Kinetic Thinking in Milan – Katherina Tsalikis & Barbara Vandoni

Improve family communication with Kinetic Thinking

We talk to Katherina Tsalikis, Founder of Kinetic Thinking and her business partner, coach & trainer Barbara Vandoni.

Find out how a coach can help improve family relationships with better communication and why communicating with children using open questions is a great form of nonjudgemental communication.

Katherina and Barbara explain how their own experiences as parents have helped shape their parenting course and why their focus on emotional agility is so important.

They are based in Milan and also work online.

Looking for coaching and or therapy with Kinetic Thinking in Milan? Find their contact details here. 

Key Interview Extract – Nonjundgemental Communication

[5:10] MumAbroad: You recently introduced a course for parents on emotional agility and communication. How have your own experiences as a mother influenced this development in the business?

Katherina Tsalikis: I’ve been teaching emotional intelligence for 15 years. When I was studying these topics around 2005 I was living in London and started testing out the new techniques in coaching about open questions. So I thought, ‘well let’s try this out on my kids’. So my kids were two and five, very small ages, and my son was extremely hyperactive and he was always running up and down the hallway, we had a long corridor, and he kept making a lot of noise. So I thought, ‘how can I approach this without screaming at him like I usually do?’. So I said to him:

‘Alessio, you’re having a lot of fun yeah?’ ‘

Yeah, yeah it’s really fun chasing my sister!’.

‘Well do you remember who lives underneath us?’

Oh, yeah, it’s the old lady who says hello to us’.

‘Yeah she’s about the same image as your grandfather?’

‘Yeah, same age’.

‘What does your grandfather do a lot?’

‘Oh he sleeps a lot, he gets tired in the afternoon’.

‘Oh it’s afternoon now! I wonder what this lady is doing?’.

‘Oh she’s probably sleeping like gradndad’.

I left a silence and after some time he looked and said, ‘I wonder if I should stop running in the corridor when the old lady is sleeping?’. It was magic, I’d never experienced that before. 

Barbara when we met we were exchanging these war stories about our children and how we managed moments of crisis. She was sharing some of her stories, about how she’s using coaching techniques to help her children to grow. We thought it would be fantastic for our clients to help them take a look at their parenting style and improve a better way of communicating with their children.