From the Diary of Asel Lobanchenko

For anyone weighing a career change and not yet sure they can trust themselves with it: what a Berlin coach asks first, and why.

“I remember the first Monday after I lost my job,” Asel Lobanchenko says. “No meeting to go to. No messages waiting. Just me and a question I had never had to answer before: who am I today, without all of this?”

It happened to her twice in 2025, after twelve years in Berlin building a career across IT, marketing and creative agencies. “I didn’t just lose a job,” she has written. “I lost the context in which I knew who I was.”

Today Asel is a systemic business coach in Berlin, self-employed, working one to one in English, German and Russian with people in career and life transitions, especially creatives, migrants and non-linear professionals who feel they’ve outgrown their current chapter. The reader she most wants this piece to reach is, in her words, “the person who is sitting with a big decision and doesn’t yet trust themselves enough to make it.”

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The Silence After

Asel has put what that Monday taught her into two sentences.

“Nobody tells you that the hardest part of leaving corporate isn’t the decision. It’s the silence after, when there’s no structure left to tell you who you are.”

Asel Lobanchenko, Founder and Career Coach, asel-coaching.com

What she learned in that silence is what she now recognizes in the people she works with. “Most people don’t just have a job. They have a persona built around it,” she says. “A professional mask they’ve worn so long they’ve forgotten where it ends and they begin. Even people who hate their work have constructed an identity inside it. Losing it isn’t just a career event. It’s an identity crisis that nobody warned them about.”

Her own questions from that time are ones she has written down: “Who am I when nobody is measuring me? What do I actually want, separate from what I was trained to want? Is the ambition mine, or did I inherit it from the environment?”

She also spent several years acting, in small productions and workshops, and has written about what it taught her. “Identity is more fluid than we think,” she wrote. Of the people she works with now: “The work is not about becoming someone new. It’s about recognizing which parts of you have been waiting offstage.”

Having been there is what she offers first. “The lived experience of going through that myself, twice, is what lets me sit with a client in that moment and actually recognize where they are standing,” she says. “I’m not guiding them through something I’ve only read about. I’ve been in that silence. I know what it takes to find your way back to yourself from there.”

Twelve Years in Berlin

“I arrived with a suitcase, a lot of curiosity, and no idea what my life here would eventually look like,” Asel wrote of coming to Germany. “Over the years, Germany became home.” She holds a master’s in Business Administration and Project Management.

The career she built went through Anomaly, Accenture, Deloitte and Jellysmack. At Jellysmack she was a social media producer. At Anomaly she worked in account management, where her profile lists the Google Pixel (DACH) and Lidl accounts and the training of interns and new team members.

Then came 2025. As she puts it on her profile, she lost her job twice that year, “not because I failed, but because the life I had built no longer matched who I was becoming. That pause changed everything. I stopped asking what role I should take next and started asking a different question.” The question was what kind of life she wanted to build.

It led her, she says, into systemic business coaching training, which her profile dates from December 2025 to March 2026 at FiredUp Academy in Berlin. She has coached as a self-employed practitioner since that December. She’s exact about the arrangement: she works within the FiredUp Academy ecosystem and operates independently, under her own practice, asel-coaching.com. Of the year that brought her here, she has written that it was “the most disorienting and the most clarifying thing that has happened to me professionally.”

The First Question She Asks

“Most of my clients don’t just want to leave their job,” Asel says. “They want to leave the system they’ve been living in. The micromanagement, the misaligned values, the slow erosion of feeling like what you do actually matters.”

Survey data points the same way. Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace: 2026 Report found that 12% of employees in Europe were engaged at work in 2025, the lowest of any region.

“And because they can’t imagine finding something better inside employment, they decide the answer is self-employment,” she says. “Start something of their own. Be their own boss.” But self-employment, in her words, “is a completely different set of challenges. You have to self-organize, sell yourself, keep going when nothing works the way you planned.”

She doesn’t argue for one path or the other. “For some people that’s exactly right,” she says. “For others, what they actually need is just a different environment, a company that fits how they think and what they value.” So the first thing she asks is this: “are you running away from something specific, or do you genuinely not know what else is possible?” The answer, she says, “changes everything.”

“The real stuck isn’t not knowing what you want,” she has written. “It’s thinking you only have two options when there are usually ten.”

Values Before Job Titles

“We start with values and life view before we ever look at job titles or options,” Asel says. She describes her specialization as a systemic lens on career transitions: looking at patterns, roles and environment fit rather than individual fixes. The questions are plain ones. Why do you work? What does work mean to you? Is it money, freedom, fulfillment, security? Once those are answered, she says, “the direction that actually fits starts to become visible. Not the direction that looks best on paper. The one that fits who you actually are.”

