Becoming a Coach with Witali and Kamil: Outdoor Facilitation and Mindfulness Integration

So, date before you marry would be my advice. And connect before act.

Welcome to the Making of a Coach, where we unpack how experienced coaches turned their passion into a profession. I'm Tobi, co-founder of metaFox. And this is my conversation with the outdoor coaching collective WalkAboutYou and its two founders, Witali and Kamil.

And while most of my guests here start their journey as a coach with a strong background in psychology and then grow into entrepreneurship, it was the opposite for my two guests today. Coming from careers as company founders, they were striving for simplicity and eventually started offering outdoor coaching with WalkAboutYou.

On this episode we also reshuffled our usual order a bit. So before we unpack Witali's and Kamil's early journeys, let's hop right into the shoes of a team that goes on an outdoor coaching experience with WalkAboutYou.

We have a very diverse team, some young people, some older generation people. And there are also some transitions going on in the business as a whole. How would the experience look?

We just pick you up at your office. We would start walking quickly. Beforehand we have sent the questionnaire Kamil mentioned, so we are a little prepared. We would start walking and connect people who are not connected within the organization.

There are older people, so we would already say, talk to the person you are not that familiar with. Just go on an easy walk and talk. Like this we would already mingle around and arrive. And then we would take you through a sequence of walk and talk questions.

It is a little bit variable in terms of what you'd rather focus on. Connect before act. On the connection part between the team, we want to derive a certain question: how do we form the organization? What could be a strategic vision of the organization? That is within the sequence of the walk and talk questions.

We would start with opening questions on a certain topic which we would figure out beforehand. And there, as Kamil said, we also have Theory U as an underlying approach. We would guide you through the four levels of listening and talking within Theory U, where they call it downloading, empathic listening and generative listening. We would play around with how deep we go into that topic. Then I pass over to Kamil.

The part that Witali described is more like the morning before breakfast. The focus here is mainly connecting, building trust, building psychological safety. And sometimes this topic continues through the whole day. And sometimes we then go deeper into a topic that's important for the whole team.

And that depends on the information, or on what we decided together with the team. After breakfast time, for example, if we do something more on resilience, then we work a lot with outdoor solos, or nature solos, where people go out into nature and have time for themselves, to sit somewhere and reflect on a question.

Which could be with the focus on psychological safety. Find a place where you feel safe. Stay there and observe what happens around you, and ask this place aloud: what do I need to feel safe in this team? And then just listen to what answers come up within you. Reflection exercises in collaboration with nature, for example, and then this is the whole topic of nature coaching. And then you bring the people together and share about that, listen, and come up with conclusions and sharings on this topic. Or we can do something like I told you before, this nature modeling, where instead of using LEGO Serious Play you use natural materials to, for example, build a model of the team.

Of the parts of the team and the relationships. And then we have reflection questions, everybody reflects on the model, and then you build the future with the team and what has to change there, and also maybe what hard conflicts or truths have to be told. So, getting a little bit more into

the emotional part of teamwork. And then, you can do everything. We did something on communication. We did something on feedback. You can do it while standing somewhere. You can do it while walking. If it's cold you do more things while walking. You do appreciation rounds, appreciation showers.

Where you maybe start by appreciating the nature around you, which is easier than appreciating people. And then maybe appreciating colleagues, or yourself, which gets harder depending on what type of person you are. So it's always walking, standing. We also have the context of the breathing group.

People go out, we breathe out, and then they come together, breathe in, and then you have a sharing of what happened there. So you can think of everything, everything is possible in the second part. And the first part is quite often, as Witali mentioned, a lot about connection, a proper check in, a proper time to calm down, and then talking and walking with different levels of listening.

And then we have an end. We take time for a proper beginning, a good middle and a proper end. And sometimes we also ask for commitments from team members. What they're committed to, what little small change they want to bring into the team. Sometimes we also talk about rituals or initiatives the whole team can create around that, so that there is something they can take into daily work life.

