Maciej Szturmowicz
Facilitator, coach, Gestalt psychotherapist
I help people develop themselves and build healthy, effective organizational cultures.
I would describe my professional (and life) journey as a path from the corporate world, where I grew up, to 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 since 2014 I’ve been working with people in individual sessions and workshops. I have over 1000 hours of coaching and over 400 hours of therapeutic experience.
Currently, I work in various roles. As one of 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 awareness and discover and develop themselves in contact with others.
My own process of becoming and following my sense of life defies all definitions. I feel that in life, I connect many different worlds, which gives me multidimensional inspirations and experiences for working with people.
I played competitive tennis at AZS Warsaw from ages 7 to 14. I won many Warsaw tournaments and was a finalist in national tournaments several times.
I studied and lived abroad for 3.5 years, in Austria and the USA. I hold a BBA degree from Webster University in the USA and an MBA with distinction 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 salesperson behavior.”
For 13 years, I worked with great success in corporations, including Sitel, 8 years at IBM, and 3 years as a board advisor for mBank S.A. I led B2B sales teams and negotiated multi-million (USD) transformational contracts with corporate clients in Poland and abroad. I managed strategic projects, integrating the work of internal teams and external partners. As part of the mBOX project, I facilitated the signing of a strategic partnership between mBank and the French La Banque Postale (this initiative was recognized by Gartner Eye on Innovation).
Since the age of 24, I have actively accompanied my three children on their life journeys and derive spiritual pleasure from it. I help them discover the world step by step and build their individual selves. I have no expectations that they will follow in my footsteps.
Conversely, I put a lot of effort into not passing on the less successful behavioral patterns of my family of origin to them. In my relationships with my children, I talk a lot, I ask questions rather than interrogate, I show curiosity, I nurture emotional connection, I share myself, I propose shared, sometimes crazy activities, and I teach them how to deal with any challenges in interacting with other people. I treat children’s needs equally to my own – I am against both treating children as objects to fulfill parental ambitions or whims, and children dominating the family.
I suffered from severe, chronic lower back pain between the ages of 22 and 34. At that time, I couldn’t sit for more than 10 minutes without gritting my teeth, and once I even lost consciousness from the pain. Eventually, I rejected official diagnoses recommending resignation to the pain, and then, through trial and error, I gradually got rid of this ailment. I healed myself through a combination of holistic osteopathy, trusting what my body told me, following my body’s voice in life, daily walks, stretching, appropriate physical exercises, and psychotherapy. Simultaneously, I began to change my way of working and living to be more aligned with myself.
Leaving the corporate world, I followed my heart and in 2018, I self-funded the development of the Mind & Soul application – an innovative employee benefit with audio recordings for self-development and mindful relaxation. The app’s exercises addressed various stressful everyday situations and helped company employees relieve stress, calm down, and develop communication skills. The app had many successful pilot programs in large companies, but paradoxically, it gained little popularity in HR departments and had high maintenance costs. So, in 2019, I closed it down and continued conducting workshops and coaching processes, which I had initially implemented based on the app.
While conducting coaching processes since 2014, I quickly noticed that many of my clients’ topics extend beyond purely transactional challenges. Therefore, I was constantly deepening my techniques for working with people to be able to support my clients regardless of the nature of their professional and life challenges. Thus, holistic, humanistic, and experiential approaches that focus on seeing the human being as a whole are close to my heart. From 2016-2019, I trained and certified with Alan Seale, who remained my mentor. From 2019-2023, I studied at the Gestalt Psychotherapy School in Warsaw, which I completed as a
Since 2011, I have been learning sculpture in 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 that stimulate a deeper connection with the senses, intuition, and heart. I have led such creative workshops for intimate groups of CEOs of major companies, as well as for groups of 80-100 people. My dream is to one day create a sculpture gallery where visitors can come with their important topics and questions, and leave with new inspirations or answers.
Freed from back pain and the paradigm of sitting at work, I returned to my natural element – daily movement with mindfulness for health. Every day I walk in nature, stretch, and strengthen myself. I run several times a week. I practice yoga, and tai chi practices are close to my heart. In summer, I sail (I have an offshore yacht skipper’s license) and windsurf. In winter, I love off-piste skiing and cross-country trekking on skis.
Since 2019, solo long-distance treks with a tent have become my great passion. During these treks in nature, I discover my natural self beyond environmental conditioning. I simultaneously trek forward physically, inward psychologically and existentially, and touch the Unknown in a spiritual dimension – not for achievement. I have completed many trails of 400-500 km, including the Polish GSB, GSS, the blue trail Grybów-Rzeszów, and the Swedish Kungsleden. I am passionate about mountains and wild, uninhabited places, full of pristine nature, where I can deepen my connection with myself, nature, and spirituality. I trek reflectively, like a dervish, carefully exploring the limits of my body. I often stop. During breaks, I soak in nature and note down emerging inspirations that demand to be captured and recorded. While trekking, I enjoy both solitude and wonderful, symbolically meaningful conversations with people I meet. While trekking, I fluidly integrate my mind, heart, body, and spirit. During my treks,
Based on my experience in body and movement work, I develop innovative methods of working with people in therapeutic and coaching processes, as well as in facilitating team meetings. I am passionate about working with movement and embodiment, which naturally allows for the integration of bodily sensations, senses, emotions, the voice of the heart (intuition), and the mind. Thanks to this integration, I conduct effective therapeutic and developmental processes, focusing not on my clients’ ingrained narratives but on the deeper, embodied sources of their challenges. As a result, I help my clients naturally expand awareness, stimulate their life energy, make rigid behavioral patterns more flexible, and increase access to new attitudes and actions. My Gestalt diploma thesis was on the topic: “Creative use of body movement in the Gestalt psychotherapy process.” Alongside other working methods, I regularly meet with individual clients, teams, and groups for walking sessions in Łazienki Królewskie in Warsaw.
I am passionate about supporting individuals, teams, and organizations in consciously building their identity. This passion applies to my own process of “becoming” and transitioning from the corporate world to deep work with people, accompanying my children in their development, and working with clients and participants in my workshops. I deeply believe that regardless of the tools used, ultimately, the most transformative elements are a kind, mindful relationship and experiencing phenomena, rather than merely discussing them. As I am on my own life journey, I accompany my clients as a partner, with curiosity to discover their phenomena, rather than from the position of an expert, guru, or enlightened person. My goal is to support people in expanding their awareness and activating their life forces – not to change, rescue, or cure them. In my private life, I surround myself with kind, authentic, and open-hearted people who have the courage to hear what calls them in life and follow it.
On this personal blog, I share my discoveries from journeys, sessions, and workshops twice a month. At the same time, I invite you to independently experience what I write about and make your own discoveries.
For this purpose, I sometimes suggest short experiments for you to do on your own. Through these, you can look at your important topics from a different perspective and deepen your connection with yourself and your environment.
I create all posts while in motion because that’s when I gain access to different states of consciousness than when sitting at a desk. So I invite you to do the same – regularly walk and consider my posts while moving. This way, we can continue to journey together!
Check out sample posts: