Hey fellow human,

This is a piece that feels pivotal to write about my work, my life and my relationships - including you. I hope you stay even when it gets edgy. Or especially then. ❤️

I started coaching 11 years ago. As part of a leadership program at ustwo, the global leadership team was introduced to the foundations of coaching by two Co-Active Training Institute (CTI) coaches. It was a weekend of solid agreements, principles, frameworks, pair practice and group reflection. To say that something clicked would be an understatement. It was more like my whole being screaming: “Fucking hell yes, this is amazing” while all my cells were filled with iridescent light.

I went on to certify with CTI and after that with CRR Global for Organization and Relationship Systems Coaching (ORSC), and joined the Regenerative Leadership journey, first as a facilitator and then a student. Since 2020, I’ve coached roughly 1500 hours (I’m not great at keeping track) with individual leaders and teams. It all gave me my validity in certain rooms - credentials, authority - and access - which I want to return to later.

Since my journey began, the polycrisis in the world deepened, the cracks deepened, and in the midst of it all, something got revealed - in my inner self-understanding, my understanding of the world, and my role in the change. What I was trained for has not prepared me to witness and work with what I’ve since seen unfold in our collective relational field. Maybe nothing can. The frameworks I was taught were great, but they were insufficient when I met some difficult ground. It was not enough for what I was encountering in the coaching process, especially with clients of the global majority living through genocide, displacement, dehumanisation and systemic oppression. I had the tools, but they were only practiced in really safe and clear containers and reality was a different beast.

I hit the limit of the tools and met the edge of my capacity to hold certain spaces. As I was looking to expand it, I dove deeper into really understanding the harm colonialism, capitalism, racism and other oppressive systems are causing in the world, mainly the global South and people of global majority. I met my own ignorance and complicity. And the tools I had were insufficient to help me acknowledge uncomfortable truths about myself and my conditioning. I started seeing what the people of global majority have been trying to tell us all along.

I had a reckoning with the colonial legacy of coaching. There was a moment when I first heard about the history of coaching - what was stolen, eroded, and repackaged as coaching as we know it today. It was a roundtable discussion led by Emily Anne Brant, in conversation with Shirin Eskandani about decolonising coaching. They took us back in time in the development of the coaching timeline. They’ve shown us how indigenous wisdom and ancient relational and sacred healing practices were stolen - violently - and how they got bastardised, sanitised and repackaged as performance coaching - to drive individual productivity and VALUE for corporations. All while minimising the spiritual dimension of the work and calling it ‘woo-woo’. Belittling something is such an effective way to delegitimise it. That’s what made it so effective.

While Emily and Shirin were speaking, a film was running in my head in parallel, almost like a panorama - about the Catholic Church, its firm hold of the collective psyche, my own rather unpleasant experiences with it and the suppression and eventual theft of the pagan rituals in my home country of Slovenia. And then I saw it: my own denial and neglect of the heritage of my culture, my land, my people. I saw how I’ve made myself smaller, how I shrunk my heritage, my culture, my language - just to belong in the West. It was like the moment you see the matrix - like those Magic Eye images from the 90s - stare at them long enough, and 3D figure appears. Seeing the pattern of colonialism not just “out there”, but “in here” (pointing to my heart). How I am complicit in it, every day.

First, there was clarity: you know, the moment when you actually SEE something. I went straight to the head, analysing - how very colonial of me. Then there was shame, and denial, and defensiveness, and letting myself of the hook. And then - escape, let’s just leave it for a while, this is too much. And then - the grief hit me like a massive wave - it threatened to drown me. I saw how I allowed this colonial conditioning to steal some of the most sacred things about where I come from and who I am. It’s one of the reasons my kids don’t speak Slovenian. It’s raw, this one.

I sat with it, for a long time, continuously, returning to it all. And the more I stayed, the more the water eventually subsided until I could look at it all. And then, afterwards - a holy wrath emerged. A “What the fuck, hell no” attitude, a newfound depot of resolve and commitment to undoing it all. I knew. This was what was taken. This was the actual journey back and the deep work needed to go forward. It was inner work, trauma healing, lineage work, relational work and re-membering all wrapped up in one.

I joined Emily Anne Brant’s Decolonized Coach Community, where we spent over a year collectively unpacking our colonial conditioning, learning to see it, learning the language to name it, growing the nervous system capacity to be with it when we see it in our lives and our coaching spaces. Deconstructing it, rewiring it, rekindling the fire of our ancestral wisdom and the wisdom of non-human kin, the land, elementals.

