ILC International, Sofia (2026)

10/08/2026

Have you ever wondered why you can’t tickle yourself?

The neurological answer is simple — your brain predicts the sensory consequences of your own movement, which takes away the moment of a surprise.
And in it’s very obviousness, this explanation doesn’t really take us much further.

It’s the meaning behind the sensation we want to trace.

Why do we laugh when someone tickles us?
When we’re laughing we feel both a sense of pleasure and a loss of control.

And what makes it fun with a trusted someone, can turn into helplessness, panic or rage with intensity and time. The breakdown of a trusted frame changes the meaning.

So yes, tickling needs a surprise - an unpredictable Other.
And it goes to show how deeply relational we are as humans, and how intuitively our bodies respond to the meaning a moment holds.

Tickling is the point where pleasure, vulnerability and dependence come together as a bodily expression.

I’m using tickling here as an example, to set the ground and pose the question we’ll be investigating: what is your body expressing every day? What is it expressing through pain or discomfort — the brain fog, fatigue, jaw clenching, IBS. These are all signals from your body.

What is it that cannot be expressed in words, but finds its path to be released through the body?
To treat the body as nothing more than a biological machine is to flatten it, to strip away the richness of being human.

We will be talking about the mind and the body in more depth TODAY

by: Tsvetomila Boradjieva
…

What Your Body Knows Before You Do: Sustainable High Performance
📅AUGUST 10, 2026 | 18:00 EET
📍 Online
🎙 Led by Tsvetomila Boradjieva / Immersive Leadership Catalyst (ILC)

JOIN US 👉 https://checkout.revolut.com/payment-link/2c237a75-991e-4be6-bc6e-df79714e84d0

07/08/2026

For decades, high performance has been built around a familiar formula of “MORE”
More effort. More discipline. More resilience.
This mindset has driven innovation, growth, and extraordinary achievements. It has helped individuals and organizations reach ambitious goals and push beyond perceived limits.
Yet a growing body of research suggests that sustained performance depends on more than the ability to continuously increase effort. It also depends on the capacity to recover, regulate, adapt, and maintain cognitive and emotional functioning over time.
These findings raise a broader question:
Are we creating environments that support sustainable performance, or are we expecting individuals to continually compensate for increasing demands?
Resilience is often discussed as something individuals need to develop: the ability to manage stress, maintain focus under pressure, and adapt when circumstances change. While these skills are valuable, they only address one part of the equation. Psychological sustainability invites a broader perspective. It recognizes that performance is not determined solely by personal qualities, but also by the interaction between individuals and the systems in which they work.

Research suggests that long-term performance is influenced by factors such a :
→ the balance between effort and recovery
→ the ability to regulate emotions under pressure
→ the quality of interpersonal and organizational environments
→ the capacity to recognize early signs of overload
→ the conditions that support learning, adaptation, and long-term functioning

Research in occupational psychology has consistently shown that prolonged demands without sufficient recovery can lead to accumulated strain, affecting cognitive functioning, emotional regulation, and overall capacity.

For leaders and high performers, this shifts the conversation.
The question is not only: “How can we achieve more?”
It is also: “What conditions allow us to sustain high-quality performance over time?”
The future of high performance may depend not only on ambition, ex*****on, and resilience, but also on our ability to understand, regulate, and protect the human systems that make performance possible.

31/07/2026

I Dariia Khodakivska

Sometimes the fog does not lift because you finally find the right answer.

It lifts because you realise how far you have moved away from yourself.
There are periods when life continues to function on the surface. You meet expectations, complete tasks, make decisions and keep moving. Nothing is visibly wrong. Yet, little by little, your choices become less connected to what actually matters to you.

You start operating on autopilot.
You say yes because it is easier than stopping to ask whether you genuinely want to. You follow routines that once made sense but no longer do.
You become guided by urgency, habit and other people’s expectations rather than your own inner compass.
The difficult part is that autopilot can look a lot like progress.

For me, the fog began to lift when I recognised that disconnection. I could hear my own voice again.
Returning to yourself does not always mean making a dramatic change. Sometimes it begins with remembering your values and using them as a point of orientation:
Does this choice reflect what I care about?
Is the way I am living aligned with the person I want to be?
Am I moving towards something meaningful, or simply continuing because I have not stopped?

