My Story

There are moments in life where success opens a door.

And sometimes, when you walk through it, everything that was never built on truth begins to crumble.

This is what happened to me.

 

In 2019, I was standing in one of the great halls of the musical world, conducting the horn group of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra.

This was not a small thing for me.

This was one of these dreams I had not even expected to reach before the age of fifty.

And there I was.

Forty-one years old.

Standing there with my greatest musical heroes.

Conducting them.

Feeling the kind of success that goes straight into your bones because you know how much discipline, devotion, loneliness, precision, criticism, rejection, training, and fire it took to arrive there.

 

At that time, I also had a professorship for conducting at the University of Cologne/Wuppertal.

I was married.

I had my daughter.

From the outside, everything looked like a successful life.

A serious career.

A respected position.

A family.

A title.

A future.

 

And I remember this moment very clearly.

I said to the universe:

Okay. I love this kind of success. Give me more. I am ready.

And the universe said:

Okay. Let’s see if you are really ready.

 

Then the crumble started.

First, my professorship ended.

I did not receive the life tenure that had been promised to me.

And the way it happened was brutal.

There was not a clean, elegant, professional ending.

There was pressure.

There was humiliation.

There was the feeling of being pushed out of something I had given my whole life force to.

I lost around 70,000 euros of yearly income.

Just like that.

 

Okay, universe.

Step one.

 

Then I came home.

And in my mind, I had this very human wish.

I wanted to be held.

I wanted someone to say:

Hildegard, we will figure this out.

We will stand together.

We will find a way.

But that is not what happened.

 

My husband, whom I had been married to for more than twenty years, said something very different.

He made it clear that now, because I was no longer earning money in the same way, because I was back home, because my position had changed, he did not need me anymore.

I was told to leave.

Leave the house.

Leave him.

Leave the life I thought we had built.

And then I discovered that there was another woman.

A younger woman.

 

And with that, the personal collapse arrived directly after the professional collapse.

No pause.

No gentle transition.

No space to breathe.

 

I left the house with my daughter.

With almost nothing.

With a red zero on my bank account.

No home.

No job.

No money.

No marriage.

No institutional title.

No old identity to hide behind.

 

This was my quantum crumble.

The collapse of the old structure at every level.

Career.

Marriage.

Money.

Home.

Identity.

Certainty.

Everything that had once made me feel safe was suddenly gone.

 

And I know how this sounds when you read it from the outside.

It sounds like disaster.

It sounds like failure.

It sounds like the moment where a woman could disappear into shame, bitterness, exhaustion, survival, or silence.

And yes, for a while, it was horrible.

 

I will never romanticize collapse.

There are moments in life where you do not immediately see the lesson.

You only see the floor.

You only see the next bill.

You only see the next legal letter.

You only see your child.

You only see the life you thought you had disappearing in front of you.

 

But now, when I look back, I can say something I could not have said then:

These were the greatest stepping stones of my life.

Because the collapse forced me to ask a much deeper question.

Who am I when the title is gone?

Who am I when the institution is gone?

Who am I when the marriage is gone?

Who am I when the applause is gone?

Who am I when the old score can no longer be performed?

 

And slowly, very slowly, I began to see something.

In every position I had ever been in, I had always been doing the same thing.

As a conductor.

As a professor.

As a partner.

As a mother.

As a leader.

As a woman.

 

I was always trying to unlock potential.

The potential of an orchestra.

The potential of an institution.

The potential of a musician.

The potential of a room.

The potential of a person.

The potential of myself.

I wanted to bring beauty and power into the world.

I wanted people to feel what becomes possible when they stop playing beneath their capacity.

 

And suddenly I understood:

This was never only about conducting music.

This was about leadership.

This was about energy.

This was about identity.

This was about what happens inside a human being when pressure arrives.

 

Because standing in front of an orchestra teaches you things no leadership book can teach you.

The orchestra responds immediately.

