Some things you understand from the outside.Others you only know because you've been through them.

There's a scene I still think about.

I'm driving through the mountains of Andalusia in my camper van. A stranger in the back seat, heading to the airport. The engine is making noises it shouldn't, so I've turned the music up loud enough to cover the sound. And I'm thinking: I was a CEO. Then an employee. Now I'm a taxi driver hoping the car doesn't break down before we reach the highway.

That moment contains something true about what it means to build your identity around what you create — and what happens when it's gone.

I've always been someone who turns ideas into things. At university I founded a music festival in my first year and directed a feature film in my second. Later I started an ideas production company in Berlin. Then came the project that would take seven years of my life: a platform for sustainable tourism, built around my father's village in southern Italy — the countryside, the food, the sea, the simplicity of a life being slowly forgotten. I genuinely believed we could change something. I used everything I had.

What I didn't see was what I was also trying to do: fill something on the inside with something on the outside.

The company survived Covid, the Ukraine crisis, investor collapses, team losses. And then it didn't. We filed for insolvency. We had personal guarantees on the bank loan. The process took years, and in some ways still isn't finished. When it ended, I felt two things in equal measure: failure, and relief. My body, which had been quietly breaking down for years, slowly began to recover.

Around this time, my son was born. A few days in, we were lying skin to skin, and something broke open in me. I cried for a long time. And I understood — not intellectually, but in my body — what I had been missing. I had been asking projects and ambitions to carry something they couldn't carry. My son didn't ask anything of me. He just arrived. And that was enough.

The road back took real work. Psychotherapy. Bodywork. Constellation work. Breathwork. Shamanic sessions. Ayahuasca. Each one a piece of something larger — my mind finding its way, my body learning to trust again, my sense of who I am no longer tied only to what I'm building.

I didn't plan to become a coach. Two people told me I should. I was skeptical — I wasn't sure I wanted to take responsibility for other people's paths. But in a breathwork session, something settled in me: I want to help people not cause harm from their own confusion. That felt true. It still does.

My father was a Catholic priest in Italy who fell in love with my mother, left the church, moved to Germany, and spent years searching before becoming an Italian teacher for adults. A good man. But I always sensed something unlived in him — a passion he never quite followed. I watched that as a child and went entirely the other direction: vision first, fully, unconditionally.

What I'm learning to find — and what I try to help others find — is the third way. Not passion instead of love. Not ambition instead of presence. But a life where what you build comes from something real inside you, and the people around you are not collateral to your vision.

That's what I do now.