ComTeam Consultants Personally: Elke Lorenz
“When I am somewhere, I am completely there –and not someplace else in my thoughts…”
“Work-Life-Balance is important for my clients and for me as well” Elke Lorenz emphasizes. She always tries to find a healthy and meaningful balance between work and leisure time, between being in contact with people and being all by herself. And she has a good reason for that, because she is living and working in several places.
To answer my question how this balance looks like is not that easy, because this depends on where she is: In Southern Sweden she lives in a house in the countryside. Here she enjoys bicycling, hiking in Nature, working in the garden and splitting wood for the fire-place. Here she consciously is by herself most of the time. She is painting abstracts in acryl and meditates. The stillness and tranquility she finds here gives her a lot of strength and concentration, which she needs when working in seminars or while working as a coach.
But she also lives in a flat in Berlin. This is a very vivid, colorful and exciting city. Here she has most of her close social contacts, meets her friends for sharing and exchange and also works with her coaching clients.
And then of course there is the regular work in seminars in Gmund at the Tegernsee at ComTeam. She appreciates the exchange and the working together with her long-time colleagues and to play her part in the work of the team.
In addition to that she also travels a lot to work with clients in in-house trainings. “All this travelling has to run smoothly, otherwise it won’t work” she says with a smile. This needs structure, organization, discipline and most of all being present. When she is somewhere, she is completely there. Either in her work with people or in other activities. What is helping her a lot in being present is to express her creativity. Some other resources are: reading, handicraft, writing poetry and listening to music.
She is living in different contexts and actually “it is a life in (apparent) opposites”. It is wonderful to get to know new people in each seminar and on the other hand to be able to support the coaching clients in their process over a longer period of time. Standstill is nothing she likes. When I ask her if living in the remote countryside in Sweden isn’t something like a standstill, she thoughtfully answers, that she really loves the quietness and that it is more a kind of dynamic quietness through which she gets many ideas for her professional context.
She is very curious and likes to experiment and try out new things. She likes to travel to foreign countries and for several years she worked in a hospital in India in her holidays.
To get to know different realities and ways of life help her to accept people in their uniqueness and to understand them better. So she can be open and unbiased in her work, in seminars, in team developments or in coaching.
The way she thinks about people and about herself is not fixed: “Change is what happens all the time, but it is important for me to deal with it consciously”.
