Marco Ayala
MD. MBA.
Certified Executive Coach
Vertical leadership developer
healthcare leadership coach
Who am I?
I have been a practicing pediatrician in private practice for over 3 decades, and have managed my own practice throughout this time, with the ups and downs that entrepreneurship has.
My career towards Coaching started more than 15 years ago in 2006, going through a university diploma in Transpersonal Psychology, and another one in Health Psychology.
Later, in 2009 I obtained the level of Master Practitioner in Neurolinguistic Programming, and my first International Coaching Certification, by the International Coaching Community in 2010. From then on, I started my coaching practice, using it as a development tool in personal domains. Thus, I have offered more than 500 hours of coaching over the last decade.
In 2014 I graduated from the MBA at ISEADE, which helped me to change my mental framework and understand the business world. In May 2024 I completed my training program and became certified as an Executive Coach (ICF Level 2), with a specialization as a Healthcare Learship Coach by the Center for Executive Coaching, in conjunction with the Center for Professional Development at Saint Joseph’s University.
To have finished my training in this prestigious Center allowed me to be elegible for the member category of the International coaching Federation (ICF) and the European Mentoring and Coaching Council.
I also have been trained in Vertical Development Tools for Coaching, with the Vertical Development Institute.
My Personal Motto:
Transforming Leadership from Within
How will it be
work with me?
Ready to lead with more clarity, breadth and results? I’ll tell you what it will be like to work with me.
For more than 30 years as a pediatrician I accompanied complex human processes: children, mothers and fathers (each with unique needs and expectations), healthcare teams, and critical decision making in rapidly changing environments, with little actionable information.
And at the same time, to be able to see the long term: to see how what I do has an impact so that these people can develop and have a full and meaningful life, adding benefit to the community where they will participate in the future.
When I am interacting with a toddler and his family, I see and address the immediate demand, while perceiving what this community can become in the next 20 to 30 years. I can even see the next generation that will come from this little one, and the impact I can have on that future. My interventions are designed to reach that impact in that time frame.
That experience taught me something essential:
people change more sustainably when they change the way they make sense, not just when they add techniques or knowledge.
My purpose has not changed, it has just moved scenery and moved tools.
Today I bring that rigor to the executive world: I help managers and teams evolve their mental operating system to make better decisions, collaborate with less friction and sustain strategic tensions without falling into pendulums. And show the perspective of the larger system in which they are immersed, and the long term where they will act.
My value proposition
I am the Executive Coach with an axis specialized in Vertical Development.
Not only will refine ou executive skills and competencies (executive coaching is the ideal tool for that); I’ll walk with you to amplify your thinking structure with which you lead. We will go further “learning tools”, to update the frame and mindset from which you decide, prioritize and coordinate actions. is the diffeence between “installing more apps”, and “updating your OS”.
What can you get with my pproach?
- Higher quality decisions in contexts of uncertainty and ambiguity.
- Better systemic coordination: fewer silos, no need for compartmentalization, and you can manage interconnected and interdependent teams.
- Paradox management (short y long term; results and y welfare; control and y autonomy).
- Measurable and sustainable changes, because they are born from an expanded mental framework, a broader mode of meaning, and in an extended time horizon.
Why Vertical Development in executive leadership coaching?
You have come to your actual leadership position after a long amd hard walk inwhich you have accrued knowledge, learnings and experiences, skills and competencies that allowed you to build your way to the present. These are the “apps” that you have installed for years of hard work. And if you have reached your actual role, we can assume that you have internalized all this technical features, and use them with intention.
What is not guaranteed by this path is your mental framework, your “operating system”, that with which you produce meaning, with which you assign meaning, with which you create purpose:
- The assumptions(not entirely conscious) on which you base your decisions.
- Your strategy for responding to paradoxes and uncertainty (and it’s not about reactivity or proactivity).
- Your ability to navigate dilemmas and ambiguity: in the face of the organization’s expectations of your performance(always increasing), the market’s demands(endlessly unmet), and the needs(sometimes in apparent contradiction) of your teams.
- Your relationship with your own identity: your personal agency and power, you perception of time, the building of a perspective, your relation to norms and regulations, your motivation, your attention span, your self regulation capacity, your self-awareness and awareness of others.
- All this, in a perspective that plans for short-term profitability and growth results, while contemplating the impact of the realization of the purpose and mission in the organization, in the community and in the long term.
Your “apps” are installed via horizontal development
El “Sistema Operativo” se actualiza en el Desarrollo Vertical
From pediatrics to the executive committee: the clinical advantage
My clinical experience has given me three advantages that I put at your service today:
- Fine-tuned diagnostic mindset: distinguish “symptoms” from causes (personal, relational and systemic).
- Safe intervention: design safe-to-fail “experiments” with clear limits and risk-benefit balance (as in a clinical protocol).
- Human accompaniment: working with emotion without losing rigor or focus on results. For me, emotions are“symptoms“: they are data, they are drivers of your way of processing information, and they correspond to your mental strategies. Tracking them and using them as data is tremendously useful, and very different from simply affirming them, or worse, ignoring them.
To this, I add my professional training as an Executive Coach, my training in NLP (Master Practitioner), in Health Psychology, in training in complexity frameworks through Vertical Development Coaching, and an MBA with my own business experience.
All this background is available to you, so that the transformation does translate into business.
How we work (3-layer architecture, focused on Vertical Development)
- Mindset and meaning (vertical core): we make “object” what previously possessed you (assumptions, loyalties, narratives). I expand with you the perspective with frameworks such as Subject-Object and developmental stages.
- Relationship and coordination: we turn these new perspectives into conversations, agreements and polarity design (e.g., speed and quality) for your team to execute with situational intelligence.
- System and results: we anchor it in rituals, dual metrics (result + learning) and a portfolio of experiments that make the impact visible.
We will put all this into practice so that you can use it effectively.
What can you expect:
- Greater clarity in persistent dilemmas: those “on the one hand…on the other hand” situations that either paralyze or force you to choose an option (where you gain something and lose something). You won’t have to decide, because you can decide to integrate.
- Better quality of decisions under uncertainty and ambiguity.
- More coordinated, interdependent teams with less political attrition.
- Execution with learning: you advance without losing security or ethics.
- Measurable impact: we define “vital” indicators before starting.
Let’s connect. I’d love to have an exploratory conversation to find out if this is the path you’re looking for.
certifications and memberships
What can you expect from me
in your coaching process?
Job
First of all, there are no easy solutions, no shortcuts.
Self-study
You will be aware of your potential to use it intentionally.
Structure
You will work with industry-proven methods and tools.
Commitment
I will be with you every step of the way
Freedom
You decide the direction and objectives, and you decide the pace of the process.
Support
If necessary, I can refer you to specific specialists.
Confidentiality
Ethics that guarantees confidentiality and privacy
Change
You will change, and that will have an impact all around you.
Executive Coaching can be a practical, expeditious and straightforward tool
But it can also be a process of development and evolution, deeply transforming, especially for your role as a leader.
You will decide the depth you need to explore to achieve your objectives.
However you want to use it, the tools we will put into practice have the structure, rigor and support you will need to achieve valuable, meaningful, sustainable and well-structured objectives.









