From constantly fixing herself to building a business and life around who she actually is ✨
When Eliška Kryslová, founder of slowczech and I started working together in October 2024, we weren’t doing somatic coaching. We were doing business coaching.
She had started slowczech from a small audio project in 2016 and grown it into a real business with a team of teachers, courses, 1:1 lessons, an immersion programme, content and a community built around a belief that goes much deeper than learning vocabulary and grammar: language is a tool for human connection.
We worked on strategy, offers, messaging, funnels, money, leadership, structure and what it meant to become the CEO of something that had grown far beyond Eliška teaching Czech online. And it worked.
By November 2025, Eliška had generated almost 2.3M CZK over the previous 13 months and increased the amount she was paying herself fivefold. Her funnels and sales pages were built, her marketing had become clearer, SlowCzech had officially become a company and she had grown from someone who regularly needed reassurance about what to do next into a leader who arrived with her own ideas, decisions and direction.But somewhere along the way, our work started changing.
Because Eliška had proved she could build a business. She could learn the strategy, make decisions, lead people and create results.
how does she actually want to live inside the life she’s building?
Eliška was running a company while raising children. Her brain was constantly producing ideas. Motherhood could feel messy, overwhelming and completely out of her control. Her emotional state could swing dramatically depending on what was happening, how much capacity she had and how overloaded she was.
That was part of what had made her successful. There was a problem? Find a solution. Something wasn’t working? Create a system. Struggling to get things done? Make a better to-do list. Business not moving quickly enough? Set another goal.
“I’m a great fixer, I’m a great solution finder. So if I can’t get things done, let’s make to-do lists, let’s make checklists. Instead of that, we went into understanding, accepting and kindly testing what works and what doesn’t without judging.”
By late 2025, our work was already moving much more deeply into identity and self-trust. In 2026, it developed further into somatic and nervous-system work.
From fixing to understanding
Instead of automatically trying to solve every difficult state, we started getting curious about what was happening underneath it.
Instead of forcing consistency through another system, Eliška began understanding how her brain actually worked and experimenting with structures that supported it. Instead of reacting immediately to every new idea, emotional low or burst of excitement, she began creating a little more space between “my mind is cooking something” and “I need to do something about this right now.”
One of the ideas we started using was Regulated Eliška. Not Future Eliška. Not Better Eliška. Not the imaginary version of herself who finally has everything together, never gets overwhelmed and executes every brilliant idea she has. Regulated Eliška could notice what was happening, separate the facts from the nervous-system state she was currently in, and then decide.
She started using practical structures that worked with her brain rather than against it. She capped her working days, used voice notes to get the enormous number of ideas and tasks out of her head, asked other people to give her deadlines when that helped, and practised staying with a direction instead of changing course every time her internal state changed.
And importantly, she didn’t become less ambitious.
At one point, we looked at a huge financial goal she’d set herself and explored what was underneath it. From a more grounded place, she chose a smaller goal for that particular season. Not because she was learning to want less, but because she was learning to distinguish between what she genuinely wanted and what her nervous system was trying to create through urgency, pressure and another enormous target.
That distinction matters. Because this work isn’t about making ambitious women less ambitious. It’s about building enough capacity to know what you actually want, hold the discomfort that comes with going after it and stop abandoning yourself in the process.
And then it began showing up in real life
The changes weren’t confined to our sessions. Eliška began experimenting with working less and discovering that the business didn’t collapse when she wasn’t constantly doing. During one summer period, she spent ten days almost constantly with her children, worked lightly every other day and watched groups and workshops sell in the background while she was swimming and living her life.
Motherhood didn’t suddenly become easy. Eliška didn’t transform into a permanently serene mother who enjoys every moment with her children. But there was more room.
More ability to notice what was happening before immediately reacting. More understanding of herself. More willingness to try something without judging herself when it didn’t work. More capacity to experience an intense emotion without assuming she needed to make a decision from inside it.
And something else started happening too.
More Eliška appeared. The playful Eliška. The slightly weird Eliška. The ambitious Eliška. The woman who has huge ideas and wants to change the language-learning industry. The one who writes human emails, creates games, gets wildly excited about things and doesn’t particularly want to look like everybody else.
Instead of treating those parts of herself as things that needed toning down to become a more professional CEO, she started putting more of them into the business.
