My journey into coaching began during my MA in Digital Management at Hyper Island in 2019, where the module in systemic thinking blew my mind as it gave space to how my cognition naturally works: in systems, noticing dependencies and how they give shape to particular individual forms of individual expression and behaviour. Or maybe it began even earlier, in 2014, when I went, acting on a whim, to a meditation retreat titled “Who is living your life?” in Scotland.

It also takes roots in my journalism work, where I was always driven to deeply understand what moves people to do what they do and how do we arrive to political and social outcomes we do. One of highlights of my journalistic work was directing and producing a documentary about people who were at the centre of the Chornobyl nuclear disaster and the massive deadly clean-up operation that followed. This taught me a lot about how people make meaning in their lives. Employing systemic approach to journalism, I co-created Migration Matters, a learning platform about migration to help people think of it is a normal, interdependent process, rather than a “problem” to be “solved”.

I think these two explorations - how does the world "work" and how do I "work" have formed an intertwined developmental arch of my own life. This interest took me down a personal development path and also took shape in my interest in conflicts, how they arise and evolve, and how it is possible to work through conflict without compromising on the evolutionary truth of the difference that they surface. Ultimately, it lead me to coaching training as I began to seek how to share this view with people who are grappling with the same questions I do. I found that this work can fruitfully make use of all these explorations to directly benefit people who are seeking ways to building out their own professional and personal lives with more congruence.

Scholarly lineages in my work are manifold:

The thinker that has most influenced my worldview because it gave deep language and concepts to what I already knew to be true, is Gregory Bateson, whose work into how systems evolve and change, their interdependent nature and contextual richness is carried on in the work of his daughter Nora Bateson, with whom I had a privilege to study personally in the course that trained me to be a facilitator of group format called Warm Data Labs.

Another thinker whose work rips blindspots off our systems is David Graeber. I have also deeply absorbed the works of ecophilosopher Joanna Macey and works of adrienne maree brown in the field of emergent strategy.

The baseline for my coaching is a Systemic Coach certification training at Humbold University’s Artop school for coaching. With a systemic and Gestalt lens, this is Germany’s pioneering and longest-running coaching programme. Accredited by Germany's Business Coaching Federation, it gave me a solid foundation into coaching applied to leadership and organisational challenges.

I complemented this training with deep-dives into systemic constellations work that combines systemic mapping together with sensing approaches to understand and shift systems with Collective Transitions, a consultancy and practice collective at the forefront of societal transformation and Coaching Constellations, IFC-certified coaching training provider that specialises on business and executive coaching training. Both have provided me with a toolset and a practice container to apply systemic approach to pragmatic needs of personal, leadership and organisational work.

And finally, my other ongoing learning container is relational work. I am a part of Microsolidarity, a community of community-builders that doubles up as a research lab into developing experiential learning around patterns and practices that create belonging and make effortless collaboration possible.

I am also familiar with the work of Otto Scharmer and Theory U, as well as many other organisational and management thinkers that combine organisational development, civic engagement and community building. I lead and participate in regular coaching circles, supervision sessions and various practice containers to keep my work sharp, wide and clear.

My work also has spiritual lineages. My core teacher is Diane Musho Hamilton, facilitator, life-long conflict mediator and Zen priest, with whom I have taken numerous courses on facilitation, conflict resolution, effective communication, shadow work, emotional maturity, and remain a part of ongoing practice containers in Zen teaching and conflict work. Diane once said that “mediation allowed me to enact wholeness” and this is what I can only aspire to in my work. I also returned to Suryacitta, one of the most experienced mindfulness teachers in the UK, who led the retreat that was so instrumental to me back in 2014, to conduct a year-long mindfulness training. His lighthearted, intuitive and deeply experiential learnings into what he calls ABC of mindfulness are always my anchor (ABC stands for A Bigger Container). Being a container for client's transformational work is what I am aspiring to do well.