When Values Cost Us Something

I did not learn about values through a textbook. I learned what they mean through moments when living by them meant losing something else.

Authenticity. Respect. Inclusion. Empathy. Dignity for every person, not only those who are easy to love. These values were given to me by the people who raised me, by a Greek tradition that asks us to examine our lives, and by every crossing between the country where I was born and the one I now call home. Living between cultures made me ask which parts of me were truly mine and which were inherited noise.

I have since taught values as a foundation of Inclusive Leadership and explored them in coaching, where questions of identity and choice lead us back to what matters most. And yet, recently, life reminded me of something theory alone cannot teach. Values are not tested when we name them or write them on a page. They are tested when living by them becomes uncomfortable: when honesty may disturb a relationship, when justice asks us to take a position or when loyalty to another person conflicts with loyalty to our conscience. It is easy to value love, peace, compassion, loyalty, truth, dignity and justice when they all point in the same direction. But what happens when they do not?

What happens when loyalty to one person means ignoring what happened to another? When protecting a relationship means pretending that something profoundly wrong did not happen?

I have been in rooms where the easiest choice was silence, where staying visibly close to someone would have spoken on my behalf. Now I choose not to pretend, not because I stopped loving, but because I would not let my presence make something look ordinary that was not. Sometimes we believe that love means understanding everyone and refusing to take sides. We tell ourselves that we are choosing peace or forgiveness. It rarely feels that simple, because no value holds up on its own.

Peace without truth can become avoidance. And compassion without responsibility can protect the person who caused harm while leaving the harmed person unseen. Forgiveness can become erasure when there is no acknowledgement and love without respect for human dignity can lose its moral centre.

This is not a call to reject those who have acted wrongly. We can love someone and still refuse to legitimise their behaviour. You do not need to defend something to make it seem morally acceptable. Sometimes sitting at the same table or being seen beside someone is enough. Our intention may be to avoid conflict; the effect may be to help harm look ordinary. Responsibility begins when we also consider what our choices enable. So the ethical question is: What does my way of caring support?

The same question follows us into professional life. Inclusion and accountability may be part of an organisation’s values, but harmony can come at the cost of silence from those who feel uncomfortable .Leadership is practised when we decide whether to speak, listen or allow a convenient version of events to stand. There is no neutral version of that decision. It requires noticing whose experience is being minimised and whose silence is interpreted as consent. Sometimes “it is not my place” is a wise boundary. But sometimes it leaves the person with less power alone and gives legitimacy to the person with greater power. Our inner compass does not always point towards the easiest choice. Sometimes it asks:

Whose dignity is honoured by my choice, and whose experience is being erased?

What would compassion and justice ask of me here?

Perhaps this is one of the deepest expressions of self-leadership: to remain compassionate without becoming morally passive; and to understand that our most personal choices participate in creating the families, workplaces and societies in which we all must live and welcome our children and grandchildren.

I think of the distances I have kept and I recognise them now for what they were: not a withdrawal of love, but a refusal to let it be used for something else.

Much love,

Charis

Frida Kahlo and the Discipline of Looking Inward

Some lives become simplified when they are told again and again. Kahlo is often described through one story: the woman who suffered, transformed that suffering into art and is now remembered as a symbol of resilience. Kahlo has carried that simplification for decades. We see her printed onto tote bags and objects turned into an icon she probably might have challenged.

Standing there in the Tate museum, looking at the unapologetic way she painted herself, I felt a strong urge to resist that narrative. I am not an art expert and what follows is my own interpretation, while standing in front of her work. What stayed with me was a different Kahlo: a woman who refused to fit into one single story. For me, this is where her work opens up deeper questions about identity and leadership.

At eighteen, her life changed when a bus accident left her with severe injuries. During the months she spent unable to move, her parents placed a mirror above her bed and gave her a lap easel. Unable to look out into the world, she turned inward, until self-reflection became the heart of her art. She did not turn inward because she chose to; circumstances led her there. She built a life and an art from her limitations, not in spite of them. There is an important difference between being naturally resilient and learning resilience, piece by piece, because life requires it. The latter matters more to the people I work with, because it does not require anyone to have been naturally strong. It requires the courage to keep evolving.