When the crisis in Palestine escalated into genocide, I didn’t know where to turn. The coaching spaces I was part of couldn’t hold that and as friction entered the room, relationships weakened. Comfort was consistently chosen over accountability and relational repair. In so many places, the centre didn’t hold.

Around the same time, I was coaching women through the She Entrepreneurs program - with clients in the Levant, Northern Africa and Turkey. Some of the approaches and tools I’ve learned were inadequate for that level of trauma and complexity. And - most importantly, the worldview I brought was not neutral. It shaped the coaching container, whether I named it or not.

I was actively looking for a decolonial approach from someone in the coaching field who was further along this journey. That is when I came across Charmaine Roche and her work, and eventually joined her container for coaches - CRIAL (Critically Reflective Inspirative Action Learning). The program was about cultivating critical consciousness and embodied presence through the practice of decolonisation. It was one of the most transformational spaces I’ve been part of so far. The space was held without defaulting to understanding, solving and resolving the friction. We sat with discomfort instead and that was very much needed for something new to emerge. One thing that was named in a recent CRIAL gathering that I wish I had seen myself before it was named: you can have all the coaching certifications in the world and still cause harm to clients of the global majority. It stirred something in my body, so I know it lands closer to home than I would like to admit.

This is all to say that the inner work of the past few years is only just starting to see the light of day, and as a consequence, everything else about what I do and how I do it is changing. There are ways of living and working I cannot choose anymore. There are things I cannot teach anymore, and there are qualities which I once deemed essential for growth that seem hollow, and I will no longer espouse them in my work.

But on the other hand, now more than ever, I know that rooting myself in my values, cultivating clear relational ethics in my life and coaching spaces is the work that can hold the centre. I feel held by my ancestral lands and commitments and I now bring the Slavic myths, elements and ceremonies into the coaching space - not to “transfer” them to the clients, but as allies in holding the space for the clients to reconnect to their own cosmology, their own roots, their own ancestral obligations and their own commitment to what work for the world actually looks like. This is where I currently am in my work. And, it’s still changing - step by step, imperfectly, daily and continuously.

Returning to the credentials I started with, for many of us, it may mean disentangling from institutions that give our work legitimacy. It may mean passing on opportunities that aren’t ethically aligned, it may mean not being able to work in certain rooms due to lack of official credentials, not being able to teach at coaching institutions. And to be honest, I would love to say that the trade-off is the right thing to do. But I actually don’t know. Sometimes I think denouncing it is integrity. Some days it feels more like avoidance. So I sit with the question some more. Because most of this work needs to be done from within the very systems we are trying to change, so there really is no walking away from it.

But what I think can come in its place is growing legitimacy from the soil of our lands and ancestry, ethical principles to guide our work, and relational obligations to the communities we are part of. Also when no one’s looking. Especially then. There is no easier way through than to work in the messy middle, and to not exempt ourselves from the ugly parts and our complicity in these systems of oppression.

To decolonise is to understand that we are not changing something “out there” but “in here” (pointing to the body as a whole). It means to hold the centre and STAY, so we don’t collapse into escape, denial, defensiveness, blame and shame. It is to sit with one’s own complicity and change ourselves first. Sometimes moving beyond the boundaries of what we think we know about ourselves and the world. It is to understand ourselves as part of a living web of relationships with our non-human kin, not the overloards of it.

It’s work of a different level of magnitude and feels like a hard and lonely journey. And still, I lean into a presence larger-than-life. Currently, it’s the mountain elder of Slovenia - Triglav - our highest mountain and the mythical three-headed god: ruling the sky, the earth and the sea. And in moments of turmoil, it carries me. At least I think it does.

What is carrying you?

In kinship,
Martina

Hi, I'm Martina. I coach creative leaders, change-makers and teams through defining transitions. My approach is relational and focused on growing vibrant, trusting cultures full of life. Our work together serves a systemic paradigm shift towards a regenerative, life-affirming worldview. ​ I am committed to anti-racism and decolonisation, and all my paid client work enables me to support impact leaders and communities of the global majority through scholarships or pro-bono work. ​ And as for me - I am wildly intuitive, ancestrally rooted and happiest in treetops. 🌳 ​

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