Welcome to my space

I have spent more than 35 years working alongside people and teams, and in all that time I have learned something that comes up in almost every conversation: hardly anyone needs more information. What they need is to stop, make sense of what they already know, and dare to look at it head-on.

That is where this blog comes from. Not to give you advice or ten-step lists, but to share what I see from the coach's chair: patterns that keep repeating, questions that shift things, and my own doubts too.

What you will find here

• Real leadership — the kind made of difficult conversations and decisions taken with incomplete information, not the poster kind.
• Transitions: career changes, new roles, moments when what used to work stops working.
• Teams: why good people together sometimes work badly, and what can be done about it.
• What I learn in sessions, in ESADE's Executive MBA and in the Moroccan desert.

Where I write from

I am an ICF-certified coach (PCC) working from Barcelona, in Spanish, English and Dutch. Before this I was an executive, led teams across several countries and rebuilt my own path more than once. So I am not speaking from theory: I have been where you probably are now.

There is one idea that stays with me, and it is African: Ubuntu, "I am because we are". Nobody grows entirely alone. Not you, not me.

One last thing

I publish when I have something to add, not because it is due. I would rather write one piece a quarter that is worth your time than a weekly one that says nothing.

If something you read here stirs something, write to me at paul@livt.es. The first conversation is always free, no strings attached.

Thank you for being here.

Paul van den Hout
ICF PCC Coach · Barcelona