As we continue with our much-loved Entrepreneur of the Month series here at My Swiss Story, I am always excited to discover the stories behind the women who have chosen to take a different path, challenge the status quo, and build something meaningful of their own.
This month, I am excited to introduce Anna Moretti, founder of The Highly Sensitive Coach. After more than two decades in global pharmaceutical companies and senior leadership roles, Anna made the courageous decision to leave her corporate career and build a business around something she had only recently come to understand about herself: high sensitivity.
Today, Anna works at the intersection of women’s empowerment, leadership, and the hidden potential of high sensitivity. Through coaching, speaking, workshops, writing, and public conversations, she is working to change the way sensitivity is understood, not as a weakness to overcome, but as a genuine leadership strength.
In this interview, Anna shares her journey from Italy to Switzerland, her transition from corporate leadership to solopreneurship, the personal beliefs she had to confront along the way, and why she believes that asking for support is not a weakness, but an act of self-responsibility.
Please tell our readers a little bit about yourself
I’m Anna Moretti, originally from Ferrara, Italy. I moved to Switzerland 12 years ago when my husband was relocated by Novartis; we came as a family, with our two children, who were three and one at the time.
Image credit: Raluca Antuca Photography
I spent over 20 years building a career in global pharmaceutical companies, first in Italy and then in Switzerland, where I held senior leadership roles at Roche and other global pharmaceutical companies. From the outside, it looked like success. From the inside, something didn’t quite add up.
A few years ago, I discovered I’m a Highly Sensitive Person, and it changed the direction of my life.
That discovery didn’t just explain a few things about myself; it eventually led me to leave a 20-year corporate career and found The Highly Sensitive Coach, which I’ll tell you more about below.
Beyond work, I am dedicated to my family. I’m a mother of two teenagers, who take up a lot of my mental space these days, even if, like all teenagers, they’re mostly off doing their own thing. I share a great deal of time with my husband, who has been a steady, grounding presence through every chapter of this journey, including the biggest leap of leaving a secure corporate career behind.
I’m also someone who genuinely needs regular time in nature to feel like myself. I’m lucky enough to have a forest within walking distance of home, and I go there almost daily. And I share my home with two cats, who I’ve come to see as unexpectedly important companions in staying emotionally grounded.
Tell us about your current business. What are you doing exactly?
I’m the founder of The Highly Sensitive Coach, and I work at the intersection of women’s empowerment, leadership, and the hidden potential of high sensitivity.
At the individual level, I coach highly sensitive women who are in, or aspire to, leadership roles, helping them stop managing their sensitivity like a liability and start leading from it: with empathy, depth, intuition, and authenticity, without burning out or dimming who they are to be taken seriously. But I don’t see my work as one-to-one coaching alone. I see myself as building something bigger: a voice for a cultural shift in how high sensitivity is understood.
Right now, the dominant narrative treats high sensitivity as a weakness, something to fix, mask, or push through. I want to help rewrite that narrative.
Roughly 30% of the population is highly sensitive, distributed across genders. That’s a huge amount of untapped depth, perceptiveness, and relational intelligence sitting inside organizations today, usually unnoticed, because corporate cultures still tend to reward speed, control, and a forceful push to get one’s own ideas across, over reflection and nuance.
When that happens, individuals lose confidence and organizations lose talent, insight, and innovation they didn’t even know they had.
So my work happens on three levels:
Individuals: helping highly sensitive women build the self-awareness and confidence to lead authentically, rather than suppress who they are.
Organizations: speaking, running workshops, and raising awareness inside companies about what psychologically safe, human-centered leadership actually requires, and what gets lost when sensitivity goes unrecognized.
The wider conversation: contributing publicly, through writing, speaking, and interviews like this one, to a broader cultural reframe: that high sensitivity isn’t fragility, but an evolutionarily preserved form of collective intelligence, and a real leadership asset.
My hope is that anyone reading this, whether they’re highly sensitive themselves, or leading a team that includes people who are, walks away curious enough to look at sensitivity differently, and maybe even a little inspired to do something with that, for themselves or for the people around them.
Tell us your story, how did you come up with this idea?
For more than two decades I worked in global pharma, starting in Regulatory Affairs in Italy, then building my career further in Switzerland, eventually reaching senior leadership. It was a career built on precision, responsibility, and high performance, and from the outside, it looked like success.
While I was still working in corporate, I trained and certified as a coach, partly because coaching was already used as a leadership tool at Roche, and I’d become genuinely passionate about people development. At that point, though, coaching was an additional skill, not yet a calling to leave anything behind.
The real turning point came about a year ago, when my son started struggling at school. As I looked for ways to understand and support him, a friend pointed me toward the concept of high sensitivity.
I’d actually read Elaine Aron’s The Highly Sensitive Person five or six years earlier and recognized bits of myself in it, but I’d closed the book and moved on without grasping its depth. This time was different. I recognized my son in it, and then I recognized myself.
That sent me back into training, webinars, and eventually into coaching and therapy of my own, revisiting more than 47 years of my life through the lens of high sensitivity. I realized I couldn’t fully help my son without first reconnecting with my own sensitivity.