Kahlo spent her life negotiating multiple identities. The daughter of a German-Hungarian father and a mother of mixed Spanish and Indigenous heritage, she inhabited more than one cultural world at once. I recognise something of this terrain. It is the territory ALTEA was created to name: people who live between worlds, between cultures and identities not yet settled into each other. Kahlo's insistence on making all aspects of herself visible was a refusal to allow others to decide which parts of her identity were permitted to appear.

She held no formal leadership title, yet throughout her life she brought people, ideas, creativity and resistance together. Even towards the end, too ill to stand, she attended her own exhibition, welcoming visitors from her bed. Leadership, seen this way, has less to do with position than with the way we continue to show up in the world.

For anyone navigating an identity threshold, leadership may have less to do with titles than with authorship, the ongoing work of defining oneself rather than accepting definitions imposed by others. Admiring someone else’s strength can inspire us, but it cannot replace the work of understanding who we are. What her story reminds us is that we need to keep becoming more fully ourselves.

Identity is not discovered once and settled. It is authored again and again, at every threshold. Perhaps that is where leadership actually begins.

Much love,

Charis

Coming Back to Now

I am tired in a particular way right now.

Not the tiredness of one hard week. The tiredness of a pattern. Work, eat, a little exercise, some scrolling through the world's ongoing catastrophe, sleep. Then again. And again. And somewhere inside that loop, somewhere between the third cup of coffee and the unopened email, the actual day disappears. It just slips out quietly, like a guest who leaves without saying goodbye.

My work right now is academic - teaching, research, the kind of work I genuinely believe in. But the pattern is not really about the job. The job is almost incidental. This is the forever rhythm of modern life: run, run, run, and somewhere in the running, lose the very thing you were running through. The present moment. The only one you ever actually have. And the news, ohh God, the news! It is the perfect trigger. It feeds the running. It makes the outside world so loud and so urgent that the inside world goes completely quiet. We keep looking out there for something to break the spell. Why do we always do that?

I notice when it has happened to me because I stop being able to find “NOW”. It gets misplaced rather than completely lost. The way you put your keys down for just a second and somehow it is evening and you have no idea where the afternoon went. Connection goes first. Then something else, harder to name. It starts to feel less like living and more like maintenance. A body keeping itself running. A person going through the motions of a life rather than inhabiting one.

What changes it, every time, is absurdly simple. And I resist how simple it is, every time.

I stop. I look at what is actually true right now, not at the next task, not at the news, not at the version of tomorrow I am already anxiously constructing. I play what I have started calling, the appreciation game, a deliberate turning of attention toward what is already here.

My cat touches my hand. That is enough to begin. From there, something loosens. I look at where I am, this particular room, this particular life, assembled from years of choices and chances and surviving things I was not sure I would survive. I look at what I have already navigated to get here. I look at the plain, unremarkable miracle of being alive on this particular planet, in this particular body, on this particular Monday. Not the grand version of my life. The actual one, right now, with the cold coffee and the unread emails and the cat who does not care about any of it.

There are two ways to move through a day. One feels like pushing a heavy door that is already open: all effort, no movement. The other feels like water finding its level: not passive, not effortless in the sense of easy, but natural. Aligned. Like the work is coming from somewhere real rather than from somewhere afraid. The difference is not in the circumstances. It is in the energy you bring to them. Low door-pushing energy is not a character flaw. It is not a personal failing to be ashamed of. It is what happens, reliably, to anyone who runs long enough without coming back to now. Modern life has made the running the default and the returning the exception, something we have to choose, on purpose, against the current. The world is not designed for pausing. It is designed for more.

This is what I sit with clients in. Not to fix the running, most of it is not optional, the work is real, the emails are real, the obligations are real. But to find, together, the place where they can come back to now in the middle of it all. To notice what shifts when they do. To remember, as I keep having to remember myself, that the day is not something that happens to you.

It is something you are inside of, right now, if you can only stop long enough to notice.

Much love,

Charis

The Map and the Territory

For a long time, I studied belonging from the outside.

My doctoral research was built around what I called the intercultural encounter: the moment when two different worlds meet in a classroom, a conversation, or a life and neither remains unchanged. I was fascinated by what happens at that crossing: how people negotiate identity, how they hold on to what they know while slowly making room for what is new, how being genuinely met by another person can shift something that no amount of knowledge ever could. I built pedagogies around that encounter. I wrote about it. I taught it.

And then I moved to the United Kingdom and I became the “Other”.