In one recent case, a client had achieved a lot professionally and had sacrificed a great deal to get there. Together they mapped out the next five years: if he kept going at the same pace, what would his life actually look like? “We found that the titles he was chasing weren’t bringing him the sense of enough that he thought they would,” she says. “What actually brought him fulfillment was time with the people he loved, space for joy, things that had nothing to do with his career.”

“That shift, understanding how values shape decisions, is where the real work happens. Not which option looks better, but which one lets you actually live the life you want.”

Asel, Founder and Career Coach, asel-coaching.com

She has also written about a designer who had spent months with her getting ready to go freelance, business plan done, when an offer arrived with a title he had wanted for a long time. They stopped and looked at why he had burned out in his previous job. What came up, she wrote, was specific: decisions were made without him, his work was micromanaged, and the recognition he needed never came. Seen through that lens, the title meant very little if the environment looked like the last one. “The decision didn’t become easier,” she wrote. “It became clearer. And that’s usually enough.”

One Small Step, Then Another

Clarity is not where her work stops. “Most people I coach don’t lack awareness,” Asel wrote. “They lack implementation.”

She tells the story of a client who wanted to prevent burnout in a new job. She knew she needed stronger boundaries and more time for herself, tried, and came back disappointed. Instead of treating that as failure, they looked at what had got in the way. A few days later she had taken one small step: an hour for herself, “without guilt. Without going back early. Without explaining herself to anyone.” Asel’s conclusion: “The first attempt doesn’t have to work. It just has to teach you something.”

The idea came from someone else first. “A mentor from my early years told me something I still carry: do it once, do it twice, let it become a habit, and then it becomes part of you,” she says. “We are not born with our qualities. We train them.” It shapes how she works with clients: “we start small, we repeat, and over time something shifts. You don’t need to be ready. You just need to begin.”

How She Knows the Work Landed

At the end of each coaching arc Asel asks one question: “what is one shift or insight you’ve gained?” One client recently told her he had always believed his burnout was caused by working too hard and pushing through. In their work together, she says, he realized it wasn’t just that: “he had been working against his own values the entire time.”

“But the one that stays with me most is when someone says: I am enough. I know my values. I know what my next step is, even if I’m still scared. That’s when I know the work landed.”

Asel, Founder and Career Coach, asel-coaching.com

She names the hard moment on the way there just as plainly. “Realizing you’ve outgrown your role and actually saying it out loud. That’s the hardest part,” she says. “But once you name it and you have your why, the path forward becomes clearer than you expected.”

Where Asel Is Now

Asel coaches one to one from Berlin, in English, German and Russian. There are three kinds of readers she wants to hear from: “professionals who are quietly weighing a career pivot and don’t yet have language for what’s holding them back,” first-time leaders “navigating the transition from individual contributor to leading a team,” and “HR professionals or organizations open to a more human-centered approach to leadership development.”

On October 22 she speaks at DisruptHR Berlin, at Venture Café Berlin. The format is five minutes and twenty slides, and the event has announced her question as “What If We Stop Fixing People?” She has said where it comes from. “When I was a child, a psychologist asked us to imagine finding a cup in the forest,” she wrote. “Most children described something beautiful. Gold. Silver. Something perfect. I imagined a broken clay cup.” Later she learned about Kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken things by filling the cracks with gold. The question she’s bringing to the stage is not “what’s wrong with you?” but “what did your experience make possible?”

Her own habit is a pause. “Before I respond to anything, I create space. A pause, a breath,” she says. “People often tell me they slow down when they talk to me, that something in them settles. I think calm is contagious.” Outside work, the answer is short: “Nature. Being outside, away from screens and noise. That is very me.”

Asked what’s next, she says: “Keep going. There are people who need this work and I’m just getting started.”

And for the reader she named at the start, the one sitting with the decision, she has already written the line. “If you are somewhere in that in-between right now, somewhere between who you were in your last role and who you are still figuring out how to become, that is not a problem to fix. That is the work.”

Five Reflections from Asel

Running from, or toward? Before choosing between a job and a business of your own, ask whether you’re running away from something specific or don’t yet know what else is possible.
Values before titles. Ask why you work and what work means to you before you look at a single option.
Count the options again. Being stuck can mean thinking you have two options when there are usually ten.
Start small, then repeat. The first attempt doesn’t have to work, it just has to teach you something.
Say it out loud. Once you name that you’ve outgrown a role, and you have your why, the path forward becomes clearer than you expected.