Maciej Szturmowicz
Facylitator, coach, psychoterapeuta Gestalt
I help people develop themselves and build healthy, effective organizational cultures.
I would describe my professional (and life) path as a journey from the corporate world I grew up into deep and meaningful work with people and the organizations they create.
I have over 16 years of business experience in various leadership roles (ex Sitel, IBM, mBank), and have been working with people in one-on-one sessions and workshops since 2014. I have delivered more than 1,000 coaching hours and more than 400 therapeutic hours.
I currently work in various roles. As one of only 16 professional coaches in Poland accredited by EMCC at the Senior Practitioner level, I support leaders in developing relational leadership skills.
As an author of development programs and facilitator, I create a safe workshop space where boards, teams, groups of leaders or employees can experientially learn new communication techniques and discuss and solve complex organizational challenges.
As a certified Gestalt psychotherapist, I help people expand their consciousness and discover and develop themselves as they interact with others.
My own process of becoming and following my sense of life eludes all definitions. I feel that I connect many different worlds in my life, so I have multidimensional inspirations and experiences to work with people.
I played competitive tennis in AZS Warsaw from the age of 7-14. I won many Warsaw tournaments and was a finalist in national tournaments several times.
I studied and lived abroad for three and half years, in Austria and the USA. I have a BBA degree from Webster University in the USA and an MBA with honors from Warwick Business School in the UK. For my MBA, I wrote a thesis titled: “How to increase the impact of IBM GSS global sales training on actual sales behavior.”
I worked for 13 years with great success in corporations, including Sitel, 8 years at IBM and 3 years as an advisor to the board of mBank S.A. I led B2B sales teams and negotiated multi-million (USD) transformational contracts with corporate clients in Poland and abroad. I led strategic projects integrating the work of internal teams and external partners. As part of the mBOX project, I led the signing of a strategic partnership between mBank and France’s La Banque Postale (this initiative was recognized by Gartner Eye on Innovation).
Beginning at the age of 24, I have actively accompanied my three children on their life journeys and derive almost spiritual pleasure from it. I help them step by step to discover the world and build their individual Self. In doing so, I have no expectations that they will follow in my footsteps. On the contrary, I put a lot of effort into not passing on to them the less successful behavior patterns of my family of origin. In my relationship with my children, I talk a lot, ask rather than question, get curious, nurture emotional contact, share myself, suggest common, sometimes crazy activities, and teach them how to deal with any challenges when interacting with other people. I treat the needs of children as equal to my own – I am against both the subjective treatment of children to fulfill the ambitions or whims of parents and the domination of children in the family.
I suffered massive chronic pain in my lumbar spine between the ages of 22 and 34. At the time, I couldn’t manage to sit for more than 10 minutes without clenching my teeth, and once I lost consciousness from the pain. In the end, I rejected official diagnoses recommending coming to terms with the pain, and then by trial and error, step by step, I got rid of the ailment. I healed myself with a combination of holistic osteopathy, trusting what my body was telling me, following my body’s voice in life, daily walks, stretching, proper exercise and psychotherapy. At the same time, I began to change my way of working and living to be more in tune with me.
Leaving the corporate world, I followed my heart and in 2018, with my own funds, financed the development of the Mind & Soul app – an innovative employee benefit with audio recordings for self-development and mindful relaxation. The app’s exercises addressed various stressful everyday situations and helped corporate employees de-stress, calm down and develop communication skills. The app had many successful pilots in large companies, but paradoxically, low popularity in HR departments, and high maintenance costs. So in 2019, I closed it down and continued to run workshops and coaching processes, which I initially implemented based on the app.
Having conducted coaching processes since 2014, I quickly noticed that many of my clients’ topics went beyond purely transactional challenges. So I kept deepening my techniques for working with people to be able to support my clients regardless of the nature of their work and life challenges. I am therefore close to holistic, humanistic and experiential approaches that focus on seeing the person as a whole. From 2016-2019, I trained and certified with Alan Seale, who has remained my mentor. From 2019-2023, I studied at the School of Gestalt Psychotherapy in Warsaw, Poland, from which I graduated as a certified Gestalt psychotherapist. While learning professional healing, I simultaneously healed, integrated and developed myself step by step.
In 2011, I started studying sculpture in the Austrian Tyrol and in my free time, I carve wood. I create transformational sculptures with a deeper message. I then use my works in workshops to stimulate a deeper connection with the senses, intuition and the heart. I have conducted such creative workshops for both intimate groups of CEOs of major companies and for groups of 80-100 people. My dream is to someday create a sculpture gallery where visitors can come with their important topics and questions, and leave with new inspirations or answers.
9. Freed from back pain and the paradigm of sitting out at work, I returned to my natural element – daily, mindful movement. I take daily walks in nature, stretch and strengthen. I run several times a week. I practice yoga and tai chi. In the summer, I sail (I have a sea skipper’s license) and windsurf. In the winter, I love offroad skiing and cross-country hiking.
Since 2019, my great passion has been solitary long-distance hiking with a tent. During these hikes in nature, I discover my natural self beyond the conditioning of my surroundings. I hike simultaneously to push myself physically, and within myself psychologically, and existentially, touching the unknown spiritually – not for the sake of achievement. I have hiked many trails of 400-500 km, including Poland’s key long-distance trails and Sweden’s Kungsleden. I am passionate about mountains and wild, uninhabited places, full of unspoiled nature, where I can deepen my contact with myself, nature and spirituality. I wander reflectively like a dervish carefully exploring the limits of my body. I stop frequently. During breaks, I sip on nature and take notes of emerging inspirations demanding to be caught and written down. While hiking, I enjoy both solitude and wonderful conversations full of symbolic meanings with the people I meet. Hiking seamlessly integrates my mind, heart, body and spirit. While hiking, I also regularly experience states of peace, love, gratitude, acceptance, awe, or a sense of oneness with the world. When creating space for hiking and vacations with my children, I don’t work in July and August.
Based on my experience in body and movement work, I develop innovative methods for working with people in therapeutic processes, coaching and facilitation of team meetings. I am passionate about working in movement and embodiment, which allows me to naturally integrate bodily sensations, senses, emotions, the voice of the heart (intuition) and the mind. Through such integration, I conduct effective therapeutic and developmental processes by not addressing my clients’ fixed narratives but the deeper, embodied sources of their challenges. As a result, I help my clients naturally expand their consciousness, stimulate their life energy, make rigid behavioral patterns more flexible, and increase access to new attitudes and actions. My Gestalt thesis was written on the topic: “Creative use of body movement in the process of Gestalt psychotherapy.” In addition to other methods of work, I regularly meet with individual clients, teams and groups for walking sessions in the Royal Lazienki Park in Warsaw.
I am passionate about supporting people, teams and organizations in consciously building their identity. This passion applies to both my own process of “becoming” and transitioning from the corporate world to working deeply with people, accompanying my children in their development, and working with clients and participants in my workshops. I firmly believe that regardless of the working tools used, in the end, the most transformative thing is a kind, attentive relationship and experiencing phenomena, not just discussing them. Being in the midst of my own life journey, I accompany my clients with partnership and curiosity to discover their phenomena, rather than from the position of an expert, guru or enlightened person. In doing so, my goal is to support people in expanding their consciousness and activating their life forces – not to change, save or cure them. In my personal life, I surround myself with kind, authentic and open-hearted people who have the courage to hear what is calling them in life and follow it.
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