Your inner compass does not give you a complete map. It does not remove uncertainty or make every decision comfortable.

It simply helps you recognise which direction feels honest.
And sometimes, that is enough for the fog to begin lifting.

When was the last time you paused to check whether the life you are moving through still feels like your own?

24/07/2026

| Tsvetomila Boradjieva

I am the daughter of a sailor.

There is an adjective in Bulgarian (“моряшка дъщеря”) which makes it less of a description and more of an identity. It comes with a sort of fate attached to it.
I heard it a few times as a child, though I could not have known how fully my father’s profession would shape my early adult life.

To most people this means: okay, he travelled a lot.
As for my inner world - it was built by tides.
Melancholia and longing on one side, confusion and excitement on the other, and no dry land between them.

Melancholia is like grieving but without a funeral.
Nothing has been lost that anyone would send flowers for. And because there was no loss to name, there was no boundary to draw - I could never tell where his absence ended and his presence in my inner world began.

Every hello was already a goodbye. Every goodbye promised a hello.
A child learns something from that rhythm, and what she learns is probably that she could do something to make him stay. A full house is a happy house.
What kind of a world did the girl construct out of all these departures and arrivals?
When you begin to question your world, parts surface that had been kept out of sight, and for good reason. For a long stretch, nothing makes sense.
It’s just chaotic findings. Overanalysing may be the closest many of us come to this: obsessively going in circles.

You break the frame of a picture and are left holding pieces of experience.
There is no clarity. Only an urge that won't let you stay where you are, and a hope that you might be going in a good direction.

I guess in my most ambitious dreams, clarity is permanent - found once, then kept.
In reality I have to continuously search for it, only to truly feel it a few times.
Once you leave Plato’s cave, going back will never be the same. Yet, forces still pull you back.

Tides still come and go, but you now have an idea what the ocean floor looks like.
And sometimes, after a big storm, there might be a rainbow - a gift for your strenuous mind battles.

It is as if huge amounts of energy become available in a new way, stripping away illusion and familiar perception, and letting you experience the rawness of the present moment - the puzzle briefly unfolding from pieces you worked so long to assemble.
So I come to think of clarity less as a state and more as a continuum.
How much of it can you hold at a present moment?
To hold clarity, you must bear the tension it creates: take responsibility and act on what it reveals.
Most of the time, clarity means staying with uncertainty, trusting the process, aand moving towards a new frame despite the tides pulling you elsewhere; integrating lost parts again and again as new layers and connections emerge.
You are a warrior on the battlefield of your own mind, sometimes there will be a hill and a clear sky that lets you see the whole view.
And it might be just enough to keep you on track until the next one.

17/07/2026

“I don’t think most people have ever experienced mental clarity.” | with Valentina Dolmova, PhD

“…That’s perhaps an arrogant thing to say.
But do me a favour and search on LinkedIn for “mental clarity”.

Reading posts of low quality for such an important topic is frankly unexplainable, so I’m willing to take the risk of speaking openly because I don’t think we know what we’re talking about.

It seems we confuse:
- focus with clarity.
- organisation with clarity.
- a colour-coded calendar, a good meditation app, and a productive morning routine with clarity.

They’re NOT the same thing!

I can confidently say I’ve experienced genuine mental clarity once in my 39 years.

Only ONCE.
And it wasn’t after a retreat, nor after a therapy session or coaching. Not even after reading a brilliant book.

It happened after an ordinary working day in London.

I was working ridiculous hours on a UBS project after the 2008 financial crisis.

I came home exhausted, lay on my bed without turning the lights on, completely awake…

…and suddenly something happened that I still struggle to explain.

Images.

A walk I took in Portugal. A tree in a park in Moscow. Someone’s face. Fraction of a conversation.

Hundreds of moments appeared connected like a string of pearls. Making absolute sense.

Everything belonged.
Nothing was accidental.
It all had a purpose.

The extraordinary thing was that there was no separation between the “important moments” from the “ordinary ones”.

The walk mattered as much as a graduation.
A conversation as much as a promotion.

I remember thinking:
“Don’t move.”

As if moving would interrupt whatever was happening.

It did.

I tried writing it all down but couldn’t. It disappeared faster than language could catch it, let alone my pen.

Ever since then I don’t think clarity is a goal-setting exercise but ratger it’s a state.

A rare one. Like a life changing love affair that happens only once or twice if you are lucky at all.