And then we have either another seminar or a webinar, where we collect and see what happened there, and from that we move on. This is just to give a picture of how it could be. The second part of the day is more individual. The first part is often similar, because it's about connecting.

And sometimes you feel that the group is ready, and then you go directly into the experience. Afterwards you do a sharing and explain what happened there and why it happened. So it depends on how we feel as facilitators, what feels good for us, what feels good for the group. Sometimes

we know the places, sometimes we don't. A basic teaching is handling uncertainty, more than insight.

This is a skill we all need in this world. I would say the high art of working outdoors is spontaneously using the things that outdoors gives you. For example, if there is a steep hill, the question fits better to the group: what's really hard in your team right now?

And talk about it until we're up. You feel it and talk about it. When you go up, you can talk about, okay, what's easy? What helps you to get up this hill? And sometimes animals come. Sometimes other groups of people come. And sometimes you have the intuition and know how to build this in.

And these can be very magical moments, because you can't plan them. We had a couple of times where musicians were suddenly in the forest playing music, and they invited people just to listen to the music, and not to follow the plan that we have. On the other side, you can perfectly also do the same things you do indoors, just outdoors, without talking about any of it, and nature does her work in the background, and it still is different.

These are extreme versions and variations of working outdoors. Everything in between is possible, of course.

We did an exercise on a nature solo, and there was a guy playing the clarinet, because he was hiding from everybody in the forest to play it. And then a huge group from an insurance company came there and everybody was sitting down at some spots. And there was this guy playing, and really well, and this is so magical.

You cannot prepare for that. It takes a certain mindset to build this in. It's goosebumpy, actually, that you can work with that. And indoors doesn't bring you that uncertainty or that playfulness.

And funny enough, out of the 52 deep pictures that I offered them to choose from, both of them selected the same identical photo.

The photo they chose to represent their journey is a photo of two doors, one blue, one red, that you can see on the cover of this episode as well as on video. Let's hear from Witali how he interpreted the photo.

And that's my life as an entrepreneur, running a company with almost 80 people now. The other is the coaching thing, where I started by joining programs and seminars. And then I thought, and sometimes still think, oh, this is not that difficult.

Maybe I can do it better. From there I started growing into coaching. That's the other door. Two different colors, two different sides of me.

How is that for you, Kamil? Is it also the two faces, or did you interpret this differently?

I'm coming from the business background. I'm coming from product development, agile, new work, and all the stuff that's connected to this tech and startup world. And I left this path and focus more on the human side and the natural side of working and living. The left door, the red door with the tree, symbolizes this new path, which is more alive right now, with vivid colors, especially the green tree that's growing, and the red, which shows me that my energy is going more in this direction right now. And the right door, the blue door, for me is more an association with being a little bit cold and not having so much energy, at least in this picture.

This is my old part, about business model design and tech products, which is still important in my work, but not my main topic as a coach or facilitator anymore.

This made him long for simplicity. His next business, still known today, started as a simple email newsletter that helps you find out which cultural event to attend in your city in Germany. It's called rausgegangen.de.

Thanks a lot for this. And I think we already briefly mentioned it, the first time Witali and I spoke was at an entrepreneurs conference here in Cologne.

And this was it for me. When I left my company I had time to go on retreats, do inner work, and I never connected it with the idea that I can make a business out of that. I mean, I'm an entrepreneur, but that was not the point why I started to go on these experiences. And then I discovered a course called Search Inside Yourself, designed at Google in 2008, for tech people, by tech people. This connected both of my worlds. And then I thought, okay, it's really possible to bring your startup world and this inner development world together through this program. Visioning and my thoughts came up and said, okay, you can connect that. And it's so valuable for everybody. I wish I had had this five years ago, with lean startup and HR methodologies. Right now at WalkAboutYou we are not the ones who have done coaching for

many years, who have all the certificates, who are the best experts in methodologies and have the best experience. But we reach audiences others don't. This is part of the entrepreneurial DNA we have. We follow a slightly different approach from the book that you get in all the coaching seminars on how to become a coach.

