Entrepreneurial and innovative, Andra Morosi is something of a global nomad and activist. Her background as a linguist and intercultural management consultant led her naturally into the world of coaching. Liz Hall reports
Systemic and global leadership coach, supervisor, mentor and entrepreneur, Andra Morosi is hanging up her climate activist hat after an intense five years, stepping back from her “warrior energy” to focus on inner work.
Morosi’s climate activism has included volunteering at global and local level with the Climate Coaching Alliance (CCA), setting up CCA Francophone, and supporting the Convention of Enterprises for Climate (CEC), an association set up in 2020 to organise awareness and transformation journeys for economic decision-makers.
However, this year she’s going to be spending more time reflecting and mindfully cultivating her garden in Normandy where she enjoys witnessing the wisdom of living systems manifest moment by moment.
“As I step into my sixties, I’m inviting in more reflective energy, the contemplative and the artist. It’s no longer about just being into the climate, but observing it from a different angle, connecting dots differently with more of a reflective and less an action lens.”
Morosi wants “to step back from activism, to leave behind the overdoing, the getting involved and inviting,” although she’s not leaving the CCA nor the climate work, and she won’t be rejoining the ranks of those still immersed in ‘business as usual’.
Morosi will continue to work through her company, International Milestones, founded in 2009, which focuses on global leadership, international skills and global corporations. She’ll also continue to work through Seedlings, the pioneering coaching organisation she co-founded with fellow eco-conscious coaches Monique Cumin and Emmanuelle Aoustin. Seedlings seeks to plant the seeds of deep transformation of business for a regenerative economy. It’s based on the principles and wisdom of living systems, learning from nature and its dynamic open complex of evolving relationships, while remembering we are nature and that the same dynamics are at play within us.
Hats
Morosi is no stranger to the wearing and removal of different hats and is “not comfortable in boxes”. She’s moved around frequently, including to New Zealand, and spent her first 17 years in Romania during the communist regime.
“I was born in Romania in a family of artists, so I was a bit privileged, because my father was able to travel the world with the classical orchestra. My mother’s an actress, and I have a brother who’s a concert pianist and a conductor in the US. So I’m the only non-artist officially, even though I have my art in different ways, and I consider myself an artist at heart. I do Aboriginal style dot painting. That’s my creative meditation tool.
“When I was 16, I learned my father had decided not to come back to Romania and to be a political defector, a refugee. That was a big thing. So we were separated for two years, and then they let us go.”
Her father had intended going to Canada but ended up in New Zealand, which seemed very far away on the map to Morosi, who at the time had never left Romania, or caught a plane.
“There was a sense of being uprooted from one place and being rooted for my own good in another place, because ‘it’s for your future we’re doing this’. Of course, my mother and father had been planning the move but not sharing the plans with anyone, because of fear and paranoia.”
With the move to New Zealand forced on her, Morosi was “very angry about this choice. I wasn’t a child anymore, and (it was) especially (hard with it being) an irreversible choice. It wasn’t like if I decided to, I could go back.”
Conscious choices
“I think that’s when coaching started for me, (something) about owning and making conscious choices, and being a rebel.”
When she was in her second year in Victoria University, New Zealand, majoring in French, she decided that “this nostalgia and complaining (about having left Romania) and then this rebellion wasn’t good for me”, so she decided to go back to Romania on holiday with her grandmother.
“I was taking the risk of them keeping me there, because I still had a Romanian passport, but I had the certainty that only good things could come out of (going back) and this notion of ownership was really important.
“Everyone disapproved of it, including my parents. I had summer jobs and didn’t ask permission.”
Morosi spent two and a half months in Romania, which helped her move on: “I could get over the nostalgia, see the reality, connect with my friends, but realise that weighing the pros and cons, I no longer belonged so much. I had a different outlook already and so I came back to New Zealand, thanking my parents for what they’d done, and starting something new, feeling blessed for the life I had and the opportunities.
“So this was an important episode in my life, owning my choice despite the risk, and that created a sense of courage or audacity – or just follow your instinct and don’t ask for permission. I have a son who is much like me and when I see him, I think, my God, my poor parents!”
Identity
After finishing her studies in New Zealand, she moved to France in 1988 as a university assistant, then her parents moved to South Africa and her musician brother, now a household name, went to study in the US.