That process was profoundly transformative, and it led me to a decision I once would have considered unthinkable: leaving my corporate career entirely to build The Highly Sensitive Coach.
It was a significant change. After years of professional experience and the security of a senior corporate career, stepping into solopreneurship required me to redefine how I understood myself, including becoming comfortable with being visible through personal branding, something that used to feel exposing. That process is still unfolding, honestly.
Building the business in Switzerland has meant learning an entirely new set of skills, not scientific or managerial this time, but deeply personal ones. It has also meant building things slowly and intentionally, staying close to what I actually believe in, rather than rushing toward outcomes.
Tell us about a setback that shaped you
A setback that shaped me deeply was the challenge of confronting one of the most deeply rooted, and most unconscious, beliefs I held: the connection I had built between money and my own worth.
For years, I measured my worth through a simple equation: high income meant high worth, low income meant low worth, no income meant no worth. I didn’t consciously believe this. I would never have said it out loud, but it was running underneath almost every decision I made.
Every challenge I pushed through at work was, in some way, chasing the same reward: recognition, validation, approval. And whenever I got it, I’d downplay it and move straight on to the next goal.
When I started imagining a life more aligned with who I actually am, something became clear.
This belief was the real thing holding me back, not the money itself, but the meaning I had attached to it.
Image credit: Marta Ruggi Photography
I had spent two decades searching outside myself for proof that I was enough: a bigger title, a higher salary, more recognition. And when I finally left my senior leadership role after 20 years to build The Highly Sensitive Coach, I had to face that equation head-on, without the external scaffolding that had been propping it up for so long.
I wish I could say it resolved itself neatly the moment I made the decision. It didn’t. Separating my sense of worth from my income and job title has been one of the slowest, most uncomfortable pieces of inner work I’ve done, and if I’m honest, it’s still not entirely finished.
What I have learned, though, is this: a salary, a title, or someone’s approval can reflect your worth back to you, but none of them can create it.
That understanding now shapes how I lead my business and my life. I no longer build my sense of value around outcomes I can’t fully control: client numbers, visibility, income in a given month. I try to root it in something steadier: whether I’m living and working in alignment with who I am.
It’s a practice, not a fixed state, and I imagine I’ll keep returning to it. But knowing that has made me freer to choose my own path, and it’s exactly the freedom I now try to help my clients find in their own leadership, too.
What is a day like “in your heels?”
My husband and I are early risers; we’re usually up between 5 and 6am, a habit we built years ago when our kids were small and we wanted some calm time to ourselves before the chaos of school runs began. That habit stuck. We have breakfast together; he reads the news, and I meditate.
Since going independent, I no longer have a commute, and my days are far more flexible, though not unstructured. I’m most productive in the mornings, so I try to protect that time for creative or deep-focus work, and I prefer scheduling client sessions earlier in the day too.
That said, some of my clients are in different time zones, so my afternoons often include calls as well; it’s a bit of a daily juggling act.
One of the biggest shifts since becoming a solopreneur is that I actually listen to my body now.
If I need a break, I take one, sometimes a midday nap, sometimes a Yoga Nidra session to reset my nervous system. My daily forest walk is non-negotiable; depending on the season, that might be early morning or after dinner in summer, or right after lunch in winter. I’m fortunate to be able to reach it on foot from home.
Food matters a lot to me too. I spend real time shopping for fresh ingredients and cooking, both lunch and dinner, and I try to protect mealtimes as a moment of connection with my family (my teenagers currently have their own opinions about that, but I keep trying!).
And while I’m someone who genuinely loves the quiet of home, I also have a strong need for deep connection with other people, so I make a point of nurturing my social relationships, usually through one-on-one time with people I find inspiring or with whom I feel a real exchange.
Very HSP of me, I know.
My two cats round things out: a few minutes with them, hand on their belly feeling them breathe, is one of the simplest and most effective ways I know to co-regulate and calm my nervous system.
Would you like to give any specific advice to fellow entrepreneurs?
The advice I’d give, and the one I wish someone had given me sooner, is this: you don’t have to figure this out alone.
For most of my life I believed that needing help meant I wasn’t capable. Now I know asking for support is an act of self-responsibility, not weakness.
Image credit: Marta Ruggi Photography
Practically, that means finding a mentor whose journey resonates with you, and considering coaching. Mentoring helps you learn from someone else’s experience, while coaching helps you free yourself from the limiting beliefs and conditioning that keep you playing small.
The deeper advice underneath that: build self-awareness early. Get to know your values, your intuition, your natural strengths, including the ones the world sometimes labels as “too much” or a “weakness.”
Once I stopped seeing my sensitivity as something to manage and started seeing it as a genuine part of who I am, everything shifted: my choices, my relationships, my sense of purpose.
That reframe, more than any single tactic, is what I’d want other women starting out to hear.
Did Anna’s story resonate with you? Are you curious to learn more about high sensitivity, authentic leadership, and how sensitivity can become a genuine strength?
Connect with Anna Moretti through The Highly Sensitive Coach or find her on LinkedIn to learn more about her work around high sensitivity, women’s empowerment, and leadership. If you’d like to connect with Anna directly, you can also book a call with her here.
Connect with her on LinkedIn or browse her Website.
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