And I had been in this teaching work, this consultant work, a little bit longer than Witali, and Witali came in, and hopefully you will tell your story of how you came to this nature work. Recently I told Witali that I'm happy you're not a consultant or facilitator as your main career, because this brings such a different perspective on the things we do.

And I think this also makes WalkAboutYou different.

And then I practiced it and it worked somehow. I don't know how old I was, maybe 16. And when I was leading my company I used this meditation app that came up at that time. And my partner did yoga and invited me to meditation classes with my teacher Juergen, a regular Cologne guy without too much overload.

And then we went to Asia and Costa Rica, and then Search Inside Yourself came, and this is how it all connected together. But actually the first retreats or programs I took part in were more in this Buddhist direction, the mindfulness foundation within Search Inside Yourself, without talking about it, because it's more based on neuroscience.

But all these things have thousands of years of tradition, wherever you look: Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, natural religions, shamanism.

This is the claim we use within Rausgegangen, the event discovery platform. And when I looked deep into myself, I realized that I don't want that much wine. I'd rather go for the water. And that's when I realized I have to do something differently. And I didn't know what.

But what I also like about myself is that I'm not thinking too long. I'm just taking the first spark and then following it. And I looked at a map in the museum here in Cologne, and on the map there was a line from Trondheim in Norway to Porto in Portugal. And I had just met my girlfriend a couple of months before, we are married now.

I looked at her and said, oh, let's do that walk from Trondheim to Porto. And she said, oh yes, why not. And, you don't have to tell me why not, because I take it seriously. And then I convinced her, okay, let's do that, and then I started to leave the company gradually.

She left her job, and after that spark of looking at the map, about eight, nine months later, we started in Trondheim to walk to Porto. It was a longer journey.

They won't disappear. If I do the process gradually. Because mostly, if you founded a company and leave, it doesn't go well with the partners. I realized by then how much emotion and fire is involved in that process. In terms of who gets how much money and shares, it's not that easy. That took a while. I think I never took too much risk. I never said I'm going to change my life. I just pushed the pause button for five months the first time and took it from there.

After the first five months I thought I'm going to change my life and do everything differently. Then I came back and it didn't last that long, because I went back into my job. I did have quite a lot of energy at that time, but I didn't manage it well.

And then, after working for a couple of months, with this tension of not having finished, I was like, okay, I have to get back on the road.

That took only two months, because I was alone, and I didn't like doing it alone. It was not easy to go through Sweden by myself. And that is also where, since we are talking about WalkAboutYou, the first ideas of taking people on such a journey came up.

And after coming back, a couple of weeks or months later, I met Kamil, and we talked about the journey through Sweden. We thought, why not do something with entrepreneurs? Because that was our matching point. Why not walk with them through Sweden?

That was the first bad idea we had.

Can you summarize it like that, or how was it?

Of picking it. Somehow we very often have the same picture. There is another explanation for sure, but somehow we did those kinds of exercises sometimes, and we often end up with the same pictures. So it was not surprising to me at all.

But I think there is a little bit of mutual understanding. And also, definitely, that entrepreneurial journey. Even at the same places, we did something completely different, but we were doing it from a coworking space. We were in similar bubbles. What's your perspective?

And at some point you feel it's not working anymore, and that's fine. In our case it worked together and it felt good to go this way. So, date before you marry would be my advice. And connect before act.

That happened, and we have two kids now. So that worked. Date before you marry. Actually in entrepreneurial journeys that is not very often the case. Sometimes you meet somebody and you don't date that long. And I leave it with that.

We had quite a journey before we started WalkAboutYou. When we did our entrepreneurial walk, we went back on the same path where I had walked before, through Sweden, because I had been there already. And it was clear that this was rather a try. There was nothing born at that time, like the idea of creating a whole project out of it. It wasn't the name, but more a placeholder. We just did this first thing together, and there were no strings and no risk attached, except that we put eight people in the wilderness in Sweden, which we had never done before, except me walking alone there. That was a little bit of a risk, but they all survived.