“After my first year in France, which I loved, I was going to go home for the holidays, but (thought) where is home? I had two passports because I’d become a New Zealand citizen, but there was no family left in New Zealand and Romania was still communist, and South Africa (where her family now lived) was definitely not a choice. So (up came) another layer of the questions about, who am I? Where do I belong? Where do I want to make my home?
“(All those experiences) have made me the person I am today. I started so early with these things.
“So it’s a bit troublesome, this (search for a) sense of belonging. Where is home? I have parts of my heart that belong to all these places, which is why I work internationally, and which is why I’m not okay being in a monocultural environment today, I need movement, perspectives, languages.”
Before we met, she reflected on her identity, and the words that emerged were: explorer, people-connector, artist, storyteller, weaver, seed-planter and bridge-builder.
“The bridge building part is really important for me, building bridges between perspectives, disciplines, professions, walks of life. And I’m a very good seed-planter of initiatives, not a good executor and follower. With the people-connecting part, people follow me quite naturally. I like to explore ideas, connect things and make things happen. That’s why I’m going back now to the notion of explorer.
“The weaver is another word I wrote – of connection and of people, and finding what’s universal in humans that goes beyond culture. I have a facility to connect with people even if I don’t speak their language. I communicate human to human. I find a way.
“Some Buddhist concepts really resonate deeply with me. It’s like everything is in everything else, there’s no separation, and choosing to separate things is diminishing our capacity to see the connections. And this is also something that I train in my garden, observing in living systems how everything is interwoven and interdependent, and how we tend to separate things, and sort to make sense, whereas the sense is in the movement and in interweaving of things. And that’s my wisdom of my sixties.”
Morosi is a fan of Nora Bateson’s Warm Data approach – it informs her and Seedlings’ work: “Her book (Combining, Triarchy Press, 2023) is amazing, combining complex systems thinking, systems theory, looking at nature as the most complex systems theory, bringing it into our nature and human nature, and observing and exploring complexities and patterns.
Climate anxiety
Morosi’s climate activism kicked in towards the end of 2019, partly because she was coaching the general manager of a big French company from Australia, and thus was closely following the bush fires which killed millions of wild animals that autumn.
That year she was a guest speaker for the national conference of ICF Romania.
“It was an emotional thing for me, being a guest speaker in my country of birth and the only woman on stage.”
The three male speakers included Peter Hawkins, who Morosi says has had “a huge impact on me, because of his speech on stage about his grandchildren, the kind of ancestors we want to be, the state of the world, and how come we’re not talking about this.”
Over dinner with Hawkins and his wife, they discussed the climate crisis, and the formation of what was to be the Climate Coaching Alliance (CCA). Morosi attended a webinar with Hawkins and Zoe Cohen soon after.
“That’s how I got interested in the notion of systems, climate, and how come this isn’t addressed in coaching. And then came COVID, and my son left for Australia to settle down there a week before lockdown. It was a big thing. I was by myself in an apartment, just with my little kitten, Polaris.”
With access to nature difficult due to lockdown, she realised she was really missing it.
“I felt deprived of nature. I’ll always remember how careful I was with my plants on my little balcony…wondering what’s happening with this world and what’s nature going to become?”
She became friendly with a fellow coach who was trained in permaculture, deepening further Morosi’s interest in systems thinking and permaculture.
The pair designed a webinar for SFCoach, a coaching association in France, to open up reflection on systems thinking and how we might do things differently after COVID. Some 80 coaches attended. Around the same time, Morosi became involved with (CCA co-founders with Josie McLean) Eve Turner and Alison Whybrow, in the CCA’s 24-hour conversation (an initiative held around the first Climate Coaching Action Day in March 2020).
“Climate anxiety was a pattern that was there with me. Thanks to the CCA, the more information I was accessing, the more this anxiety was mounting. (I was thinking) ‘How come this isn’t mainstream? And then feeling compelled to do something about it. So that’s again the warrior energy in me, that ‘no, we need to act’.
“I felt part of a community that cares, (exploring) how we connect all these dots, and how come we’re separating things and not seeing the interconnections. Alison was pushing me, and so I said on that first call, ‘I’m going to start a French-speaking community for coaches who really care and want to see the systemic dimension of our work, and how this connects to nature. And permaculture is part of it, climate is part of it, running of the world is part of it, everything is connected. Let’s disconnect from the siloed vision of coaching’.”
CCA communities
After this call, about six people wrote to her saying, ‘When do we start?’
