On independence, responsibility, and listening

Since I began directly supporting and accompanying professionals and institutions as an independent practitioner, I have come to realize that independence allows for the development of a human depth that is not always possible when there is a CEO behind you, with their own personal, professional, corporate, and investment interests. Independence gives you an autonomy and a perspective that help you avoid becoming complicit with profiles such as those who were utterly irresponsible in managing the DANA, or those senior executives who, without the slightest hesitation in the field of public healthcare, choose to look the other way in order to line their pockets: we cannot gamble with people’s health and lives.

Such a simple statement is completely lost on those who get caught up in the power games of a kind of authority that chooses to be utterly irresponsible. As when you are asked to sign off on a settlement at a company by falsifying figures, knowing that by signing you are choosing to endorse a multi-million-euro fraud. Curiously, it is always the person who will not benefit who is expected to sign. And those people—out of fear, subordinated, in situations of personal vulnerability—end up trapped in a complete deadlock. Were they the problem, or were you? Cowardice always hides behind the imposition of silence.

Every time I sit across from a person or an institutional representative who chooses me to help chart their path, I feel deeply grateful and also deeply prepared—ready even to continue learning as part of a team. And every time someone sits across from me, I end up realizing that many others failed before in something as simple and as complex as listening. Listening and truly seeing are not forged through a diploma, but through knowledge and experience that can only be inhabited at the intersection of lived experiences, perspectives, tools, and forms of understanding. These are matters that do not reside solely in the professional or the academic, but in the human. A dimension not contributed only by those in high positions, but also by ordinary people full of life and stories. Because we should never forget: the embrace of a migrant can express far more than the embrace offered from an office.