My Values

Inner Freedom is the Key

For me, the key to personal happiness and inner satisfaction, to functioning teams and exceptional companies, is how inwardly free we can each act as individuals. Because no matter what we do, think, plan: our output is always significantly influenced by how we limit ourselves in our possibilities by restricting beliefs, our own value system and the limits of our world view.

Inner Freedom is a Conscious Decision

The greatest lever for change lies within ourselves. Because as a rule we set ourselves unnecessary limits and instead of thinking and acting freely(willingly), we allow ourselves to be limited by (often unconscious) limiting beliefs and outdated value systems. So much so that we lose the joy of life, we become mentally and physically ill, others suffer from our imbalance and we sometimes cause great harm through the power we have acquired in our jobs.

By the Way, We Don’t Take Ourselves So Important Anymore, Either

Very important: When we are boundlessly free, we don’t take ourselves so seriously anymore. Becoming inwardly free does not mean reinforcing an unhealthy ego. Rather, inner freedom leads to ever greater selflessness in our own value system and in everything we present to the outside world. This does good because it takes a lot of pressure off the system.

External Factors Virtually Irrelevant

Such inner freedom does not need external factors as support at all. Money, for example, does not make you inwardly free. And it is also not up to the partner or the superior whether we are free within ourselves. My life principle: To be content and happy in a relationship (private or professional), it takes exactly one person: me.

Responsibility Remains

And one more thing: Just when we do something good for ourselves by intensively dealing with ourselves and become more and more relaxed, cheerful, balanced, we see more and more clearly and insistently how unhappy the people around us are. At work, on the street, in the club, in the partnership, in the family. And we also see more and more clearly how much mischief these unhappy people cause in their environment. Our own freedom does not mean that we should not care. Rather the opposite: Because we can approach our fellow human beings inwardly free and quite selflessly, and because we see all the mischief, we are called upon to deal with it. Freedom with commitment, in my understanding, are the two values with which we can become happy and the world better.

Everybody Can

Everyone can achieve exactly this state of complete inner freedom. You just have to set out on the path. And yes, you have to be willing to completely change your thinking. I still lack a powerful translation for the English expression “Really make the difference”. But that’s what it’s all about. It’s not about repainting the facade or putting a new engine in the car. It’s about reinventing yourself piece by piece.

How I Became the Person I Am Today

I was born to academically educated parents and grew up with the worldview of the educated middle class. My family lived a solid façade on the outside, but on the inside it was a family construct set up according to strict rules, in which each family member simply had to function and take on a role, not their authentic self.

As challenging as this childhood was, it gave rise to something in me that I absolutely would not want to miss today: the certainty that there must be some power “out there” that has greater things in mind and that I am not indifferent to. It is this admittedly spiritual realization to which I owe my great inner peace today and the composure that is always attributed to me, even in very difficult situations. And it has also been this certainty that has ultimately allowed me to come through many years of “subordination for career” unscathed.

After graduating in economics, I initially started as an assistant to the management in a medium-sized company. When, soon after I started, my boss at the time disappeared behind bars for several months and the public prosecutors repeatedly came to search the company’s premises, it became very clear to me that professional success does not necessarily have anything to do with performance, but is often the result of misunderstood social beliefs and their application.

In my next professional station, then already as a management consultant, I worked for a corporate reorganizer. We “rescued” companies in extreme crises, which required not only tangible management skills, but also an empathetic approach to people in exceptional emotional situations. It was here, at the latest, that I realized how much humanity there always is behind the facade, even of people with a lot of leadership and charisma.

I then spent several years with a large, internationally active management consultancy. Here I learned a great deal about the craft of consulting. I learned how to stay afloat in such a large organization. And, that includes how skillfully and often subtly organizations and their formative leaders put pressure on individuals to function the way the organization needs them to. Regardless of whether one has the exact skills needed, whether one’s own life circumstances allow it, or whether one’s own values can be reconciled with the required work.

In 2007, together with an IT consulting company, I founded c.con Management Consulting GmbH, a management consulting firm specializing in energy supply. After a management buy out in 2019, we are now a successful partnership with an exceptional team of about 15 consultants who support c.con’s clients with high professional and social competence.

As a management consultant for more than two decades now, I have had the chance to look into the most diverse types of companies and corporate cultures, where I have become acquainted with the broad spectrum of personalities who run these companies or parts of them. I am grateful to each and every one of them for meeting me. I have been able to learn something from all of them and take something away for myself. Without all these encounters, the idea of Committed Leadership could never have been born in 2019.

A few years ago, my need for clarification of the question of meaning and the practical consequences in life became really great and I finally wanted clarity. I met Arjuna Ardagh, who became my teacher for many months. Arjuna, after many years spent in India and America with various spiritual teachers, had been commissioned by them to go to the West and teach. From the beginning of the 1990s, he also taught in this country, imparting his knowledge of who you really are and developing methods to transfer this knowledge into daily life. From the beginning, it was clear to me that I would like to apply all this much knowledge that Arjuna taught me to the business world at some point.

In a retreat in early 2019 – we participants were deeply snowed in at our lodge in the mountains above Nevada City in California – everything came together to form this self-understanding of “Committed Leadership.” The idea was suddenly there and has been the basis of my vision ever since: leadership based on a broad consciousness and with the wisdom of a matured heart. For us as leaders, for our employees, for our companies and for our society.