Have you been looking for a way to be more productive, with better habits and just being HAPPIER?
Me too! Let’s go and let’s do this together!
Here’s a bit about me, so you know who I am and why I am here, talking to you.
Like all good stories, my one starts with some silly shenanigans and “mistakes” that eventually led me to where I am today.
Born in a regular Czech family just a year before the fall of the Iron Curtain and the communist regime in then Czechoslovakia, I had a regular happy childhood spending my summers with my sister and cousins at my grandparents’, often helping in their gardens or vineyards, collecting wild herbs with my auntie and eating watermelons.
One memory of these summers that stuck with me is my grandmother having her Turkish coffee while reading a book or solving a crossword, sitting on the sofa with her legs up on the chair, after every lunch (I miss you grandma!).
This is my ever-lasting reminder of how important self-care is and the ability to give yourself some slack and love.
The second memory that stuck is how I was preparing school exercises for all my younger cousins to fill in during the summer holidays and marking them (this shows how much I love to learn, but also the pressure I already felt to be the best!).
As for way too many teenagers, I’m glad my high school period is over. “Winning” the “second ugliest girl in the classroom” competition is characteristic of this era (Fun fact: the culprit of this competition says he has no recollection of this and says there is no way it was him. He is one of my best friends now.)
Throughout my childhood, I felt that I had to prove my worth.
I felt the constant pressure to get the best grades, win the school competitions (which I did most of the time) or wear great clothes (which I didn’t), be talented in some extracurricular activities (which I never was, except long distance running). I created the identity that I’m very smart, but boring, ugly and I doubted I’ll ever find a boyfriend (It took me well into my late twenties to realize that I’m smart, beautiful and enough).
I created the identity that I’m very smart, but boring, ugly and I doubted I’ll ever find a boyfriend.
Never in the group of pretty girls, I started making friends with the “cool guys” in the class. I was somewhere in between the smart girl with the best grades always finishing her assignment well in advance (perfect trait for eventually becoming an accountability coach!) and the rebel going to reggae parties. I graduated with the best possible grades, but did some unwise things which I would now regard as far too risky.
On the “smart girl proving her worth” wave, I enrolled at the Faculty of Science of the university I always wanted to attend and in a couple of weeks I surprised everyone with the first ever bombshell announcement: “I’m leaving the university and going to look for work!”. I love flowers, but I refused to kill mice or frogs to get my degree in botanic, though this was just the tip of the iceberg. The truth was that I hated the university, dealt with some pretty serious confidence issues and didn’t know how to get out of that dark space not even the hundreds of self-help books could help me with.
The decision to leave the university was not really well thought through, but it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made as it led me to travelling and discovering the world.
I worked in a vegetarian restaurant for about 9 months, meeting my first two boyfriends (from Iceland and Australia — see the intercultural beginnings here?!), and went for my first-ever solo trip abroad. I went up north to Sweden by a truck, hitchhiked, stayed with amazing people through Couchsurfing, got myself a job at one of the biggest European reggae festivals so I could watch Sean Paul for free. I met people from Africa for the first time ever, travelled to Norway to see my friend, hiked 80+ kilometers in two days and did other utterly silly and amazing stuff you’re able to do only when you are in your early twenties. This started my love for travelling, meeting people from different backgrounds and just being super curious and enjoying the new experiences.
After a yearlong break, I successfully passed the entry exam for a new university which I had chosen. I loved studying now at the Faculty of Social Sciences, but I still had lots of issues with self-confidence and my relationship to food was a disaster. I wanted to live abroad and I didn’t hesitate when the Erasmus application announcement came in. After my first year at the university and a second hitchhiking trip with a friend through Poland, Lithuania and Latvia (and a six-week-long Balkan trip with a Polish music group!) I packed my bags and got onto a bus to my beloved Sweden for a year of stay.
The Swedish refuge leading to Africa
Moving to Sweden started the seven-year-long journey.
I finally dealt with my eating challenges, mostly because finally I felt loved and accepted for who I was.