“I was like, now I have to do it! And then I had some colleagues who said, ‘you’re a pioneer, let’s do it’. So that’s how CCA France started. It was magic. It was a grassroots thing, not knowing where we were going, but unfolding, engaging with what was emerging in conversations. I was with both the global and the local movement, feeding back and trying to act as a facilitator of global reflection by merging the two.
At CCA, Morosi, along with Anne-Marie Brest was heavily involved in supporting CCA communities to thrive.
“I did that also to continue Alison’s (Whybrow) legacy because she was the one who planted the first seeds for communities.”
She is delighted that there are now 32 communities. In particular, Morosi supported CCA Italy, Greece, Norway, Scandinavia, Switzerland and Canada.
Through the CCA, she came across the CEC, volunteering as a pro-bono coach and bringing in other coaches too.
“It was a wonderful experience… It was also very disappointing that a couple of years later, when you see that (although these leaders) had the awakening, the road maps and many things that they did, they don’t have real action, because we live in a money world, and we’re still talking about growth. It’s not so easy to accept that and to have conversations with these leaders later on.
“Not many leaders and organisations are ready for radical change,” she says, bemoaning the fact that people are increasingly making money out of supporting organisations to audit in terms of ESG and sustainability, for example. “That’s becoming a market…And I heard last week there’s a thing called the climate industry…It’s totally insane…this is the world we live in, everything is turned into a business.”
Like so many of us, Morosi too has been caught in the ‘business as usual’ model and then when she threw herself into addressing the climate emergency, her turnover went down because she was focusing so much on climate activism, and climate-related pro-bono coaching and less on other clients.
Seedlings
“So I had a wake-up call at one stage. It was quite an interesting journey in terms of one thing leading to the next. And this is how Seedlings came into the space of CCA, because CCA France was saying, let’s create a model, let’s propose services, and why do we have to do this pro bono and work with normal coaching with companies that are polluters? What’s wrong with making a living through supporting organisations to go through transformation?”
Seedlings believes that understanding systemically what they see as humankind’s required transition calls on us to question our relationship to the world so we can go beyond a model of civilisation based on extraction and exploitation.
“Reconnecting to life and living systems means understanding the challenges of overcoming planetary boundaries, of course, but it also means rediscovering our capacity for wonder, understanding our intrinsic dependence on nature, recognising precious ecosystems, observing the principles of cooperation and interdependence and being inspired by them,” says Morosi.
The regenerative company differs from the sustainable company, whose ambition is limited to improving its ecological and social footprint. The regenerative economy is also about regenerating human connections: connection to ourselves through better alignment with our values and deepest beliefs, connection to others through resonance and better value sharing, stronger cooperation and greater solidarity and connection to our environment, believes Seedlings. Coaching has a major part to play in this transition to come.
Clients include or have included Leroy Merlin, Grant Thornton and Sanofi. In addition to the co-founders, Seedlings’ team consists of eight professional coaches, facilitators and consultants based in France including Florent Duchêne, Emmanuelle Katz, Roselyne Lecuyer and Armelle Stoltz. On its website, it also lists as part of its team, ‘the planet’, with the hashtags: #BeautifulAndVulnerable and #4.6BillionYearsOfR&D.
Seedlings has mission-driven legal status, which requires it to include a mission in its statutes, set up a mission committee and communicate its social and environmental objectives, the execution of which is verified by an independent body.
Activism and multiple perspectives
Her activism started early in her life. For example, when she visited her family in South Africa for a couple of months after the university where she was working broke up for the summer, she “was really on the lookout, not allowing the maid to iron my clothes, because I don’t support slavery, joining an ANC movement and other things because I needed to feel at peace about being in a place still under apartheid.”
This visit helped her be open to multiple perspectives.
“Through meeting people and sharing, I started to understand things from different perspectives, appreciating that what we were seeing from a distance such as apartheid wasn’t so simplistic and polarised. It was much more complex. Embracing different perspectives and going for nuances was something that started also then.”
After this break in South Africa, she came back to France, again taking a risk as she had very little money and she hadn’t yet had confirmation that she would be given another year as university assistant. Until it had been confirmed, she worked as an au pair.
Then in 1989 came the fall of the Berlin Wall, the revolution in Romania and the fall of its last communist leader Nicolae Ceaușescu. At this time, Morosi, who considers herself to have always been a linguist, had started a master’s degree in French as a foreign language as part of her plan to return to New Zealand as a university professor. But with all the changes, she instead went to Berlin then to Romania, where she created an association with artists, broadcasting programmes about communism and Polish anti-communist organisation Solidarność Walcząca (Fighting Solidarity).