And then we thought, okay, let's do something and take money for it. The plan came out to go to Sweden for a week, for entrepreneurs and change makers. And we needed a name and a presentation. Me coming from the entrepreneurial world, from the consulting world where I had already sold programs and educational programs, I used my skills there and put a PDF together. I don't know what the pricing was, something like pay what you want, or fixed pricing. Most of the people who actually came with us were good colleagues and friends. They paid for the costs and then gave us something extra, and we had a price just for testing it out. I don't remember so well. And we found the people mostly from our network. And then we did this, and

now, looking back, it was a huge, complex program. From that point on we never did something similar. Shortly after that, it was 2019, Corona came.

So we had to think differently about travel and large groups. But it showed us that we can earn money with this. People liked it, people in decision making positions liked it. And that we can do this together and that we work as a team. With Corona and other small things we got signals that it makes sense to invest more, especially from companies inviting us out with their teams.

To go into the business to business part, where you can make more money and build the organization to be more sustainable on the financial side.

This was a contact from Italy, so we had at least this part covered. But still we were both overwhelmed with the part we didn't know. So I was really exhausted, and then I was thinking, okay, now I should also guide some exercises. And the people were also completely wasted.

They could barely walk. They didn't want to do any coaching exercises. The second day was really hard, with backpacks and all the stuff. And then we had the sharing circle at the fire. It was raining, cold. The question was, how are you doing?

And people broke out in tears and everything, because there was no protection left anymore. And in the end everything was good. And this is our mantra, and it was always like that. But at some points, at least for me, and I think also for you, Witali, we had to reschedule and replan what we were doing there.

So it was a huge personal development and team development exercise for ourselves in the end.

I think just having this sort of group dynamic of like minded people can already be powerful. And then this element of being outdoors and having this extreme physical experience comes together. You said it was just, how are you. But what else in terms of facilitation approaches did you use?

And not only the physical exercise helped, it was the nature. We were really remote. It was, I think, one day away from a bus station, a city, a road. It was not like you're at the next corner in one hour. And it was beautiful nature. And it was raining and it was pure and it was raw, and this does something with us.

And this is also the core of WalkAboutYou. We all experienced what it means to be nature, as human beings in a group, and how much that is a part of being human in the end, and how much it is a part of our evolutionary history as a species. And this also brought the connection, the focus.

No phones, no screens, nothing there, and being part of nature. That was a big thing that worked in the background, even without us telling people it works in the background.

From there we stripped a lot of complexity out of our programs, the way we do them now, based on that experience. It was interesting. First of all a very difficult experience, and then strip it down. We wanted to do similar things for a couple of days, but here close to Cologne.

But those didn't work.

So at this point, in 2020, you had done the pilot project. The whole project was very important, close to your heart, but it wasn't an actual business for you. You didn't rely on it for income. How did that evolve to become an actual business?

And this is why I had to be there. We also did WalkAboutYou and all the projects didn't work. So I had both things that didn't work. That was stressful, to be honest. But on the other hand, before that I had lived in a tent for five months and spent 10 euros a day, because that was my budget.

10 euros a day, 300 euros a month. So I was okay with very little, and it was not too stressful in terms of financially sustaining myself. In terms of how that evolved, I also couldn't really tell myself that this coaching aspect can be a project I can live from, because I had never experienced that before.

I had never written substantial invoices for coaching and I didn't know that you can do that. And I also told Kamil, I cannot take money for walking with people, because I want to do it anyway. So why should I take a lot of money? And he was the one trying to convince me.

Let's do it a little bit more business like.

And now this whole coaching world came into place.

And as we did B2C walks, where people could just join, we got a lot of experience in doing that, and also realized that it works in different constellations, with different group sizes. It gave us a lot of credibility.

We had already done a lot of formats with end users. There the connection didn't really work so well so far. Every end consumer, everyone who takes part in the open programs, is also working somewhere. That connection to B2B doesn't work well so far.

still friends and consumers, how did that evolve into a profitable business with actual large business customers?

