most valuable people are the ones willing to tell you what you don’t want to hear. And for those in advisory roles—whether as a consultant, a board member, or an executive coach—your value is not in alignment. But instead, your clarity.

Track 2 Diplomacy and the Art of the Unofficial Deal

Most people understand diplomacy as a formal exchange between governments: foreign secretaries, State Department officials, and bilateral summits with prepared statements. Vlada operates in a parallel world where the actual work gets done before, or instead of, those formal exchanges.

Track 2 diplomacy refers to unofficial, back-channel negotiations between parties who cannot or will not engage directly through formal channels. The reasons vary: political optics, domestic hardliners, and public perception. But the need is consistent: something has to move the parties toward a position they can eventually make public.

Vlada described one such instance involving countries in the Middle East whose governments maintain an official stance of non-engagement. The formal talks kept breaking down, driven by hardliners on both sides who had no interest in a resolution. In back channels, the picture was different: officials from both governments, away from cameras, found far more common ground than their public positions suggested.

“You come to agreements sitting in a hotel room suite. Both representatives go back to their respective countries. Next thing you know, a deal was made publicly.”

The broader lesson for executives: most consequential decisions don’t happen in the formal meeting. They happen in the conversations that precede or follow it. The ability to facilitate those conversations—to move things forward in informal settings, to build the trust that makes a formal agreement possible—is a distinct skill that rarely appears in leadership training curricula, and rarely gets discussed as a performance variable.

Building From Nothing: The Resilience Requirement

Vlada became a millionaire before she turned 30. She did it without family money, without connections, and without even knowing what an EIN was when she opened her first business bank account. When the banker explained it, she learned, moved on, and kept going.

The throughline in her account of building Oracle Advisory Group is the willingness to fail, to absorb failure as information, and to try again without expecting persistence to become comfortable eventually.

“You’re going to fail more times than you succeed. But in one of those, you’re going to learn a lot. You learn a lot more from losing than you do from winning.”

And then, perhaps the most useful reframe for anyone who has found a groove in their business and started playing it safe: “When something becomes very easy and very comfortable, you’ve outgrown your environment—and you staying there is not increasing your potential.”

This is the trap that takes out more high-potential operators than almost anything else. Not failure. But premature comfort. The business is working, the systems are running, and the revenue is stable, but the operator stops pushing into territory that would drive genuine growth.

Vlada’s model is the opposite: she deliberately takes on engagements in regions she hasn’t worked, with clients and political environments she hasn’t encountered before, specifically because the unfamiliarity is the point.

That appetite for difficulty is a discipline, practiced deliberately, and keeps performance at the edge rather than the center.

The Physical Foundation Behind Elite Performance

An often-overlooked dimension of Vlada’s story is how deliberately she manages the physical and psychological inputs that support her work. She operates in conflict zones, advises leaders during crises, travels constantly across time zones, and carries the cognitive load of some of the world's most complex strategic environments. That load has a biological cost.

Her approach to managing it is specific. She weight trains. She cooks—braiding bread after a 12-hour day, a practice her peers find incongruous, and she finds essential. She deliberately seeks environments that force genuine disconnection: the Arctic Circle, African safaris, the open desert. Not because they’re pleasant, but because cities, even beautiful ones, don’t produce the neurological reset that genuine recovery requires.

“When I disconnect, I really remove myself. I go somewhere quieter.”

The leaders who sustain performance over decades share a consistent pattern: they treat recovery with the same intentionality they bring to their business. They understand that the cognitive capacity, emotional regulation, and decision quality their work demands are biological outputs that, in turn, require intentional biological inputs. Sleep, movement, genuine disconnection, and nutrition are operational requirements.

For the founders and executives reading this: your biology is either supporting your performance or slowly limiting it. There is no neutral position. And unlike most business problems, the solution here is not more complexity. It is more discipline applied to fewer, more fundamental variables.

The Closing Thought: Identity As the Whole Game

When I asked Vlada what that six-year-old girl on the plane, the one with two words of English and a cardboard sign, would say if she could see what she’d built, she paused for a moment.

“I think she’d say we did it.”

That answer contains everything. Not “I did it.” We. The girl who didn’t know how she would enter a classroom and speak to someone, and the woman who walks into rooms with Heads of State. The same person, over time, held together by an identity never fully defined by the circumstances surrounding it.

That is what elite performance actually looks like at its foundation. Not a collection of habits or frameworks or strategies—though all of those matter. Instead, it’s a relationship with your own identity that is durable enough to survive the rooms that were never built for you, the failures that were never supposed to happen, and the moments when every external signal says stop.

Vlada didn’t stop, and the world she now operates in reflects that.

For the executives and founders reading this: your biology, mindset, and identity are a cohesive system. And when that system is operating at its full capacity, the rooms you can access, and the impact you can have inside them, expand in ways that are genuinely difficult to anticipate.

That is the work. And it starts with the question Vlada has been answering her entire life: who are you when the room wasn’t built for you?

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Track 2 diplomacy and how does it differ from formal diplomatic channels?

Track 2 diplomacy refers to unofficial, back-channel negotiations between parties who cannot engage formally due to political constraints, public pressure, or internal hardliners. While Track 1 involves official government-to-government dialogue, Track 2 creates space for conversations that couldn’t take place in public without political cost. Most major geopolitical agreements have a Track 2 component, where the groundwork is laid informally before anything is announced officially.

What traits do the highest-performing world leaders share?

Based on Vlada Galan’s experience advising Heads of State across five continents, the consistent traits are: a settled and clear sense of identity, unambiguous vision for what they are building, the ability to reframe rejection without losing momentum, deep resilience, and a disciplined operating system that doesn’t depend on motivation or emotional state.

How do high-performing executives manage imposter syndrome?

Vlada Galan’s three-step protocol—Accept, Affirm, Act—provides a practical framework. Accept the feeling without suppression. Affirm the specific evidence that qualifies you to be in the room. Then take the action regardless. The goal is not to eliminate the discomfort but to make it irrelevant to your behavior.

What role does physical health play in executive performance?

Significant. The cognitive load that top-level executives and advisors carry- decision quality, emotional regulation, and sustained focus under pressure is a biological output. It requires biological inputs: sleep, movement, genuine recovery, and nutrition. Leaders who sustain elite performance over decades treat these inputs as operational requirements, not lifestyle choices.

What is crisis management at the government level?

At the government level, crisis management involves rapid strategic communication, narrative control, and coordinated action under extreme time pressure. The first 48 hours are critical, as whoever sets the narrative first has a structural advantage. It requires coordinating among cabinet officials, managing media cycles, and implementing an actionable strategy while the situation is still unfolding. It is, as Vlada describes it, consistently a dumpster fire, and the goal is to resolve it before it spreads.

How do you build a career advising at the highest levels of power?

Vlada Galan’s path involved formal education in political science and international relations, early hands-on experience in domestic political campaigns, deliberate expansion into international work, and a willingness to take on engagements in difficult regions that others avoided. The credential stack mattered—she holds a Master’s from Harvard—but so did the track record built through real-world work in complex environments. Access at the highest levels is earned through demonstrated results, not proximity.

If this conversation sparked something about your own performance architecture — the habits, identity, and physical foundation supporting the work you’re doing—I’d like to hear from you. The executives I work with are building something significant, and they understand that their biology shouldn’t be the variable that limits it. [Connect here.]