While I'm interested in learning and building many things, my recent creations has been mostly around three pillars: human behavior, coliving, and music.

I love understanding myself and others. My passion for human behavior came from having had moments of depression and drug abuse. Being able to come out of it and actively changing myself is the main driver for this part of my work.

I’m currently coaching others to align their lives with their values and to gain higher self-awareness through introspection. I’m also a speaker on the topics of self-knowledge, lifestyle design and nomadism.

I’m an expert in creating coliving communities. After being an operator and running four pop-up coliving spaces, I interviewed and visited 200+ coliving spaces to understand how to create life-enhancing shared living experiences at scale.

This led me to writing two books, the Art of Coliving and the Community Facilitation Handbook.

It also led me to being president and director of Co-Liv, the global association of coliving professionals, hosting hundreds of events, launch publications and micro-products around the subject of coliving. I launched other initiatives, such as cofounding the first coliving magazine called Coliving Insights and bringing to life the largest library of coliving knowledge, Coliving Resources.

My consultancy Artof.Co helps coliving entrepreneurs and developers to reach high levels of communal experiences, operational excellence and brand integrity. I’ve worked with 30+ different organizations in Europe, South and North America, and Asia. You can discover more about my coliving work and background on this page.

I’m at active speaker at conferences in real estate, future of living and community building.

I’ve been a DJ for 10+ years (Paris, Madeira, Lisbon, Bali, Barcelona) and harpist for 20 years. I’m now combining hosting electronic music experiences with live electric harp sounds. My style is influenced by the notion of ecstatic dance, 5 rhythm dances, and a variety of electro styles. I’m a resident DJ at NomadX, playing in clubs/locations in Lisbon and organizing my own events.

💡 The best place to get updates on my work and creation is by signing up to my short weekly newsletter, where I share what I learn, experience and create:

I’ve come to redefine my lifestyle over time. The best way to describe it is through some fun facts:

• I’ve been a digital nomad for 6 years with no home base. While I have a base in Lisbon, I still travel especially to reconnect with loved ones.
• In the last five years, I spent 98% of my time living in communities, whether coliving spaces or self-organized home sharing.
• I’m a minimalist and live out of 70 items. I travel only with one bag pack, which even fits my DJ controller.
• I decided to do a self-wedding ceremony as an act of commitment towards one-self.
• I love experiences in nature and running, especially trail running. I’ve been running marathons, ultra-runs. My favorite way to discover a city is being dropped of 30km away from home and having to find the way back without phone.
• I believe in the power of experiencing our edges, whether through ice baths, psychedelics, martial arts or lucid dreaming.
• At the age of 14, I was one of the top German harpists. Since then, I’ve reinvented my own style and combined with electronic music.
• I love thinking and hence writing. There are around 200 blogposts and 3 books that I’ve never officially published, including a 70-page guide on how to become a public speaker.
• I speak 4 languages fluently: French, German, English and Spanish. I’m also picking up Portuguese.
• I lived in 13 cities from more than three month at a time, and visited a total of 50 countries.
• I’ve also run with the bulls in Pamplona, fasted for up to seven days, love hiking for days in nature with barely any resources and lived with no goals and money for several months.

💡 The best place to get an idea of my lifestyle is on my Instagram.

I’m a person driven by living a value-driven life full of meaning, harmony and growth. I love to learn from life through introspection. This leads me to create applicable frameworks which I share on this website.

I believe in integrity and honesty. Lying to ourselves or others is one of the biggest challenges that we have in the 21st century to create a culture of connection.

I love deconstruction myself and constructing ecosystems around topics that I believe the world needs: in my case, it’s creating initiatives that help humans find connection to self, to others, and to the world.

I love to redefine meaning to things: to define my own relationships to the world and to define my own value systems. I see every interaction with the world as a series of patterns that we can influence: whether our relationship with our loved ones, our relationship to money or success, our relationship to internal emotions or external behaviors.

I love going into unknowns, deconstructing subjects and then leaving them. But there is one subject I've not let go of: how to live a good life, how to reinvent meaning, and how to align my baked and actions in every aspect.

I believe in lifestyle design by introspection. I believe that there is nothing we can be sure of, and that life is a game of discovery. I believe in the power of introspection and qualitative questions.

I believe that the only thing we can try to be in control of in ourselves. Hence, we should focus on ourselves and our own behavior. At the same time, we should find value from giving value to the world. It is finding that balance between focus of self and contribution to the world that is the hardest to maintain: how to live a self-conscious life without being self-centered.

I believe that chasing external success is a contract of unhappiness with yourself. I believe that judging yourself only by whether you did your best, whether you remaining aligned with your values and came from a place of good intentions are the best criteria for feeling fulfilled.

I love observing, analyzing and influencing humans, especially myself. I believe humans are pretty predictable based on certain patterns we adopt and repeat, and that we can change these patterns over time with willingness, increased self-awareness and action for change.

I believe that change starts with self. You can change the world only as much as you changed yourself. It’s about finding the balance in this double bind between changing yourself and changing the world without falling in the trap of overthinking.

I’m a systems thinker who loves making complex stuff simple. At least, I try. I’m a connector of dots and people, creating value by creating unseen opportunities.

It is my hope that by publishing my inner work, I can help others to gain introspection, to change their behaviors and thought patterns, to ultimately lead to a change in culture.
 

If I would describe myself in three quotes, it would be:

"All type of knowledge ultimately means self-knowledge." - Bruce Lee, Be Water

"It’s a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centered, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self." - David Foster Wallace, This Is Water

“The quality of your life is a direct reflection of the quality of the questions you are asking yourself” - Quoted my many ;-)

To conclude it all, my life motto could be summarized as the following:

“Live for yourself, in order to serve others.”

💡 The best way to follow my thoughts is to follow me on Twitter.

The talk of my life at Experience House: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUFE-fmzlLE

Podcast on life philosophy, digital nomadism and the notion of self-imposed suffering: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5CTS7FUlvyJLOEzSfeV7bV

Podcast with my ex-girlfriend on sexuality and relationships: https://chelsaez.podbean.com/e/conscious-uncoupling-with-chelsae-zirna-ex-partner-gui-pedrix  

On building KPI-driven communities: https://anchor.fm/future-of-coliving/episodes/KPIs-in-Community-Building-Four-Approaches-to-Designing-Commuity-ejboks 

On company culture, remote work and new organizational models: https://open.spotify.com/episode/2cq53fKcDGquvpvM4xpSAY

The future of coliving and digital nomadism: https://share.transistor.fm/s/23774109

On community building, coliving and trends: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxu8PaQeriA

On the transformational power of coliving: https://www.consciouscoliving.com/transformational-power-of-coliving/ 

Contact me for speaking, consulting or coaching opportunities. Or simply write me about yourself: I'd love to know who you are and respond to every email I receive!