Most of us, including me, operate in mental fog. Not because we’re unintelligent, but because we’re constantly interpreting reality based on fragments, fears, ambitions…

We make it up through our identity. Through yesterday’s experiences.

So the better question isn’t:
“How do I become more mentally clear?”

It is:

“What question matters enough that I’m willing to live with it until clarity arrives?”

The biggest breakthroughs, in science, in business, in life, don’t happen because someone found the perfect morning routine.

They happen because someone became obsessed with a question they refused to stop asking.

Maybe clarity doesn’t come from trying harder.

Maybe it comes from caring deeply enough about a question.

I don’t know. What I do know is this:

One genuine moment of mental clarity has taught me more than years of trying to manufacture it.

I was obsessed with finding out why my life seemed like it starts over and I reinvented myself each time I changed countries. I got my answer.

10/07/2026

| by Petar Švarc.

Mistakes happen all the time in traffic.

I make them, you make them, everyone does. Most are insignificant and forgettable. Once they happen it's a moment where our choices push the situation to either side of a narrow edge.

On one side, I choose to ignore the consequences of my actions, disregard any thought about the fellow traffic participants, swallow the guilt and move on. On the other side, I choose to take accountability by gesturing an apology, make myself available to compensate for any damage and learn from the incident.
I'd like to focus on the lighter situations where a minimal effort is required, still making all the difference and developing a belief in a principle which stands regardless of the mistake's intensity.

Here's a specific situation.
I turn into a narrow street. Cars line both sides, leaving just enough room for one car to pass through. There's a pedestrian on the road, his back towards me, headphones on. Enjoying a stroll.

My monkey brain goes: "Another idiot on the road!" A few seconds later, the pedestrian turned around, apologized with a humble gesture, and made way, silencing my monkey brain before it could spiral.
Had his reaction been disregarding or even aggressive, we'd probably have gotten into a pantomime war of obscenities.

Hence, a small, split-second decision on the young man's part defused it and we both continued our day free of regret, guilt or feeling of having suffered injustice.
What it took him to apologize I will never know, but most likely we have his internal moral compass, good upbringing or past lessons learned to thank for. Not everyone's reaction would have been the same.

Admitting a mistake takes strength because our ego suffers.

The jerk reaction is to protect the ego and see the world as an enemy. Apologizing is acquired behavior we learn from authorities we recognize and then reinforce by acknowledging its long-term benefits. The return on his minor investment is considerable. Especially if it's scaled into a culture in our family, workplace, neighborhood or wider community. Watch the Japan national football team's reaction to their fans in the stands after they got eliminated despite an impressive performance against one of football's most dominant powerhouses, Brazil.

Choosing grace over ego during a globally televised event is a sight to behold.
Developing the accountability muscle helps not just us, by not ruining our days, but countless others in whose way we inevitably end up being, many times a day.
Moreover, not developing it means pain and more learned unconstructive behavior patterns all around, eventually coming back to haunt us. The smaller the world in which it happens, the sooner the boomerang returns. Even if it doesn't, the internal repressed guilt only festers, resurfacing when we least want it.

So, let's not take ourselves too seriously, enjoy some self-irony and gift ourselves a few better days.

03/07/2026

| Spotlight this Friday on Katerina Georgieva

The noise I did not know I was carrying

Sometimes the most clarifying thing you can do has nothing to do with strategy, planning or productivity. Sometimes it is just two weeks without a washing machine.

I just came back from two weeks of camping. No washing machine. No dishwasher. No fancy beauty tools. No smart gadgets telling me what to do next.

At the beginning, the absence sounded like an inconvenience. It felt like relief. 🌿

When you strip away everything that is supposed to make life easier, something unexpected happens. Life does not get harder. It gets quieter. Simpler. More honest. The noise I did not even know was there was suddenly gone… or in this case, replaced by the camping noise of many people around, living their lives. It could be very noisy sometimes, but it is a different type of noise. The anxious planning, the reminders, the alarms - all gone.

I did not take many pictures.

There was everything worth capturing. Breathtaking water. Laughing children. Sunsets. I just wanted them for myself. The moment itself, not the image of it.
And I keep thinking about how many of those we lose every day. To the reflex of documenting. Of sharing. Of quietly performing our own lives for an invisible audience or our own inner critic.

