I’m a huge fan of "The Diary of a CEO" podcast by Steven Bartlett. And this episode with Stanford neuroscientist David Eagleman was one of the most mind-expanding conversations I’ve listened to in a long time. One sentence especially stayed with me: “You are not one person in one brain.” I thought about periods in my own life where I deeply wanted transformation while simultaneously resisting it. Leaving architecture behind. Building a new professional identity. Moving co

Human potential and team performance have always fascinated me. And over the years, I’ve come to see something very clearly: Most teams need collaboration workshops as much as, if not more than, skill-based training. Because skills alone can’t create performance. The real challenge is this: How do you bring different strengths together in a way that actually works? And that rarely happens in the middle of daily operations. It requires a space outside of the usual pace. A

I genuinely enjoy being in front of people with what I create. Sometimes it is a safe space for someone to open up, reflect, and act differently for the better. Sometimes it is a virtual or physical room full of people eager to learn, practice, and grow. It is the energy I feel when I speak, when I write, when I engage, that makes me come alive. And seeing how quickly a conversation turns into real connection and trust, through my voice, my presence, my body language, mak

In my early years in architecture, everything was drawn by hand. Then came AutoCAD. Then 3D modelling. Then renderings and animations. The tools kept evolving. But the question never changed: How will people feel in this space? Today, with AI entering our work, I find myself returning to that same question. Because lately, many professionals I work with are asking: “What will happen to me when AI becomes more present in my work?” But underneath that question, I believe

As a coach, I always try to ask the right questions. And at the same time, I know that sometimes the question I ask can be… not the most helpful one. And that’s part of the work too. This particular coachee often expressed how important it was for her to feel understood, seen, and acknowledged. In this session, she was sharing how her nights had been lately. Waking up at 3am. Work-related thoughts not letting her rest. Falling back asleep, then waking up again. Her energy

A few days ago, a dear coachee of mine said something I didn’t expect. “Dilek, you're not just a career or leadership coach for me. You helped me design who I am personally and professionally, and I want to thank you for these soul talks!” I felt genuinely happy hearing that. Because it captured something I care deeply about, the idea that our work is not only about what we do, but also about who we become in the process. There is a version of you forming at work. Throug

For years, my relationship with food moved in cycles. Moments of discipline. Moments of letting go. At some point, I knew I needed to redesign the whole system in order for it to work for me. I removed gluten. Shifted to two meals a day. And I changed the order of how I eat inspired by what I learned from Jessie Inchauspé, the Glucose Goddess. Starting with vegetables, continuing with protein and vegetables again, then carbohydrates, and finally sugar. In six months: bett

Across industries and countries, I keep hearing a similar reflection from experienced professionals and leaders: “I thought I would feel more confident at this stage.” But what they describe next is something else. They pause more before answering. They think longer before deciding. Not because they are less capable. But because they are seeing more than they used to. More complexity. More perspectives. More consequences. And somewhere in that expan

During a recent coaching conversation, we touched on an idea that stayed with me long after our session ended. We were discussing why coaching conversations create surprising momentum through reflection and real action. At one point he paused and said something remarkable: “Maybe coaching works because I’m observing my thinking and my progress, and you are observing it with me.” That sentence reminded me of something fascinating from physics: the ‘ Observer Effect’ . Hu

Lately, many professional conversations start the same way: “Everything around me is changing.” Teams restructure. Leaders move on. Priorities shift faster than strategies can stabilize. Recently, a senior professional told me something that stayed with me: "I am not afraid of hard work. I am afraid of losing clarity about where this is going." Organizational change affects people, their clarity, motivation, and long-term engagement. Problem: When clarity solely depen

When I looked at my calendar last Friday, I realised how much work has changed. Coaching conversations connected me to the USA, Colombia, UK, the Netherlands, France, and Austria, all in one day. My mind and heart were genuinely expanded. New ways of working. New technologies. Thanks to being a team member of digital platforms, such as BetterUp and SparkUs, and tools like Calendly, scheduling happens seamlessly across time zones. As a solopreneur collaborating internatio

For almost two decades, I kept rewriting my professional story. Architect. Interior architect. Leader. Projects in Türkiye and the German market. International work. From the outside, coherent and impressive. And in many ways, it truly was. But success can blur self-awareness. The better I performed, the harder it felt to question the direction. Competence creates momentum. Momentum shapes identity... If I’m honest, something inside wasn’t fully right. Through expat tr

In almost every strategy conversation I have with corporate clients and career-growth coachees lately, one topic keeps coming up. They want a digital presence that truly reflects them. Their thinking. Their professional contribution. Their leadership style. Whether they are entrepreneurs or intrapreneurs inside large organizations, the expectation is similar: In today’s professional landscape, visibility shapes credibility. Last year, I asked myself the same question. D

For years, I believed I was functioning well. I delivered, decided, coached, led. From the outside, no one would have guessed that my system was slowly failing. Chronic fatigue and insomnia didn’t arrive overnight. They accumulated quietly. First, my cognitive sharpness declined. Then my emotional regulation followed. I remained efficient, but my clarity suffered. I stayed active yet felt less grounded. I was present, though increasingly impatient. When I decided to take b

When the topic comes to ‘Change Management’, it is often the moment the room goes quiet. I see this repeatedly in my leadership coaching and training work. The conversation starts engaged. Then this term is mentioned. Something shifts. People don’t disengage, but they become careful. This reaction is not surprising. Problem: Change is announced late, and lived early In many organisations, change is not communicated when it starts forming. It is communicated once decisi

I’ve learned to pay attention to reflect on what becomes visible after the work is done. Like walking through a building after an intense construction period, checking what holds, what evolved, and what is now ready to be used . And the question I keep returning to is this: What if being multi-layered is not a distraction, but having different hats with one single purpose? As a professional, wearing multiple hats is often framed as something to “outgrow.” And yet, when th

There is a kind of exhaustion that comes from doing many things right, consistently, for a long time. The final quarter of last year required sustained effort from me. I worked intensely with my 1:1 coaching sessions, delivered many team workshops and trainings to huge international organizations, launched a new program with care, one that later required redesign and recalibration, and entered the holiday period still carrying momentum rather than closure. I did not rest w

There is a kind of stuckness I meet again and again in my coaching work. It doesn’t look like failure. Capable people. Intelligent people. People who have already changed their lives before, moved countries, shifted careers, rebuilt themselves more than once. And yet, at some point, something goes missing because they are tired of doing every meaningful life and career upgrade alone. I know this territory well. When I rebuilt my life step by step as an expat, it worked.

Every December brings a familiar feeling for me. Not sadness, but a sense of incompleteness, like walking into a newly designed room that’s almost finished, but not fully yours yet. This week, while closing my last coaching sessions of the year, that feeling appeared again. I was grateful for the people, the progress, the conversations… and still, there was an awareness that something in me wasn’t fully processed yet. When I first moved to Vienna over a decade ago, my whole

When I look back at 2011, I see a version of myself standing in a life that felt suddenly unfamiliar. A new city. A new language. A new hat of motherhood. A new identity I was not yet prepared to inhabit. It felt like waking up inside a house whose layout had changed overnight. I was moving through rooms I no longer recognised. And I remember wishing, deeply, that someone would show me how to set a direction and move forward on a map with clarity. If you’ve ever felt unsure