Over the past few weeks, I took part in the Leading Yourself programme: four intensive training days, buddy sessions, online peer-learning sessions and a final presentation based on the "made to stick" principle.

When you spend a lot of time in the IT sector, the focus is quite often on developing and keeping hard skills up to date, but for a change this was training to sharpen the soft skills ...and working on self-management certainly does no harm in a world that is becoming increasingly digital and complex.

My main personal takeaways:

🔹Insights Discovery colours: a colour-based lens on behaviour, not only my own but that of others as well. What gives someone energy, what drains energy, what does work in communication with a particular colour and what should you therefore avoid? It makes it much easier to adapt your style to your conversation partner(s) ...and the personal profile was surprisingly accurate.

🔹Heart coherence: so important, yet underrated. Learning how to calm your nervous system through breathing and focus. Useful when pressure, expectations and deadlines increase, but you still want to keep thinking clearly.

🔹Connecting communication: learning to distinguish between facts, interpretation and judgement. Surprising how quickly you fall into judgement; it takes some practice to get it right. That alone changes how you conduct conversations, approach conflict and give (and receive) feedback.

...and on top of that, a whole toolbox of additional methods and frameworks.

Thanks to everyone for holding up the mirror and for the honest conversations. Thanks to Tim Vanmarcke, provocative transformation coach at Time To Switch, for the inspiring sessions. Now to keep translating it into practice! 🚀

🖼️ 'Lightly' caricatured AI illustration (ChatGPT 5.1)