A few months later came the liberation of Nelson Mandela and the election of FW de Klerk.
“I was personally curious and concerned by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the liberation of Mandela in a sort of a parallel process that was very interesting to observe in terms of what came after that. The transition, the transformation, the fear, the too much freedom all of a sudden, and then people saying it was better before. What do we do with this chaos?”
Eventually she finished her Masters and left her assistant job in France, and decided to go on holiday once again to South Africa, but with a different mindset, “this time with an open heart” in new South Africa. After six months reflecting on where she wanted to make her home, she was joined for her 25th birthday by her boyfriend, and chose to return to France to get married and make her life there.
Then, in 1991 she studied international conference interpreting at ESIT in Paris “a very competitive and tough environment from a studies perspective.”
Later she was asked in a job interview in the UK about the connections there might be between conference interpreting and coaching.
“I realised there are connections for me – the awareness of your filters and the capacity of withholding and just sticking for the facts and being totally neutral in the space. In coaching, you have time, while in conference interpreting, it’s very fast, with simultaneous interpreting. You hear and speak at the same time. It’s tremendous from a neurological perspective, and that’s why conference interpreters work always in pairs, swapping every 30 minutes because it’s really difficult. But this notion of transferring meaning without bringing in your own meaning, and being aware, building awareness of your filters, is just extraordinary, and I never thought I would use it later on in a different context for different purposes.”
Early on, she did some internships at the Court of Justice in the Hague, The Netherlands, and realised conference interpreting wasn’t the right job for her: “I’m not someone who’s comfortable in the back office. I need a front office job.”
She had noted though how interesting and rewarding conference interpreting can be.
She shifted to teaching in business schools, teaching English and teaching communication skills and relativity of contexts from a cultural perspective.
“That’s how language, culture and thinking patterns came to me. I got very interested in the cross-cultural dimension based on my background. With an American colleague, we started running seminars for the public service in France about how language and culture go together.”
She studied this theme, too, “opening up to more anthropology, sociology and understanding French culture from a different angle. So I was a teacher/trainer and then started working for global organisations as a language trainer.”
Although it wasn’t called coaching, there were parts of this work that were highly related to it. She was working with very senior people including civil servants in French ministries. Little by little, she became “very fascinated with the world of business and the private sector versus public sector, because, again, it was about different cultures.”
Then she had children and moved to the countryside. “That was my first connection with country life, with gardening, with planting, with living systems, with having a huge garden. I (took part in) competitions for the house with the most flowers and the most beautiful presentation in the whole village, ending up one year in third place.”
Business woman
She met someone who had a training organisation specialising in languages, cultures, business skills and macro-economics. Valuing her creativity, he asked her to go into business with him, co-founding Agolangues in 1997.
“That’s what I call my hands-on-MBA, which was quite a ride. He was also one of the first in France to develop Serious Games (a totally new approach to language skills, with the principle that language is a living system). I was head of the pedagogical unit.
“I suddenly became a business woman and that was quite a game. I really loved the game, although I wasn’t selling my soul out to money and all that. I had two babies at home, and my big baby was the company. It was great fun. And we were quite successful. I (was drawing on) all my teaching, learning, my background in linguistics, creating innovative ways of looking at language as a living thing. We created new methods that later on, I turned into coaching methods, and sold, such as group coaching programmes and individual focused global leadership coaching, that I continued to develop later when I joined AKOR Consulting in 2002, and then with my own coaching company, International Milestones.
Getting into coaching
“That was the first encounter with coaching for me in those days, so I was basically training and doing facilitation.”
This period in her life was one of a number when she waited until she became exhausted to receive a wake-up call, to take action to bring back more balance and to radically shift things. She left her husband, and quit the company, and in the process of negotiating with her business partner, she properly came across coaching, which she engaged in to reflect on what was next professionally. She decided to go back to Paris, to explore coaching.
She loved “the holistic dimension, the fact that you don’t address just the professional or the personal part, you address the person, the vision, the inner state, everything. It’s the humanistic dimension of coaching that resonated with the humanistic nature of who I am, and I loved the awakening that that provoked in me, and again, making conscious choices very often.
“When I do discovery sessions, and I educate clients who don’t know what coaching is, I often say, it’s partnering with a coach to support you in your journey into making conscious choices.
