I combine long management experience with a deep understanding of what really drives people.

I became a manager at a young age and grew into the role from within my own team. At first, I did not yet know what leadership truly meant. I had to learn how to stay close to people while also carrying responsibility for decisions, results, and the functioning of the team as a whole.

Over time, I realised that a leader's role is not to know or solve everything personally. What matters is creating the conditions in which people can use their strengths, ask for help, take responsibility, and develop.

My responsibilities included results and work processes, but recruiting, training, and developing people and building a well-functioning team were equally important. The teams I led were characterised by low employee turnover, strong collaboration, and the consistent achievement of agreed goals.

Most of all, however, leadership was taught to me by the people themselves—their different needs and strengths, and the ways they respond to pressure, uncertainty, or change.

That experience taught me that a heavy workload is not the only thing that exhausts people. Responsibility without sufficient clarity, influence, and support can be just as draining.

I was used to being strong, finding solutions, and moving forward. Asking for or accepting help did not come naturally to me. When the load became too much, life did not stop—I shifted increasingly onto autopilot. What needed to be done got done, but there was less and less joy, ease, and genuine presence.

Eventually, the question was no longer whether I could cope. The question was at what cost.

I experienced first-hand something no leadership training can teach: the fact that someone functions well does not necessarily mean that they are well.

Later, my wish to understand why people continue in familiar ways even when they know they want something different led me to trauma-informed practice, the nervous system, somatic work, positive psychology, and neuroscience. I came to understand that change cannot always be thought through or forced into being. Our decisions and behaviour are also shaped by previous experiences, learned roles, bodily responses, and automatic protective strategies.

Trauma awareness also helped me understand my employees better as a leader. Apparently illogical resistance, withdrawal, a need for control, or a strong reaction rarely comes from nowhere. These are often ways of coping with pressure or uncertainty.

This did not mean reducing responsibility or permitting everything. It helped me create a more supportive working environment where people felt able to ask for help, use their strengths, and take responsibility.

For me, these insights did not remain theory. I also learned to notice myself earlier: to recognise tension before it turned into exhaustion, allow myself to feel my emotions without immediately trying to explain or dismiss them, and ask for help before I had carried everything alone for too long.

After a 21-year career, I took a year-long break from working life. Instead of rushing straight into the next familiar role, I gave myself time to pause and ask what I truly wanted to do in the next stage of my life. That time allowed me to listen to myself in a way for which there had been no room in my previous pace of work and life, and to choose my next step not from habit or a need for security, but from greater clarity.

My life has not become free of problems. What has changed is that I no longer lose connection with myself so easily in difficult moments. I have not lost my ambition, clarity, or ability to take responsibility. What has diminished is some of the inner noise and the need to hold everything together through sheer effort.

This is what my work today has grown from: helping people, leaders, and teams understand what drives them, and creating more room to act from clarity, self-trust, and their true capability.