I loved Sweden. It was a kind of refuge. When I was not at school, I was alone in the forest or walking around the lake. I never participated in the wild Erasmus life, probably because I preferred to save the little money I had to make a couple of small trips to see the northern lights (They never showed up during my trip but I made it to the polar circle!). The time in Sweden was the first time I was in a truly international mix and since then I kept my feet in different countries. My Tanzanian neighbour kept raving about his Italian friend, but I was waving him off. Until he came. We spent the night talking, he cooked homemade Italian ravioli and the next day we were a couple. I met his amazing Italian family a few weeks after that.
This started the seven-year-long journey. I finally dealt with my eating challenges, mostly because finally I felt loved and accepted for who I was. I made my first trip to Africa, spending four weeks in Uganda on a very low budget, so most of the surprises Africa can offer, I experienced. Although everybody was discouraging me about the continent, not only did I survive, I also loved it. I moved to Uganda when I finished my bachelor’s, and spent two amazing years in Karamoja, the pastoral region of North-West Uganda fitting the image of the “real Africa”: traditional pastoral (and very poor) communities living on the traditional mixture of cow milk and blood, and sorghum, men and women wearing amazing garments, some of them with the significant beauty scarification, cattle everywhere and beautiful nature.
Five years of a dream-like relationship passed quickly and were followed by two years of a rollercoaster. I was desperate to make it work (because it was that dream relationship of living happily ever after!), but at the same time, I was not able to put my relationship first. I can safely say that at that time, I was selfish but I didn’t see it then. Deep down, I wanted my way out, but I wouldn’t admit that to myself. I didn’t have the power, self-differentiation or confidence to do it with more grace and less pain.
In 2014, I fell in love…
After spending two years in Uganda, I felt I needed to move on and after sending job applications all over the world, destiny wanted me to stay in Africa. I got a job in Zambia, working in one of the two refugee settlements.
One and a half years living in the middle of the Zambian countryside made me fall in love with this country. All my memories are so visceral that it is hard to explain with words. The dust during the dry season, the purple jacarandas, the bush and all the amazing flowers, the friends I made and the crazy nights I spent with my girlfriends dancing up to 5 o’clock in the morning. I felt free, yet tied in my relationship.
I left Zambia for Tanzania but I just couldn’t stay out of the country for long. I kept coming back.
The relationship started to crumble, and we eventually broke-up and divorced.
During one of my trips to Zambia, I met him. After a night of talking and dancing, he invited me out for a coffee (until this day, he claims it was NOT a date! I keep arguing with that…). I left Zambia after a couple of days, but we never stopped talking and we moved in together a few months after that, living the bliss of a new exciting relationship while having our first arguments.
Chris wouldn’t take my nonsense. This is when I started to realize I ran my life and relationships on autopilot. It was the only way I knew and I never stopped to question it. Until Chris did. Then, I faced the decision: Will I put my myself together or will I have another relationship fail? You guessed the answer probably. It was not smooth nor straightforward, but we made it. We navigated about two and half years of long-distance relationship, with the longest stretch of seven months while I had to leave Zambia as my work permit expired.
It was hard, but this break made my long-term dream happen – I had the chance to live and work in Mongolia for six months.
It was hard, but this break made my long-term dream happen – I had the chance to live and work in Mongolia for six months. Thanks to my insistence and creativity, I made it back to Zambia, but I worked on the other side of the country about 17 hours away from where my partner lived. For two years, we would meet once every three weeks for a weekend, but we never skipped a day talking over the phone (even when we were arguing!).
A person born for employment…becoming a business owner
After one of the weekends together, I felt sick. I didn’t want to travel back to my work location as I suspected malaria so I went for a test. The test was negative, but I found out I was a couple of weeks pregnant. This initiated yet another new journey and two months after that the long-distance part of the relationship was finally over. I moved to Kitwe, the second largest city in Zambia, the home town of my partner. Our son was born and we got married on his first birthday.
As a new mom, I felt the urge to do something different than the development work I spent my whole life in. My journey to becoming a coach was not straightforward, but I felt I needed change. I could no longer travel for work and I was exhausted from the work I was doing working travelling all over Zambia. I started a blog, I found myself writing gigs in a couple of Czech newspapers and magazines, and without even having a thought of ever running my own business, I ended up signing up for a very expensive course on how to create my online course (I was like: Am I crazy spending all this money for an online course?).
