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

This week, while getting ready for another social event, I caught myself feeling something I hadn’t expected. I was looking forward to the people, the conversations, the atmosphere and yet a part of me wished the season moved a little slower. It wasn’t the gatherings themselves that felt overwhelming, but the pace, the food, the rushing from place to place, and the constant expectation to be ‘on’.  Every year, we enter December with the intention to connect, celebrate and hon

This week, while reading Designing Your Life further, one insight stayed with me: designing a life is not only about imagining multiple futures, but also about learning how to build them through real-world experiments, conversations and support.   It reminded me of my early days in architecture. Beautiful concepts meant nothing until we tested materials, gathered feedback and refined the design. The second half of the book makes the same point: a well-designed life is not sha

While sketching ideas in my notebook when I was reading our new selection in Book Insider Book Club  ‘Designing Your Life’; a thought landed with surprising clarity: we rarely design our lives the way an architect designs a space. We decorate , we adjust , we patch , but we rarely take a blank sheet and ask:  ' What if I could design my life again, how many versions could I create?’   Research from Stanford’s Life Design Lab and behaviour science shows that people stick to lo