I am happy to be back. The washing machine and all the other utilities are running as I write this, and I have zero regrets about that.

But I am carrying something with me from those two weeks.

💭 A quiet reminder that simplicity and presence are not laziness or a step back, and that some of the most precious moments - of joy, love, even grief - are real even when they were never posted anywhere or captured with a phone. They belonged only to the people who were there, and to the moments that cannot be replayed.

It made me wonder what other noise I have been normalizing…

What is one thing you have disconnected from recently, even briefly, that surprised you?

July is just beginning. What is one thing you want to do less of this month and one thing you want to feel more of?

26/06/2026

| Friday Reflection by Daria Khodakivska

For as long as I can remember, my biggest driver has been curiosity. ✨

The feeling of:
What will happen if I try this?
How can I learn more?
What should I do next?

Curiosity has taken me to many places. New roles, unfamiliar situations, difficult conversations, and experiments that didn't always end well.

At first glance, curiosity and safety seem to pull us in opposite directions. Curiosity pushes us into the unknown, while safety seeks to protect us from risk.
At least that's how it appears.

Over time, I've realized they are not opposites.
💡 In fact, psychological safety is what allows curiosity to thrive.

When people feel safe to ask questions, challenge assumptions, admit mistakes, or say "I don't know," curiosity becomes a catalyst for learning and innovation rather than a source of fear. The teams I've learned the most from weren't the ones that had all the answers. They were the ones where people felt comfortable exploring, questioning, and sometimes getting things wrong.

Curiosity opens doors.
Psychological safety gives us the confidence to walk through them.

What's something your curiosity taught you that you wouldn't have learned if you had played it safe?

19/06/2026

| with Valentina Dolmova, PhD
An uncomfortable thought about psychological safety.

Throughout my professional journey, I’ve been many things.

A promoter (you know the girl that gives you free samples or wears a branded t-shirt)
A shop assistant.
A waitress in low key bars and in high-end restaurants.
An intern in banks and in a head-hunting company.
I was a compliance officer/ AML specialist too.
A management consultant in cap. markets
A performance coach.
A founder and then CEO.
A psychologist and researcher.
A university lecturer …

And in every single role, there were situations that were difficult. They felt unfair, political, uncomfortable, or simply wrong. Many times I felt small, challenged, disliked, or that something was off, missing on integrity.

Not once did I think:

“This workplace is psychologically safe.”

And frankly sometimes it wasn’t.

Often speaking up came with consequences.

But I spoke up out of a personal sense of ownership and integrity that were non negotiable.

Which makes me wonder whether we’ve started talking about psychological safety in a way that strips people of their agency.

The conversation often sounds as if safety is something organisations either provide or withhold.

As if we simply wait for the environment to become safe enough before we can be honest.

From my experience life doesn’t work that way.
• Most meaningful conversations happen before conditions are ideal.
• Most important decisions are made with huge uncertainty.

Of course leadership matters.
Of course culture matters.

Some workplaces genuinely punish dissent.
I’m not pretending it’s otherwise.

But I also wonder whether we have begun to underestimate our own role in creating psychological safety. Not just for others. For ourselves.

Because if our willingness to speak depends entirely on external conditions, then someone else will always control our voice.

And that feels like a dangerous place to leave our agency.

I’m curious:

What has shaped your willingness to speak up more - the environment around you, or the standards you hold yourself to?

15/06/2026

Psychological safety may be one of the most misunderstood concepts in leadership today.

The irony?

The more popular it becomes, the more its meaning gets diluted.

We hear:

“Let’s focus on being nice to each other.”
“Let’s phrase this more positively.”
“Let’s make them all comfortable.”
“Let’s make sure people know the survey is anonymous.”

Yet none of these necessarily create psychological safety.

Amy Edmondson’s original research was never about comfort.

It was about reducing the interpersonal risk of speaking up.

Admitting mistakes.
Questioning assumptions.
Sharing concerns.
Disagreeing respectfully.

In our work, one of the most common misconceptions we encounter is that psychological safety and accountability somehow sit on opposite ends of a spectrum.

They don’t.

The healthiest teams tend to combine both.

People feel safe enough to challenge.

And responsible enough to deliver.

The carousel explores five misconceptions that often prevent organisations from building genuine psychological safety.

Which one do you see most often in practice?

ILC International

10/08/2026

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