LEARNINGS FOR BETTER TEXTS✍️ | They unjumble ideas. Establish the truth, of characters and points mentioned. Remove clutter from the scene. Reinforce key messages. Fix mindless repetition, while holding the needed details close. Along with the vision, and rationale. They don’t get too involved – tightening, while letting the colour…

“How do I know how hard to push? How much is enough?”, I ask my coach. “In coaching, and in life.” Words from a long time ago, weighed down by the urgency of placing a few full stops in between the endless question marks. Coordinates on maps still to be…

“Aargh, action, goooo, bravoo.” Courage in the workplace sounds something like this: face adversity, run through fire, speak up, take risks, make changes, decide, and do it FAST. Or, if we go a bit deeper, we’re now all about admitting mistakes and I-don’t-knows (vulnerability! leadership!), asking for help, saying ¡NO!,…

Coaching is the art of partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential. I’m currently training as a life coach and 10 days ago, we completed the Trauma-informed Coaching Basics course with Moving the Human Spirit!  After one of…

HOW DO YOU FIGHT AN EMPIRE? | “This is the only place they’re being held accountable, and we did it.” | Harlem, Hudson, High Line, Washington Heights – all of that will sound familiar. While the #Sackler Wing, in one of the 4 (!) largest museums of art worldwide, might…

[FLASH OF CREATIVE INSIGHT] Storytellers, anyone? “In therapy we say: Let’s edit your story.” I’m inspired by people who do courageous things, who tell honest stories, or even help to change them. And by great content editors, but that’s a different…story. The book “Maybe you should talk to someone” by…

I don’t believe in born leaders. Some of us grow up as leaders, others craft their way to leadership later in life and a third group walk a quite different path altogether. As the Communications Coordinator of the European Youth Energy Network, an experienced project manager and passionate creative, I…

“I didn’t want to enroll in this class and the teacher sucks.” (forgotten source) 6.6.22, edited in Sept ’22. This is a place for fragments, written as a human, borrowing the words of others – and not a professional trying to prove something to someone. This is a piece about…

The words drown in the heatwave. It’s funny how when you’re part of the system, when you work for it, you stop asking questions. Your feed: assumptions from within, instructions from above. Strange, startling, shameful, stationary. The volunteers, the ones who care about what’s happening outside of what some want…

“There are no easy questions here”, she is right. I’m deeply in love with the fathomless connections that emerge in a first instant of collaboration between special humans. Just like between Vienna and the South, months before the first coaching session. And then I get another call. The mind fog…

We talk about social entrepreneurship in the hot morning sun at the arrival centre. Us – no more volunteers, but humans with ideas, jobs and lives. I remember that we’re empathetic, we relate, when we act from our whole being. Caring, then setting boundaries. But this day also brings me…

STORIES | “How can you live without a cat?” I laugh that I don’t know how, and promise to send photos of my cats in exchange. I etch their smiles into my memory disk, and drink the – now lukewarm – cappuccino that they brought from the kitchen despite my…

M. takes out his phone: his grandfather young, his grandfather old with M.’s mother, with a joyous smile and a funny cap, family pictures in slightly faded black and white, black hair, expressive eye(brow)s, long robes. His grandfather was 16 when he escaped home to join the “Rostov” battalion in…

Oh the psychology! In March, after going through a deep state of shock and “adopting” a family from Kharkiv, I started volunteering to help Ukrainians seeking refuge in Austria as well as those passing through. At the main train station in Vienna, later at the registration center (Austria Center Vienna)…

It’s a marathon, she says over Zoom. And we just nod, later we laugh about some things I don’t remember. The translators’ container in the arrival center has two tilted-open windows, letting in the humming, rattling buzz of the microcosm born on March 4th. Ebbs and flows, the world on…

When my intolerance against #newleadership, #distributedleadership and the like grows into a big cloud, I decide to make it rain down in something useful. In an early morning in bed, before rushing to the office, I write about what really matters for leadership, beyond the stunning beaming, buzzing, blaring buzzwords….

APRIL | I just want to catch a metro and seal up my mind for the day. Instead, I decide to trust. And to not be afraid of a question. B. is the nicest human who would deserve so much more from life. We stand close in the piercing cold,…

Feeling small offers us the chance to connect compassion and bravery. In December 2021, I jogged through St.Petersburg’s snows and museums. And when I thought that I’d lost myself, I became a bit more of myself. Here is the artist in me speaking, writing in front the painting by Ivan…

“No, I don’t have a ticket yet,”, no transport card, I already threw in my token (I had to ask a guard to understand that this was my ticket), no I’m not from here. Whatever “here” is, dear St.Petersburg. “I’m from Italy”, the standard answer that I don’t use anymore,…