The Malaria test was negative, but I found out I was a couple of weeks pregnant.
As a new mom, I felt the urge to do something different than the development and humanitarian work.
At moments it felt like a huge mistake and my comfort zone almost vanished, but eventually, I created my first online course for women in intercultural relationships and got my first client ever (with whom I ended up working for the next two years). I had no choice but to overcome lots of pretty huge fears and mindset blocks. The biggest was the fear of talking on camera and in public, but also dealing with a ton of racist hate (mostly from white Czech men) while marketing and talking about intercultural relationships. I cried. I wanted to give up. I was asking myself what the heck I had got myself into. However, I continued, I worked with more amazing women in intercultural relationships and finally I decided to switch my business to English, because by now most of my adult life was in English, I had feet in different countries and I haven’t lived in the Czech Republic for more than ten years. This made sense and it felt more real like the real me (even if I have a strong Czech accent!).
The biggest was the fear of talking on camera and in public, but also dealing with a ton of racist hate while marketing and talking about intercultural relationships. I cried. I wanted to give up. I was asking myself what the heck I had got myself into.
I started working with an amazing coach based in the US (Sarah, you’re amazing!!!), investing a sum of money that I was again thinking I was foolish. I continued focusing on intercultural relationships, yet it was not doing it for me again. Then I realized two things. One, even if the cultural difference in the intercultural relationships may bring additional facets and challenges, all relationships are ultimately about who we are as human beings and how we work through the challenges. Two, I felt we should aim higher, not only for amazing relationships, but for the overall feeling of happiness in life. That includes being happy with the work we do, with the habits we create, having fun in life doing the things we love, having a wonderful community and being strong and healthy
This felt right. This felt like me. This was fun.
I had already committed myself to keep trying the best possible version of myself and doing this for my clients just felt … natural.
This felt right. This felt like me. This was fun. I had already committed myself to keep trying the best possible version of myself while being able to say “I had a great day” at the end of every day, and doing this for my clients just felt … natural. Going wider and transforming into a life and accountability coach for freelancers and business owners with feet in different countries, I realized that productivity and creating habits for bettering ourselves is the passion I always had (remember the homework for my cousins during the summer holidays? Remember the ton of self-help books I read in my early twenties?) and my personal traits of internal accountability, high conscientiousness and hate for deadlines are perfect for what I started doing: helping my amazing clients to be productive, create new healthy habits and be happier.
This is where I am now
I’m my favourite experimenting ground. Navigating parenting with a very active and opinionated 3-year-old, building and growing my business, dealing with ups and downs of life abroad, trying to be healthier, eating better (while hating cooking!) and exercising regularly while keeping our relationship with my husband on the track.
I try make sure I have enough moments in my life that are fun, I have space to breathe and sit with a book on our veranda.
No, my life is not perfect. I have days when I’m not as productive I’d like to be, when I slack with my habits or feel not confident at all.
Living a perfect life is not the point, being happy is.
I refuse to believe the nonsense that “we can’t have it all”. I believe we can have a successful career or business, an amazing relationship, and be parents while having fun doing things we love. We can create habits that make us stronger, happier and more productive. We can have a wonderful community that will support us, even if we have feet in different countries. I want to have it all. And I want you to have it too. This is no space for compromising.
Now I guide amazing men and women like you through the rollercoaster of life. You don’t have to do it alone like I did most of my life with all my challenges (now I can’t imagine life without a coach!). You don’t get extra points for doing it alone.
Let’s go together on this exciting and amazing adventure of becoming the happiest selves, with its failures and low points, and making sure we live the life we WANT – happy, confident, focused and positive.
You can do it. I’m here to support you. This is going to be awesome, hard, exciting, uncomfortable, enlightening and FUN!
Ready to see how we can work together?
Book an initial free session and let’s discuss how we can make sure you get exactly what you want
Ready to see how we can work together?
Book an initial free session and let’s discuss how we can make sure you get exactly what you want