About Matri

Hi, I’m Jacqueline Wilf, founder of Matri.

I'm a coach, an executive, and a mother of two. I built Matri the way most things worth building get built: from the experience of needing something that didn't quite exist yet.

I spent almost a decade as an executive coach, working primarily with women founders navigating the particular demands of building something ambitious while also building a life. The questions they brought me were questions about identity and purpose under pressure: who they were becoming, what they were willing to hold, what they were ready to leave behind. When I became a mother, I recognized something in myself that I'd been hearing in those conversations for years. The shift was significant enough to need a framework, not just support.

That recognition brought me to Columbia University, where I spent three years researching matrescence alongside leading minds in psychology and maternal health. What the research confirmed was what I'd felt and witnessed firsthand: matrescence isn't a disruption to a woman's development. It's a continuation of it. One of the most significant developmental inflection points she will ever move through.

The Matri Method grew from that convergence: a decade of coaching experience with women in leadership, three years of graduate research, and the lived reality of navigating matrescence as an executive myself. It is a developmental framework grounded in Positive Psychology, transformational learning, and experiential practice. Designed as a coach, not just a researcher, because a framework only matters if it works in the room.

In practice, that means using structured tools, including the Aware-Explore-Apply model and the ORID reflective process, to create the conditions for real insight and meaningful forward movement. Not advice. Not a curriculum to follow. A set of questions, structures, and containers designed to help you access the clarity you already hold and build on it.

I work one-on-one with mothers at every stage of matrescence: women stepping back into their careers, women in the middle of a significant identity shift, women ready to build what comes next. I also hold community workshops and group cohorts, because mothers need each other in a particular way. When we gather with openness and shared experience, something unlocks. Not just for the individual, but in what becomes possible.

I work primarily with founders and executive-level mothers, women holding the specific complexity of professional identity alongside the deeper shift of becoming. If that's you, you're in the right place.

Matrescence is one of the most profound developmental opportunities of a woman's life. Not despite the disorientation, but because of what moving through it with intention makes possible.

That's what Matri is here for.