To your clarity.

To your doubt.

To your hesitation.

To your tension.

To your breath.

To your timing.

To the way you enter the room.

To the way you hold the silence before the first sound.

 

You cannot fake leadership in front of an orchestra.

You can know the score perfectly and still disturb the music.

You can have all the information and still not give the upbeat.

You can feel deeply and still not move.

 

And this is exactly what I began to see in myself.

And later, in my clients.

 

Most people do not fail because they do not know enough.

Especially intelligent, sensitive, high-achieving people.

They have read the books.

They have done the trainings.

They have bought the courses.

They have strategies.

They have ideas.

They have vision.

They often know exactly what to do.

 

But when the moment of action comes, another score begins to conduct them.

Overthinking.

Over-responsibility.

Overgiving.

Overachievement.

Self-doubt.

Fear of being visible.

Fear of disappointing someone.

Fear of success.

Fear of losing love, belonging, safety, money, identity, control.

 

And this is the moment where the real work begins.

Because the problem is rarely the problem.

The visible problem is often only the entrance.

The sales issue.

The leadership issue.

The career issue.

The communication issue.

The procrastination.

The constant delay.

The exhaustion.

The repeated conflict.

The feeling of being capable and still not moving.

 

When something keeps repeating, there is a pattern conducting it.

And once you see the pattern, you cannot unsee it.

 

This became the foundation of ConductingLeadership.

Not as a concept I invented from a clean desk.

It came from the podium.

It came from the collapse.

It came from the years where I had to rebuild myself from the inside.

It came from having to move before certainty arrived.

It came from learning that self-leadership is not a nice idea.

It is the moment where you stay in the room with the future you said you wanted.

Even when the nervous system wants to run back to the old familiar score.

 

This is why I do not teach transformation as theory.

I know what it means to lose the structure.

I know what it means to stand in the void.

I know what it means to be highly capable and still feel completely stripped of the identity that once held everything together.

I know what it means to sit there and think:

How did I get here?

And I also know what it means to rebuild.

Not by becoming someone else.

By finally becoming unavailable for the patterns that were never truly mine.

 

Today, my work brings together the world of orchestral conducting, energetic leadership, identity work, nervous system awareness, strategic action, and deep pattern recognition.

I work with conductors, entrepreneurs, leaders, creatives, coaches, and high-achieving women who are no longer interested in performing success while secretly abandoning themselves.

They are capable.

They are intelligent.

They are often already successful.

And still, something keeps repeating.

They carry too much.

They delay the move they already know they need to make.

They overprepare.

They overexplain.

They give too much.

They wait for certainty.

They stay loyal to old identities because those identities once helped them survive.

And then they come into my world.

We look at the score underneath the score.

We look at the invisible pattern that has been conducting the visible result.

We look at where leadership collapses under pressure.

We look at the moment where knowing does not turn into doing.

And then we recalibrate.

Not dramatically.

Not performatively.

Precisely.

Because in conducting, one millimeter changes the sound.

One breath changes the entrance.

One unclear gesture can disturb an entire orchestra.

And one clear internal decision can reorganize a whole life.

This is the work.

To stop disturbing your own orchestra.

To stop leaving the podium of your own vision.

To stop waiting for the perfect moment where fear has disappeared.

The orchestra does not need your perfection.

The orchestra needs your presence.

 

Your life does not need another performance of the old score.

It needs your leadership.

The kind of leadership that stays.

The kind of leadership that listens.

The kind of leadership that acts.

The kind of leadership that can hold pressure without abandoning the vision.

 

This is what I had to learn through the crumble.

This is what I now help my clients embody.

Because sometimes the thing you thought had ruined your life becomes the exact initiation into the life you were actually here to conduct.

And sometimes the collapse of the old score is the beginning of the real music.

 

Welcome to ConductingLeadership.

The place where we ask the question:

What keeps repeating?

And which score are you conducting from?