Can I do something with a team? So this was one way, one approach, how it started with B2B and with paying clients that pay enough that you can do something with it. And another one, especially for me: I was already working with organizations on topics like leadership, like team development, Search Inside Yourself, that I talked with you about, and people knew me and

wanted to work with me, and then they asked me, what can we do with our team and business unit? And then I always recommended, we can go out there and do something outside. And I was convincing, I guess, and also believed this is a good way to do it.

And then we had our first business customers. The first one was also a friend of mine who had a startup at that time and who also likes to hike. I don't know if he was already on the public program, but at least he knew me. He loves nature, he goes hiking, and then he said, okay, let's do something with our team.

Another one was a company I was working with, where I was teaching other programs. And there a person came and said, hey, we have a new team, can we do something for better connection, on values and all the things you can do? And then I said, okay, let's do something outside, let's spend a day outdoors.

And this is possible through these great experiences, not only through our work but also through nature, being outside, the full package. We also tried things that others are doing.

This depends on our focus and all the things that we do. And there are so many opportunities. The question is,

We work on you as people. We work on your inner development. We work on your team. And there was already this trust established. Let's say this wasn't there.

This is the same thing happening with WalkAboutYou now.

The same is the case for, last year, Witali, you did it with Astrid, a focus walk, which is about attention management, a public program. And there the focus was also on how to manage your attention at work and in life. So, having public formats that target human beings as individuals, but in the work context.

And from then on, when people know you and they experience you, this is something that's so important for coaching, because it's always also about you as a person. In this context you can get to know people. Instead of a short public workshop, this can also be a webinar.

We had a webinar series, for example, a free one, where we had half an hour in the morning, where people could come and experience us and knew us as humans. And from that, trust was built and people approached us to do more. So events as a lead generation channel is something that we did.

and try to understand what the problem is, the challenge behind it. And then we offer something. And of course we have our packages, so we don't have to develop everything from zero. But it's more about getting the first personal contact as fast as possible.

Getting a lead, and then as fast as possible a personal conversation, getting into contact, and then sending out an offer.

Then we also send them this PDF. But when we have enough information, we send an individualized offer. So, what we heard you say is, these are the challenges, this is our offer based on that. And then we go into the whole process of yes or no, or maybe, or how to adapt this and how to adapt that.

It's giving a quick first bite of something to taste, and then getting into a conversation to come up with something that both sides are fine with.

And then we do that day, and after the day we have an online webinar where we gather again and try to integrate it into the daily life of the team. So it's not just a one day experience, but integrated somehow. And for this package, with two facilitators from us, it's 7,200 euros. And with just two facilitators from us, we can do it everywhere. We can come to your location, basically wherever you are, and do it there without additional costs.

But it's around that one day program, because I think it does take some time to learn about the concept of doing it outdoors. We do quite intense work with people. There are a lot of emotions involved in that, and you need to generate trust.

And after that we can go into the longer ones. Because we already have relationships with teams. They already last for one and a half years. That is where we can do longer programs. It's more interesting for the team, because you can work on stuff.

And for us we get time to deep dive and follow up on topics. And for sure also from the business perspective it's great. It makes more sense.

We learned from Kamil that it's really important to understand the client situation, to listen a lot. But in order to arrive at this first conversation with a potential business client, I learned that you also run open programs, where I as an individual come on a Sunday afternoon, and then it's a two hour thing or something.

How do you advertise that, and how did you price it?

But we realized that didn't work well, because we had a price tag of 150 euros per person, and then they say, ah, 150 euros for a walk, I can just do it for free at the same spot, because it was close to Cologne. And it was also really hard to advertise.

The people who did it were really happy. But we always had the difficulty of getting enough people to run it. And at some point, last year, we changed to doing it in the afternoon only, for three or four hours, maybe two hours, but more like three or four hours, and giving it more of a B2B context. Inner development goals, outdoor experience, walk in nature, objective key results, focus walk, focusing on work and personal focus.

And there we do pay-it-forward formats. You can join for free, somebody before you has already paid for you. So they know they come for free, but they have to pay for the next group. And then, after the three or four hours of working together, they receive an email and pay whatever they feel.

