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Born in the Soviet Union to a family of Russian, German, English, Irish and Jewish lineages, I always found it hard to answer the question “where are you from?”
I grew up in a divided post-war world with the Iron Curtain and Berlin Wall cutting us off from the rest of our family, and really from the rest of the world too. But I was lucky enough to witness those walls fall fairly early in my life.
Educated in England and France, I have spent most of my adult life working internationally and traveling the world, before settling down in Berlin with my family.
After the collapse of the Eastern European bloc, I also saw the collapse of almost every social structure I could rely on. My education, my career plans and even the money we had became devalued almost overnight.
However, while things seemed catastrophic on the surface, new opportunities were rapidly becoming available. I decided that total re-invention was the best way for me to go.
I took on debt in order to move to the UK and attend the London School of Economics (LSE), where I studied business and human resource management.
Though I entered the corporate business world at the very bottom of the “food chain”, I effectively worked my way up the ladder to the top management level and completed my career many years later in the role of HR Vice President for a Fortune 500 company.
While I oversaw large scale business transformations and multi-billion dollar acquisitions, I also had the opportunity to coach individuals (managers and directors) on navigating their own personal and career transitions.
At the same time I got a chance to work with my own professional coaches, which was a total game-changer.
At the very beginning of my career, a company restructure forced my layoff – after only 6 months of landing my first properly paying (and very promising) job! Though it came as quite a shock, I recovered, made a new start, and eventually progressed successfully through the ranks of a new company.
10 years later, I found myself stuck and unhappy again in my repeated attempts to break the glass ceiling from senior management to ExCom level business leadership. It took hours of coaching support, a paradigm shift, and a maternity leave to find my way out of the conundrum.
Finally, having made it to the top of the corporate career ladder, I felt ready to turn my growing coaching practice into a brand new career. But here I got stuck again – wasting years of my life on figuring out the best plan of action to leave my 9 to 5.
The transition out of my cushy corporate life and into my own coaching business was happening against the backdrop of the global 2008 financial crisis, which nearly bankrupted me and my family. With two very small children, no capital and no safety net – I decided to go ahead with starting my own business anyway.
It took a lot of trial and error to get my business up and running, but thanks to my commitment and the career transition method I developed, I was able to fully recover my losses and even triple my investments in just 3 years! Now, the same colleagues who initially doubted my decision to start my own business come to me asking for advice on how to take their own careers away from their 9 to 5.
Whenever I encounter change or face adversity, I find an opportunity to thrive.
In all my career shifts, I took the risk to let go of the old and embrace the new. I made a lot of detours and mistakes.
At times I found myself alone, broke and hitting rock bottom, but every single time, I picked myself up, found support and learned how to make the change work for me in the most timely, effective way possible.