And people responded. She started hearing that people loved her emails, her enthusiasm, her joy and her games. The very things she could once have interpreted as being too much became part of what attracted the right people to her work.
As she put it:
“I allowed myself to be myself and attract and repel the right people. It’s like I found my tribe.”
The goal was never to become a calmer version of Eliška
One of the things I love most about Eliška’s story is that there isn’t a neat ending where everything became easy.
She still gets overwhelmed. She still experiences huge emotions. Her brain still produces an impressive number of ideas. She still has children, a business, financial decisions, difficult conversations, uncertainty and days when everything feels like a lot.
The transformation isn’t that those things disappeared. It’s that she has more capacity to be with herself inside them.
She can catch the spiral sooner. She can recognise when she’s trying to fix herself. She can hear what her body is telling her before her brain has produced the perfect explanation. She can experience an emotional low without automatically deciding the entire business needs to change.
There is a gap now between feeling and reaction. And inside that gap, there is more choice.
Eliška described it like this:
“I am able to catch myself in spiraling, in self sabotaging, in trying to fix myself. And just be kinder to myself. I am slowly accepting who I am and getting really back to my true self without proving, pretending.”
But perhaps the line that captures the whole journey best is this:
“For the first time in my life, even if it’s still extremely hard with kids and business, I feel like I am fully myself also in public and I don’t feel guilty for not being someone else.”
When we first started working together, a lot of our conversations were about what Eliška needed to do to build the business and life she wanted.
Nearly two years later, the deeper work has become much less about turning her into the woman capable of having that life.
She already was.
It has been about building the capacity to be that woman without constantly fixing her, overriding her or waiting to become somebody else first.
I’ve allowed myself to be playful, joyful, a little weird and to have big dreams.
"Ola has a very holistic approach. She doesn’t just see the business, motherhood or one problem I’m bringing to her. She sees all of it together. She can listen to a ten-minute messy voice note from me and reflect back one sentence that suddenly helps me see everything differently, without telling me what to do or overwhelming me with knowledge.
Our work helped me stop constantly trying to fix myself. Instead, I started understanding myself, accepting myself and kindly testing what works and what doesn’t without judging it. I’m now much more able to catch myself spiralling, self-sabotaging or going into fixing mode, and create some space before I react.
I’ve allowed myself to be playful, joyful, a little weird and to have big dreams. I use that in my marketing and as a CEO now, and people tell me they love my emails, my enthusiasm, my joy and my games. It feels like I found my tribe.
For the first time in my life, even though it can still be extremely hard with kids and business, I feel like I am fully myself in public and I don’t feel guilty for not being someone else. Ola is gentle, but she also knows when I need to be challenged. I feel deeply seen by her, and I would recommend her to anyone who is ready to stop feeling lost, too much or not enough, and come back to what they really want from their life and business.”
Eliška Kryslová is the founder of slowczech, an online Czech language-learning platform she started in 2016. Together with her team, she helps adults build confidence speaking Czech through real-life language, conversation and human connection.
You can explore her work here.
This is the work I do
My work is for ambitious, sensitive women who are already capable of a lot, but are beginning to realise that knowing more, trying harder and finding another strategy isn’t necessarily what they need next.
I bring a lot to this work. Years of business and coaching experience, somatic and nervous-system work, an understanding of neurodivergence, motherhood, identity and what it means to be a deeply feeling, high-achieving woman trying to hold a lot at once. I don’t separate you into neat little boxes because your nervous system doesn’t experience your business, your children, your relationships, your ambition and your sense of self as separate lives either.
You might be building a business while raising children. You might have a brain that rarely stops. You might be brilliant at holding everything together while privately feeling overwhelmed by the life you worked so hard to create. Or you might simply be tired of approaching yourself as the next thing that needs fixing.
Our work isn’t about making you less ambitious, less sensitive or less emotional. It’s about building more nervous-system capacity for all of it: the ambition, motherhood, uncertainty, visibility, difficult decisions, ordinary routines, big emotions, rest, pleasure and the life that exists outside your achievements.
Because you don’t need to become somebody else before you’re allowed to live your life.
1:1 coaching is a deeper, ongoing container, with investment starting at £500 per month. If you’re curious about what this work could look like for you, book a 1:1 Exploration Call with me. We’ll talk about where you are, what feels difficult right now and whether working together feels like the right next step.
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