For many professionals, development still means one thing: thinking more.

More analysis. More frameworks. More models designed to explain what is happening.

Yet in my work with leaders and teams, I repeatedly see the limits of purely analytical approaches. People often understand what is happening very clearly, and still struggle to change how they act, decide, relate, or lead.

That is why my approach is deliberately experiential.

I create spaces where participants do not only talk about leadership, collaboration, or emotions; they live them, here and now.

Why experience creates deeper transformation

The challenges leaders face today are rarely technical. They are relational, emotional, and systemic. They involve uncertainty, tension, power dynamics, unspoken expectations, and internal reactions that operate below the surface.

These dimensions cannot be accessed through analysis alone. They require a different entry point:

• engaging the body, not just the intellect

• slowing down habitual responses

• making the invisible visible

• allowing awareness to emerge rather than forcing conclusions

When people step out of constant cognitive control, something shifts. They stop performing and start noticing. That moment of awareness is often where the most meaningful learning begins.

An experiential coaching foundation: the Co-Active approach

At the core of my work is the Co-Active Coaching approach, in which I am trained and certified as a CPCC (Certified Professional Co-Active Coach) through the Co-Active Training Institute.

The Co-Active model is deeply experiential by nature. It is built on the belief that people are naturally creative, resourceful, and whole, and that transformation does not come from fixing or advising, but from increasing awareness and choice.

Rather than staying in problem analysis, this approach invites clients to explore:

• what is happening in the moment

• how emotions, beliefs, and behaviours interact

• where energy is flowing or blocked

• what becomes possible when awareness expands

Co-Active coaching brings people back into contact with themselves. It creates space for intuition, emotion, and meaning, dimensions often sidelined in traditional leadership development, yet essential for sustainable performance.

Tools designed to move beyond over-analysis

The tools I integrate are carefully chosen to help participants step out of “thinking mode” and into lived experience.

LEGO® Serious Play® is one of them. By building instead of explaining, participants externalise their thinking. Complex ideas, tensions, and mental models take physical form. This levels hierarchy, encourages full participation, and creates a shared language. Insight emerges not from debate, but from reflection on what has been built.

I also use the Human Factor Fresk, a collective and systemic tool that helps participants understand human behaviour, cognitive biases, emotional mechanisms, and social dynamics. Its visual and collaborative format allows teams to grasp complexity without intellectual overload, shifting the conversation from individual blame to shared responsibility.

In addition, I integrate emotional intelligence assessments such as EQ-i, which offer a structured yet deeply personal way to explore emotional functioning. Used experientially rather than diagnostically, these tools help participants understand how stress, assertiveness, empathy, decision-making, and optimism show up concretely in their daily professional lives.

From insight to embodiment

What all these approaches have in common is this: they do not ask participants to be “right” or to perform. They invite them to be present.

Instead of convincing, they reveal.

Instead of prescribing change, they allow it to emerge.

Instead of staying in abstraction, they anchor learning in experience.

Participants often arrive with strong analytical skills..and leave with something different: a felt understanding. They recognise patterns in themselves and in the group. They notice where they control, where they avoid, where they rush, where they hold back. And because this understanding is embodied rather than purely intellectual, it lasts.

A different relationship to learning, leadership, and performance

An experiential approach does not mean abandoning structure or rigour. It means placing them in service of deeper integration. When people experience insights emotionally, relationally, and physically, they are far more likely to translate them into action.

This is particularly powerful in leadership and team contexts, where performance depends less on individual expertise and more on trust, alignment, and collective intelligence.

Ultimately, my intention is not to add more content to already saturated minds. It is to create meaningful experiences that reconnect people to themselves, to others, and to the systems they are part of.

Because transformation rarely happens through explanation alone.

It happens when people experience something differently and cannot return to operating in the same way again.