Your Best Version - Live Coaching Event Berlin 2024

In early June, I had the chance to travel to Berlin to take part in a coaching event called Your Best Version. Karin Kuschik, who created and ran this seminar, is a business coach, moderator, and bestselling author of the book "50 Sätze die das Leben leichter machen." In this seminar, she brought together her most effective coaching tools into one program with a focus on values work, and used the values we developed to build strategies for stepping out of the drama triangle and taking on the role of creator. Over the two and a half days, I gathered so much experience, and I came home with a toolkit full of tools, countless insights from inspiring people, and great conversations - and I'm still practicing applying this set of possibilities. I took away a particular kind of clarity from that weekend - clarity within myself, clarity in my thoughts, and also in the way I approach things. Even two months after this event, I notice how this clarity, and with it a certain sense of calm, has become a lasting part of me.

I'd like to share a few experiences and impressions from that weekend.
Since this was my first coaching event of this size, I didn't know what to expect. On top of that, I deliberately didn't think too much about it beforehand, simply to make it easier for myself to stay open and dive in fully. Still, it felt strange and took some getting used to at first, since there was a very intense audiovisual and emotional setting with lots of applause and loud music, designed to amplify any emotions that came up so we could go even deeper. Worth mentioning here: to enable a process of change in a relatively short time, it's essential to activate all the senses in order to intensify the emotions that surface.

The thought "I'll take with me whatever feels right for me" helped me stay open and, as a result, take in and take away a wide range of new experiences.

The program over the two and a half days was scheduled incredibly tightly. Alongside plenty of input from Karin Kuschik, there was also a lot of self-experience through individual and group exercises as well as speed coaching sessions. What I found truly impressive was how sensitively and precisely Karin knew exactly when something needed to happen to keep the energy in the room up. She managed to make this extremely intense program feel remarkably engaging. At the end of each day, I was surprised that the day was already over - especially on day two, when we worked on our best version for ten hours straight, with only short breaks. She always knew exactly when to switch from a talk to an exercise or a short break, before the participants' fatigue could even set in.

"Language is so powerful, and when we use it deliberately, we can achieve great things."

Together we worked out tools like a drama-exit strategy and the target talk. Language is such an essential instrument in all of this. The sentence "Language is so powerful, and when we use it deliberately, we can achieve great things" came up often. Be aware of how you phrase things and what you actually want to say with them, and consider whether that's really how it comes across. How you use language matters - especially how something is said conveys far more than we're often aware of. Anyone can address anything directly; it's simply whether I say it casually and with a smile that determines whether it's taken as an attack or as a plain statement. Karin always puts it so nicely: "Just say it the way you'd order an apple spritzer."

After these days, I admire even more how she can address truly uncomfortable situations with ease and charm. Every phrase she uses carries so much clarity and simplicity that it's a genuine pleasure just to listen to her. Her words kept echoing in my head for days afterward.

For Sushi Dev, I was able to take away several learnings from the event. One of them is the concept of the clear closing. Meetings often end without a clear conclusion, and the likelihood that tasks won't get done, or won't get done the way they were meant to, is high. When everyone present briefly summarizes their tasks at the end, the likelihood that those tasks actually get done as intended is significantly higher.

I'd like to close this blog post with a question a very good friend asked me after the event: if I had to sum up the weekend in one word, which word would it be? In my case, it's completely clear: clarity. After the weekend, I feel clearer within myself and with myself than ever before, and that allows me to cultivate a certain calm and ease within me.