We give a price range between 50 and 200 euros, so they have an understanding of where it can be. And people sometimes pay more than 150 euros. Now we do it for a little less time, on a Thursday afternoon, and people start to pay more than we charged before for a full day.

But we changed the topic to be a little bit more business related.

And you say you learned, okay, we actually arrive at more or less this price tag of 150 euros on average, sometimes more, sometimes less. How do you present it? Is it on the signup page, pay what you want? And do you explain this whole pay it forward, that you are paying for the people who do the event after you?

Somebody else in the past has paid for you. When do you explain that story?

Not only for people that have money. This is also on purpose. The story we are using right now is this pay it forward story. There are different stories and different namings you can give this whole process, but it always works the same: people decide how much they give, and pay it forward.

It's more like, okay, the first workshop, we paid it forward as an organization and invited all of you. And then after that, we're working on the topics of sustainability, regenerative transformation, how we can form our economies to better serve us as people and better serve the planet.

And this is about not thinking only about you, but also thinking about others, connecting to other groups, thinking into the future, not only about your personal benefit. We tell people, okay, somebody paid for you. This is how it is.

You can pay for others to have this experience. You're investing in this product, in this topic, you're investing in this education that wants to bring a better economy, life, connection to nature, to ourselves. That's what you can do there. There are many stories you can tell.

One of the quotes that I used recently is the story that in great societies old people are planting trees under which they won't sit themselves. That's a quote that goes in this direction. And you're also bringing people into the process, connecting them to this product.

So it's not, you take it, pay and go. You have to think about it, you think how much is it worth to you, you're more involved. It's actually a coaching intervention to bring the price on the table, and it's more like a marketing tool, at least for us. This is also something we are now looking at very extensively: how to handle money and money flows within the organization, outside the organization, and in the whole world, to discover.

We just stepped in. It's a very, very interesting topic that, especially in the entrepreneurial world we came from before, people didn't know about and didn't talk about at all.

And then also of the people coming after me. So I am put into this place where I'm not an individual but part of something bigger, which I'm sure makes a great story also for acquisition. And just, again, becoming very practical about acquisition: do you tell that story?

So it's our flagship process. They pay the accommodation and the food. So everything we pay, they pay upfront. But at the end, they actually decide what they give us as facilitators for the whole program. It's quite risky for us, because we cannot calculate beforehand. However, we are covered on our costs.

Not on our time. And we invest, especially Kamil invests, a lot of time into the program. And then the outcome comes at the end, after they have experienced the whole program. In my view it works quite well, actually. They do acknowledge it.

forward model for individuals. And now you're mentioning the flagship program, training coaches in outdoor facilitation.

How did you end up with this target group?

And there was this initiative, one point that can bring us further, and I think on our last offsite three or four months ago we said, okay, this is one of our main focuses for creating the impact we want: making working outdoors as normal as online and indoors. It's our biggest impact group, because they're multipliers.

And on the other side, people invest in their career and their business and have new opportunities with clients. So they can earn money with that. They invest money and really want to do it. They're not like in some teams, where you have people who are directed to this program. Here people want to do it and they are already passionate about it. So it's also great work with people like that, spending time with them.

We have cards called walk and talk cards, which are just regular cards with questions, but smaller. And we sell them through our website, so stuff like this is also included.

We are organized more as a network. So we have projects, and whoever works on the projects gets paid for the projects. And then there is a part that goes into the organization for the common costs that are there. And everybody who works with us also has other projects and other work. This is how we are organized. And maybe next year, who knows, somebody gets fixed employment, but we're experimenting with all of that. We see WalkAboutYou more as an organism that's living, an experimentation field in organizational development. We can then take these things to our clients and show them what we actually did

for ourselves. And we will see. There are some voices that say, hey, we want to have this as our main financial income, and there are some voices that want to keep it more free and experimental. All directions are possible, and the question is what we will decide for, and what feedback we get from the market.

