How I Got Here

The Beginning

A sensitive child in a world that moved too slowly

I was a restless child. Sensitive, curious, perpetually impatient — running through the house announcing that I was bored, desperate for stimulation, for attention, for closeness. The adults around me did not always know what to do with this particular combination of qualities. I learned, early, to seek out my own answers.

That stubbornness took many forms. At secondary school, I spent an entire summer studying English because my sister spoke it better than I did. I have never quite lost that particular kind of motivation — the kind that is fuelled less by ambition than by a refusal to be outpaced by someone you love.

I was not a prominent student. Grades interested me less than the world itself. So I co-created and led a school magazine, a student council, a debate club. Through the student council, we organised open days, garden parties, and initiated a student ball that became a tradition long after I had left. I was building rooms for people to gather in, long before I had a name for it.

The Debate

Learning that listening is the harder skill

The experience that shaped me most was the debate programme under the Slovak Debate Association — an institution founded, as it happens, by my cousin. We practised the Karl Popper format, later the Parliamentary debate at university. What debate gave me was not the ability to argue. It was something more difficult and more valuable: the ability to listen.

I learned early that listening is the harder and more important skill. I learned to structure a speech, to build a layered argument, to distil the essential from the overwhelming. But above all, I learned that the quality of what you say depends entirely on the quality of what you have heard. That lesson has never left me. It is embedded in everything I do — in how I facilitate a salon, in how I sit with a coaching client, in how I run a compliance team.

There is a paradox here that I find endlessly instructive: a discipline built on the art of argument turned out to be, at its deepest level, a training in silence. The programme that appeared to be about your voice was always, in fact, about everyone else's.

The Career

From courtrooms to the C-suite — and what it cost

At eighteen, I moved to Prague and enrolled at Charles University to study law. The city became my home for nearly two decades. My career moved swiftly — from courtrooms to compliance departments, from associate to executive. By thirty, I was a C-level manager of a compliance and AML department in a retail bank. The institution was small; the responsibility was not. Since 2024, I have served as regional compliance manager for Western Europe at one of the largest German banks.

Alongside this, I have always been building something else entirely. A one-year vocational training to become a certified carpenter — pursued alongside executive management. Spanish, started at thirty-one, while simultaneously leading a growing team. These were hobbies, yes — and genuinely loved. There is something deeply satisfying about working with your hands, about the particular honesty of wood and tools, where the result is either true or it isn't. And there is something equally profound about learning a new language — not just acquiring vocabulary, but slowly gaining access to a different way of seeing the world, because every language carries inside it a distinct way of being human.

But they were also something more. They were expressions of a restlessness I have carried since childhood — a constant, almost compulsive curiosity, an urge to do more, to try something new, to refuse the idea that the person I already was might be enough. The same child who ran through the house saying she was bored grew up into an adult who filled every available space with learning.

This high-performer mode served me extraordinarily well for a long time. It accelerated my career and sharpened my capabilities. But the older I become, the more clearly I see what it was, underneath: a coping strategy built by a child who learned that closeness was not guaranteed, so self-sufficiency had to be absolute.

The Therapy

Ten years of returning to myself

At twenty-eight, I walked into a therapist's room for the first time. I have, in essence, never fully left — with only a few short breaks across ten years. It was not a comfortable process. But it was, without question, the most important investment I have ever made: in my relationships, in my self-understanding, in my capacity to be present with others rather than merely efficient around them.

Therapy gave me back the sensitive child I had spent years outrunning. It did not make me less capable. It made me capable of different things — softer things, more durable things. The kind of presence that a room full of people can actually feel, rather than simply observe.

There is a paradox at the heart of this story that I have only recently been able to name. The very thing that drove me to become so capable — the early sense that closeness was not guaranteed, so self-sufficiency had to be absolute — is the same thing that eventually drove me to create spaces where closeness becomes possible for others. The wound and the work turned out to be the same thing, seen from different ends of a long road.

The Salon

A pandemic, a living room, and a question that mattered

During the pandemic, I was on ten video calls a day and felt more disconnected than I had in years. I missed conversations with weight. The kind where you leave the room slightly different from how you entered. So I began inviting people to my home, selecting a topic that genuinely mattered, and asking everyone to simply show up and talk.

The first salon took place in 2024. A few friends of mine, yet strangers to each other. Carefully chosen topics. My own apartment in Prague. And something happened that evening that I had not quite dared to expect: strangers became real to each other. Not acquaintances — real. It was the room I had been searching for, in one form or another, since I was a restless child running through the house asking for someone to talk to.

The Thread

It was always about language

In 2025, after seven years in senior management, I began to see something I had not previously been able to articulate. The difference between a good leader and a great one is not technical knowledge. It is not strategy or process. It is the emotion embedded in language — the way a sentence lands in a room, the quality of attention that a question conveys, the relationship between what is said and what becomes possible as a result.

This realisation led me to ontological coaching — a discipline that treats language, body, and emotion as the three dimensions through which human beings shape their reality. I began my formal training in 2026 and I am still in it, with all the rigour and humility that implies.

Looking back, I can see the thread that runs through everything: the debate programme, the law studies, the therapy, the managerial role, the salon. All of it has been, at its core, an inquiry into language — into what we say, how we say it, and what transforms when we learn to say it differently. That is the story I carry. And it is the story that Mindsalon exists to tell.

And perhaps one final paradox: I spent the first half of my career in law and compliance — disciplines obsessed with the precise, binding letter of the word. And what I discovered, slowly and then all at once, is that what actually moves people has almost nothing to do with the letter. It is the emotion carried inside it. The spirit, not the rule.

I am on a journey from the performer mode to something more open — a way of being that makes room for others, for slowness, for the kind of closeness I have been seeking since I was small. I invite anyone who recognises that hunger to join me.