Spotlight your TRUE self

*** If you are listening on Spotify, please answer the short survey! - Thank you!*** “How can I get better in the things that I do? How do I know what to improve?” You always have the chance to give feedback to yourself! Self-reflection means that after doing a task, hosting a meeting, giving a presentation, or recording a podcast 😉, you can always analyse yourself: what was good, what was bad, w...

“Sorry, I have my menstruation. I cannot attend this business meeting – I want to rest!” Have you ever said that at work to your boss? Have you heard it from others? Would you be judged as unprofessional, too sensitive and weak? Do you even judge yourself when you have your period? In this podcast episode, I talk with Carmen Lorenzana who became a menstrual educator and fertility coach after she s...

When you apply to a job – wouldn’t it be cool to know what the recruiter thinks about your application? In this episode you have exactly this possibility! Marina Ponomareva shares her valuable knowledge, insights and experiences from working as a recruiter. She will answer the questions Where can you find the best open positions? What does a recruiter focus most on in a CV? What is more important...

Would you consider yourself as a “job hopper”? What does it mean to change your job every 2-3 years because your employments are based on fixed term contracts? Marina Ponomareva loves exactly this challenge. Originally from Russia, she has studied in the Netherlands and came to Finland as a junior professional. She has followed an impressive – and very diversified – career path, working in IT, as...

We all use English in our every day life. But how confident are you really to express all of your thoughts, knowledge and emotions in English? And what can you do to get better? This episode is a joint record that I made together with Samantha Houston, who is originally from the UK and lives in Helsinki for two years and works as an English language teacher and presentation coach. In this episode...

“Great people make other people great, small people keep other people small.” And this is not referring to the body size 😉. There is a difference between being really self-confident and having a big ego. Are you able to award and recognize other people in a sincere and empathetic way or are you trying to push them down and make them feel guilty. In this episode you learn: What true self-confidenc...

Do you have this feeling that there is more in this life for you? And are you just dreaming about possible successes or do you really start going for it? Do you just want to avoid painful moments in the case that you will fail or are you brave to take a risk when there is a chance to win? In this podcast episode you learn what it means to have a growth mindset. I am sharing with you a personal sto...

“When I was employed, I felt like I was sacrificing my freedom. I always wanted to be an entrepreneur.” With this mindset – plus the fact that she is highly allergic to any conventional jewelry – Chiara decided to create jewelry herself and to found her own brand. Together with her business partner she developed ‘MonVes’. This brand stands for beautiful hand-made earrings, necklaces and bracelets,...

Do you know what happens on the 15th January every year? If you have set for yourself a great target for 2023 on New Year’s Day - do you belong to the 5% of people who are still following it? How big are your targets and dreams for this year? “If your target does not make you a little bit scared, it is not the right target” one of my mentors once said to me. But having a great target can be overwh...

Do you allow yourself to celebrate yourself? Or are you right now facing a stressful pre-Christmas time with still too many to-do’s on your list, like baking cookies, buying presents and decorating your flat? What if you take a couple of minutes time for yourself – and instead of thinking about what is coming next, you look back on what has happened this year?! What have been your big and small su...

Imagine you come from Spain to Finland, you graduate here, start working for a start-up, every couple of months you are promoted and finally you have a leading role. But then you face the downside of this great career: huge responsibility, too high workload, you work 12 hours every day, you cannot sleep anymore and you could cry every day because your body cannot handle the stress. Would you quit...

“Staying in Vietnam, I would have lived with my parents until getting married, and then I would have lived with the family of my husband.” – But if you want more in life, if you have a continuous drive for learning and developing your skills, you use the chance to study in Finland. This is what Camilla Lumi Koivu did and during the last 8 years she has made an impressive career and now works as a...

What do you do when you move from Portugal to Helsinki and just two weeks later the pandemic starts? When you run out of work in your remote job? – You get creative! This is what Inês did: She discovered again her passion for drawing – especially birds – and built up her own business ‘Seni Illustrations’ as an illustrator and graphic designer. Today she runs her business successfully by selling he...

Born in Mexico, worked as a psychologist in South America, lived in an Indian ashram, learned meditation in Thailand – what makes a woman with such a background moving to Finland? In this episode Ana Lopez shares with me her great story what brought her to Helsinki and how she has successfully built up her own business as a yoga teacher and life coach. In this lively interview we are talking about...

You already have the job that you ever wanted? You speak Finnish fluently? No? Are you wavering around the question what you really want to reach in life? Are you not able to keep up the motivation to work on your skills, because you don’t have a clear target? – But having a target is what keeps us going! It makes us getting up in the morning with energy, it makes us going the extra-mile on our wa...

Imagine you go to a party or networking event, you don’t know anyone and you are really afraid of starting to talk to strangers, because after a couple of sentences of small talk, it happens what we all don’t like: This long embarrassing pause, because you don’t know what to say. Imagine you have to start a challenging discussion with your colleague or manager and you get confronted with a strange...

“This person does not like me”, “I am not as good as the others” – How many of you have these thoughts as well? Do you know that when you are afraid that other people might think negatively about you? The good news is: This is not the reality. The fear that you might annoy other people, that you are not good enough or that they don’t like you is a creation of your own mind. This is what we call a...

I never like the way how I look when I have the webcam on and I would never ever make a post on Social Media where my face is straight in front of the camera!! Those could have been my words two years ago. Does that sound familiar to you? Do you also walk around with this “hopefully nobody sees me”-attitude? Merely not attracting too much attention… Nowadays I have fun to give speeches, to publish...

When was the last time that you have cried in front of someone else? Or admitted how much you are struggling and that you need help? Sounds quite challenging, right? At least for me it was. I have thought a lot, whether I should record such an episode, but I had figured out during the last months that this is my next level of getting visible: To not just be an outgoing person with a super-positive...

Do you know people who are really inconspicuous, who are easily overlooked and seem to be invisible for others? Do you feel like such a person yourself? Do you have problems to express yourself and to build up connections to other people, because nobody recognizes you and nobody seems to remember you after a meeting at work, after a business event or after a party? The bad news is: Nobody will see...

Did you know that 15% of people are afraid of dying, while 80% of people are afraid to speak in front of others? However, overcoming this fear will build your bridge between the targets that you set in your own mind and their realization in the real world. Because speaking in out loud what you would like to have not only creates a commitment to yourself, but also attracts the right people to suppo...

Do you often have to watch very, very boring presentations at work? Presentations held as 50 slides of Powerpoint with black text on white screen which are flipped through unenthusiastically – and where you wonder, if not even the presenter has a passion for his/her topic, how should you develop the motivation listening to this? And are you afraid that other people would think the same about your...

Would you like to have more feedback in your daily work life? And how often are you asked for feedback yourself? Do you feel comfortable giving feedback? Or do you always feel insecure, because you neither want to embarrass your colleague or your manager nor trigger an aggressive discussion when you feel you actually want to criticize something? Learn in this episode to what extent the reaction of...

Do you love your job? If not – what would you like to be changed? And do you belong to those people who do the first step to actively change circumstances which are in their area of control? But if you feel you are caught in a work environment in which you don’t feel well, you don’t like it at all and there is absolutely nothing you can change about it, although you have already tried – do you wan...

Do you know that when you have to make a decision, but you just can’t decide?! You think about your options again and again, back and forth, you try to handle the list of advantages and disadvantages in you head and you ask for advice from other people – and in the most cases you are still not wiser. But we have to make decisions – in our every-day life, when we decide what to pick from the menu i...