Elena Tochilina

I work with small and medium enterprise owners, top managers, not-for-profits, NGOs, HR leaders, women leaders, teams, local authorities, communities, and individuals with big ideas. The challenges they face rarely arrive labeled as “complexity,” though that’s often what’s underneath. What they do notice is an ever-changing environment, a sense of stuckness, or difficulty making decisions about where to focus next. Some need to shape a new product or innovation but find themselves low on inner or organisational resources. Others — often thriving leaders or business owners — are looking for a thinking partner to help them dream bigger or bring new ideas to life. I’m often invited to support vision and strategy processes, and I work in incubators and accelerators where ideation, prototyping, and new business models are born.

I also work with young men and women who are facing their first choices in life. And part of my work is dedicated to trauma healing and trauma management through somatic practices and inner work.

One example is a business owner in construction who came to me with a bold, beautiful idea — an app to align information flows across business, government, and personal systems. It felt too big to hold, let alone start. Together, we unpacked it, trimmed what wasn’t needed, and grounded it in a doable first version. He pitched it, built a team, and brought it to life.

Another was a strategy session with a mission-driven company wanting to grow their impact and stay financially healthy. They weren’t truly stuck — they just needed a space to get creative, listen to each other, and rethink their business model. I helped them surface fresh possibilities within their existing services and imagine new ones, reconnecting what they wanted to do with what they could make happen now.

My approach is relational, developmental, and embodied — rooted in deep listening and shaped by what’s alive in the moment. I support clients to grow their leadership, navigate complexity, and reconnect with a deeper sense of self and purpose. Whether we’re working through personal transformation or systemic shifts, I aim to create space that’s both practical and grounded in their Core — their Authenticity. I draw on a range of frameworks depending on what’s needed — developmental coaching through Growth Edge Coaching and the Leadership Circle Profile; sensemaking tools like Cynefin and Theory U; and Polarity Wisdom to work with stuckness and creative tension. When clients are building something — a project, an organization, a shift in culture — I also bring in strategic tools like the Business Model Canvas, Value Proposition Design, and culture mapping to help ideas take shape. Somatic intelligence is a core part of how I work. I’m certified in TRE (Tension & Trauma Releasing Exercises), Polyvagal Theory (PVT), and Tensegrity — practices that support nervous system regulation, presence, and deeper integration. I listen not just to what’s said, but to what emerges in the body and in the field between us. At the heart of it, my work is about helping people cultivate fluidity — the capacity to stay present and open in uncertainty, to release rigidity, and to move from a more grounded, authentic center.

My work has been formed as much by teachers and formal learning as by my own inner transformations. Personal change has always come first. For years, I was part of an organisational team for inner development trainings called Tensegrity, where I held both the role of leader and facilitator. It taught me how the way I lead is inseparable from who I am, and how the spaces I hold for others are shaped by the inner work I do myself.

My clients have been among my greatest teachers — arriving with their requests for safety, boldness, connection, and permission to dream. They continue to show me where I can stretch, and where the work meets life in its rawest, most beautiful form.

Trauma work has been a continuous thread for me over many years. I’ve studied body-based trauma therapy approaches, Polyvagal Theory, and the ways movement, posture, breath, and neuroplasticity around cues of safety can help people shift out of fight, flight, or freeze into connection. This has profoundly shaped both how I hold space and how I listen — to what’s spoken and to what lives in the body and in the space between.

I worked within the sustainability field — supporting banks in exploring how to finance green transitions. I saw how much a company’s culture and mindset influence its capacity to evolve. Some organisations shifted quickly, others stayed stuck. It made me curious about what allows culture change to take root, and how leadership shapes that process.

The Scandinavian tradition of Bildung has also been formative for me — a philosophy of adult education rooted in growing conscious, active citizens for thriving democracies. I’ve studied it both in theory and on the ground, spending half a year teaching and learning inside Danish folk high schools. That experience stays with me in how I think about human growth, learning communities, and social change. Given the context in my home country, agency and the ways to grow societies into bigger agency has become one of my goals as a volunteer and civil activist.

Theory U by Otto Scharmer, and Robert Kegan’s Immunity to Change and Changing on the Job are among the frameworks behind my work, giving language and structure to systemic change for teams and individuals.

Meditation, yoga, and energy work have long been part of my own resilience and wellbeing. I draw on these practices not only to stay steady myself, but to help clients discover what’s possible when we shift our state and create space for inner resourcefulness.

I’m a colleague, and sometimes a communications expert

I’m a dancer, and curious traveller, a volunteer and an activist.