The Catastrophe Café

In this episode we welcome Prof. Dr. Antoinette Weibel, Full Professor of Human Resource Management at the University of St. Gallen and twice named one of the 40 leading HR minds in the German-speaking world. She has spent 25 years researching trust and has some uncomfortable things to say about the perks and performance systems most organizations lean on instead.  We talk about what it would actu...

What if the most important question in your career is one nobody ever asked you?  This week, Anita turns the tables on Fabio. He teaches self-leadership & reflection to students, where he brings Aristotle, Frankl and three minutes of silence into the classroom. His approach is not about morning routines or optimising yourself. Instead, it's about noticing where you actually are, asking wha...

The deepest illusion of our time is believing we are separate.  That’s the line that opens Part 2 of our conversation with Susan Goldsworthy — and it’s where Care and Dare give way to something Susan added deliberately: Share. Not sharing as in information or updates, but as in vulnerability, interdependence, and the courage to let others hold you too.  This is also where the conversation zooms ou...

Care doesn’t mean being nice. Dare isn’t just about pushing harder. And you can’t really have one without the other.    That’s where Susan Goldsworthy begins — and it immediately reframes something most of us thought we already understood. Susan is an Olympic finalist, affiliate professor at IMD, and co-creator of the Secure Base Leadership framework. She was also one of our professors during our...

Psychological safety isn't the absence of discomfort — it's whether speaking up feels worth the risk. For our first guest episode, we sat down with Nina Rossiana, who previously worked in Anita's team in Indonesia as part of a wider global team. Today, she is the regional representative for Asia at the Swiss Sustainable Coffee Platform.  Her postgraduate research looked at voice and silence in glo...

Money doesn’t hug you when you come home.    That’s the line that opened this conversation — and it stayed with us long after we stopped recording. Because somewhere between optimising for salary, security, and status, many of us quietly lost the thread of what we were actually working toward.  In this episode, Anita and Fabio get personal about their own relationships with money — and honest abou...

Welcome to Season 2 of The Catastrophe Café — same spirit, new guests, more perspectives. And we’re kicking it off with a paradox.  Getting serious about joy. Yes, that’s exactly what we did.    Because somewhere between growing up and getting productive, most of us quietly stopped giving joy permission to show up. Not dramatically. Just gradually — buried under priorities, deadlines, and the vagu...

Philosopher Laurie Ann Paul writes that when facing a truly transformative decision — one that will change not just your life but who you are — you can't evaluate it rationally. You can't pre-feel it. So she offers a different question: which path am I most interested in discovering?   That idea stayed with us long after we stopped recording.  In this episode, Fabio and Anita explore why c...

The world’s longest study on happiness — running since 1938 — found that close relationships matter more for health and longevity than money, fame, genetics or IQ.  Yet most of us treat relationships as something that just happens, rather than something we actively and consciously build.  In this episode, Fabio and Anita explore how to build, sustain and repair the relationships that shape our liv...

Habits run 70% of our decisions on autopilot. That's both a superpower and a trap.  We all have routines that ground us and free up mental energy for what matters. But some habits quietly keep us stuck — repeating patterns formed long ago, in contexts that no longer exist.  "Each time you act consistently, your brain interprets this as evidence of your identity." This is what makes h...

What if the reality you're living in is one you've chosen - and can choose differently?  We all see the world through different lenses shaped by our upbringing, experiences, and values. But we can become aware of these lenses and decide whether they're helping us or holding us back.  "Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards." - Kierkegaard  This q...

Trust is something fundamental in our lives. It's about psychological safety, mutual acceptance, respect, and the freedom to be authentic without fearing consequences. Without trust, there is no flourishing – we can only dedicate ourselves fully when we feel safe to be our true selves.  In this episode, Fabio and Anita explore the essential ingredients of trust: authenticity (staying true to y...

Picture a beautifully wrapped gift. It's there, somewhere in the middle of your change process - you can't see it yet, maybe don't even believe it exists when you're in the thick of resistance or grief. But it's there.   In this episode, Anita and Fabio explore how we navigate change - not as something to simply survive, but as something that holds an unexpected present we have...

In this episode, we explore what it truly means to live at a pace closer to our natural rhythm. Not as a retreat from ambition, but as a deliberate act of resistance against the constant rush that defines modern life.  We talk about the courage it takes to step off the highway when everyone around you is speeding past. About the German concept of Innehalten - consciously pausing to turn your atten...

Welcome to the very first episode of The Catastrophe Café – where we pour meaning into the beautiful mess of work, life & everything in between.    In this inaugural episode, hosts Anita Aerni and Fabio Duma explore the art of balance. Not as a destination to reach, but as a dynamic practice of surfing the waves between opposites – activity and rest, doing and being, giving and receiving.    D...