I was educated and professionally established. But I was also suddenly navigating a “grammar” that was not mine, not just the language, though that too, but the unspoken codes of how things are done here, what is said and what is left unsaid, what counts as warmth and what reads as intrusion. I found myself understanding, intellectually, exactly what was happening to me and still not being able to stop it from happening. The map and the territory, it turned out, are not the same thing. That gap between knowing and living is something I had read about. I had not yet understood it in my body.

What followed was a long, quiet education. I began teaching international postgraduate students - people who had left their countries and their professional identities behind to begin again in a new academic culture. I recognised them. I had stood at a version of the same crossing. I knew what it was to be competent and capable and still feel that the most important question had not yet been asked, to carry a self that did not quite fit anywhere. The questions that began to matter in those rooms were not only academic. They were messier than that, about identity, about how a person shows up when the context keeps shifting, about what happens when the different layers of who someone is do not sit neatly together. It was in the classroom of Inclusive Leadership Practices that I saw what shifts when a person begins to lead from who they actually are, not from who they think the room expects them to be. Something in my attention changed. I was no longer teaching from above the experience. I was inside it.

It was there, with those students, that I recognised something I had been doing for thirty years, with students, with parents, with colleagues, with friends, with family, without ever having a name for it. Sitting with someone in a difficult moment. Asking the question that shifts something. Holding the space until their own answer surfaces. I had been doing it for everyone around me. I was beginning, slowly, to do it for myself.

ALTEA grew from that. The research, then the crossing, then the teaching, then the turning inward, each one the same question, asked from a different depth: what does it take for a person to come home to themselves?

I do not think that is a question that belongs only to people in difficulty. It belongs to anyone who has arrived at a moment when the life they have built, however good, no longer quite fits who they are becoming. That is a threshold. And that is where this work begins.

Much love,

Charis

ALTEA: On Healing and Altitude

ALTEA comes from the Greek ἀλθαίνω, the verb that means to make whole, to heal. The plant named after it has been offered to the wounded since antiquity. Its root, soaked in water, becomes something that soothes from the inside out. It is a beautiful sound, but that is not why I chose it. I chose it because it says the thing I most fundamentally believe: that healing is not repair. It is a return to what was always there.

The altitude is in there too. Not transcendence. I am not interested in leaving the ground. Something closer to the freedom that comes when you lift just high enough to see what is actually true about the terrain below, and to recognise yourself in it. The altitude that makes me feel taller, see things clearly, speak without fear and believe in humanity again. I know this particular altitude because I have had to find it. I come from Greece and I live in the UK, and that sentence carries something that took years to understand. The logo holds both movements: the upward reach and the inward spiral. That is not a coincidence.

For a long time, I believed I was open-minded by profession. I had a PhD about "the Other." I taught intercultural understanding and inclusion. I also lived inside walls I could not see, because they were made of the same material I was made of: my roots, my faith, my language, my certainty about how things simply are. It was moving, living inside another culture, navigating another grammar, meeting myself in translation, that slowly peeled those layers back. Each one that fell left more room.

This is the reason I chose to coach. Not because I solved something, but because I know what it is to carry something you cannot yet trust as knowledge. To sense something in yourself that has no language yet, to be educated and capable and still feel that the most important question has not been asked. The Socratic tradition I carry is a lived belief: the person in front of me already holds what they are looking for. My work is to ask well enough, and listen carefully enough, that they can begin to hear themselves.

ALTEA is where I do this work. I am an iPEC Certified Professional Coach grounded in Core Energy Coaching. Behind the practice is a PhD, years of genuine philosophical inquiry and the particular education of living between two cultures. My coaching philosophy holds one non-negotiable: we are already whole. Beneath the weight of accumulated expectation, the stories others have told about who we are, and the understandable strategies we have developed to manage life rather than live it, there is a person who already knows. Coaching, as I practise it, is an act of remembrance, older and more honest than either fixing or improvement.

This journal exists because I think in writing. Here I will write about energy and consciousness, what happens when people encounter themselves honestly, the surprising places where Socratic inquiry, Core Energy theory, and the healing traditions I work within turn out to be saying the same thing in different voices.

I write in English, which is my working language and in Greek, which is my thinking language. Both belong here. If something brought you to this page, I trust that. Whatever it was, it was already listening.

Much love,

Charis