She moved back to Paris, yet again demonstrating her resilience by starting from scratch, joining AKOR management consultancy as a manager of its linguistic unit, transforming it into a department called international development. Having been her own boss for years, it was a big shift but she stayed for eight years. She made the most of the company’s training policy, getting trained in coaching, first in NLP in the UK. She met Robert Dilts and went to study with him in California.
“That was a big encounter for me. He was very inspiring and it was very good to be sponsored by someone like that with that clarity of vision.”
She followed up with a coaching course with CTI, with systems coaching, and other courses. With colleagues, she launched a coaching unit.
“That was great experience, because it was the early days of coaching. I then joined the ICF.”
She recalls attending an ICF conference in Spain where she approached John Whitmore.
“He was by himself at the table, and I said, ‘Can I join you? You’re a star.’ His was the first coaching book I read. And he said, ‘Yeah, please.’ I’m a gutsy woman! My lunch was just wonderful.
“I joined ICF because coaching was quite a young profession at the time, and I felt it should get more recognition for what it is, and how come people are not more active into making it known? So that was my calling for professionalising coaching.
“In the French market and also in California, there were people saying, ‘Are you a real coach?’ A real coach (was seen as) a coach certified by one of the professional bodies. So that’s how I joined the ICF, to get my accreditation.
She was on the board of ICF France for four years, in charge of communication and international relations, and considers one of her achievements as having organised the ICF conference in the UK, persuading 80 French coaches to attend.
After her visit to California, she went solo, “daring to build my own coaching practice, not belonging to a team, being the captain of my ship: scary stuff!The involvement with the ICF was like having a sense of belonging to something bigger than me.”
She’s also a supervisor. Morosi completed the Coaching Supervision Academy (CSA)’s Diploma in Coaching Supervision in 2017. She’s now on the CSA’s faculty and considers the CSA her “soul family”. She works on both the Anglo and the French programmes.
Growing roots
At the end of 2020, Morosi’s apartment was broken into in Paris. She’d been thinking about leaving the city but hadn’t yet admitted this to herself, until the break-in.
Having spent holidays in Normandy, she chose to move there to radically change her lifestyle, going back into and connecting deeply to nature.
By 2021, she’d found a cottage, and more importantly, a beautiful garden.
“The house was optional. (But) it’s an amazing garden. And I had my first CCA France gathering in my garden – with people camping in the garden – which was a symbol of my moving back into nature, connecting to the earth.”
The move is allowing her to delve more deeply into permaculture, “experiencing it, observing and learning with making mistakes and understanding how plants work, how nature works. What do we call weeds? Why do we remove the weeds? What’s the function of the weeds? What’s a thistle? It’s amazing stuff. I could stop working and just do that, exploring nature. I just love that I create plants. I’m so proud. And I have people over, and it’s like, ‘you see that, that’s my baby.’ I create honeysuckle walls. I do it myself.”
Although her garden is “amazing”, in the summer, the winters “can be long in a isolated country cottage”, so when we spoke, she was in Lisbon, in someone else’s apartment.
“I’m bringing in a circular economy through exchanging my home with others via Home Exchange. And it’s really working on how trustful you are of total strangers, and also connecting a bit more with our humanity. There’s personal development in it as well, not just the practicality.”
But she’s very happy with having made the move to Normandy:
“It’s almost like a place where I want to grow roots, and I haven’t moved. After being such a traveller, it was like ‘I need to grow roots, to settle down, and this is it for me’.
“I feel at peace in this place, for the first time.”
FIND OUT MORE
- CEC: https://bit.ly/3EQOWSQ
- Seedlings, visit: https://bit.ly/4301b9R
- Join Nora Bateson’s warm data session as part of the Climate Coaching Alliance’s Community Festival, on 6 March: https://bit.ly/4hYWilG
- Listen to Coaching at Work’s podcast with Andra and fellow Seedlings co-founder Monique Cumin, recorded for Climate Coaching Action Day 2024 https://bit.ly/4hAbvtA
- Join Morosi next month (2 April) for a Coaching at Work masterclass on Coaching with the Lens of Living Systems, inspired by research and exploration with permaculture and its principles mapped across to systemic coaching, Nora Bateson’s Warm Data, regenerative leadership, relational systems intelligence, mindfulness and deep ecology practice: https://bit.ly/3EEDoCp
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