But I think the rain is coming in the middle of a podcast episode. And I can relate, as a facilitator, staying flexible and not clinging too tightly to the thing you so nicely thought through and put a lot of work into is also something I developed relatively late,

I would say, in my facilitator life, and for sure am still developing.

Do a check in round in your workshop outdoors, or a check out outdoors, or a walk and talk intervention. And this year we really, we are still on the way, but we figured out the principles most important for our work. One of them is, we are nature. Nature is not a tool that we are using.

This is a living organism and we're part of it. And this already changes a lot. You don't have to tell it to your clients, you don't have to tell the groups, but if you're somehow connected to your environment, it will help you to feel better and to work with it. And another one is connect before act, which we mentioned a lot, which is one of those principles.

And also what Witali said about uncertainty, go with it. So, these principles. And we are actually happy on our trainings when there is bad weather and not nice conditions. It happens that we do these trainings in autumn, or next year in spring, where the weather is not so constant, to let people experience that it also works when the weather conditions are not perfect, and to have the trust to just try it.

Reinventing Organizations.

And they put it quite nicely into words, and they have these different tools. For me it was important not just to listen. At that time I was already working in my office job. Every evening I heard something, and the next day I smuggled it in and used it in a meeting, or in an online format or whatever.

That was important for me, to realize those tools work. Social presencing theater. I used it for real problems, and it does work. I know for many people it doesn't. I like that it has different approaches.

I've never been there before. And at that point, being able to read the group and what is important right now. This is the sensing part, from the present moment, and that's what we try to do quite intensively at WalkAboutYou.

development goals. It's 23 qualities and skills that help us to do sustainable transformation.

It's about qualities and skills to change something in the outer world that makes sense and solves the big crises that we have. Search Inside Yourself is also quite similar, focused more on mindfulness, emotional intelligence, backed with neuroscience, and coming more from the tech world with a different story. But it's also about, I mean, the founder, his main purpose was to create world peace, by providing business success and inner peace. Frederic Laloux with Reinventing Organizations is also focused on the purpose, on the next levels, and on acting more from the moment and not being trapped in the lower levels of spiral dynamics.

It's about being connected to the whole, being present and doing something good for you, for society and for the world. I came from Search Inside Yourself, from my education background. Right now I'm looking at the inner development goals, because there's a large momentum, it's a large community, and it is an umbrella for a lot of other things. So also WalkAboutYou, and Otto Scharmer, they are talking with the IDG guys.

Search Inside Yourself, it's an umbrella holding a lot. This is how I see it. And this is where I am now, where I'm coming from and where I'm going in terms of models and trends. We tell different stories for different audiences to work with us.

But the core is always the same.

And you also wrapped it up really nicely. I would like to ask one more question, to make things actionable.

How would that look? Where do I start?

we realized we need people who are also able to create a momentum with other people, because it's a lot about marketing as well, and hustling. It doesn't just work by clicking, you have to tell people that the thing is there.

The second part is within the OFT program, the outdoor facilitation training, happening in April. This is four days, Thursday to Sunday, and you basically also pay what you want. You pay the fixed price before, and you can apply on our website. Probably you will be there in April.

I think I have written a personal email, or a LinkedIn message, to almost all my connections in the last years, and sometimes more than one, and sometimes I had this feeling, okay, I'm the spammer here. And then people start to come who are not in your network, hopefully. And then it can generate a flow that's not so dependent on yourself. But there is not this one way for that.

Of course we are supporting, putting this in our channels. But this is about finding your sweet spot, your way. Marketing, sales, lead generation is one of the biggest bottlenecks, at least if you're not the super expert in your field that everybody is trying to hire. But through these little formats, which are easily accessible, you can become an expert, and then it gets easier.

We have at least a little brand that stands for something, and people know us in our bubble. This helps, but it took four years, or was it five years, four years.

This was my conversation with Witali and Kamil from WalkAboutYou. If you want to get in touch, train as an outdoor coach, or learn about the concepts that we touched upon,

check the links in our show notes, and see you next time on the Making of a Coach.