Anaïs Sagesser is an impact-driven educational entrepreneur, learning designer, teacher and coach. Anaïs co-founded the non-profit Scaling4Good, she co-creates pioneering leadership development programs with the University of St Gallen, and was recently elected as a member for the scientific advisory board for transdisciplinarity at the Swiss Academies of Sciences. She also offers mindfulness and compassion practices in English and German on Insight Timer.
Broadly speaking, Anaïs is dedicated to societal transformation through personal transformation, social equity and systems change.
In this interview, Anaïs tells Anne about how a trip abroad at age 15 opened up her perspective as to how a human life could unfold. She also shares the twists and turns that led her to study many different subjects, from business to comparative religious and Islamic studies, before landing herself a job in management consulting.
She talks about seeking to serve and contribute to society, and how she went from her consulting role in business engineering and enterprise architecture to her involvement in the climate crisis response, becoming Swiss director and co-leader of Climate-KIC, the largest public-private partnership to foster innovation and entrepreneurship for climate change mitigation and adaptation.
Anaïs also shares how she went on to leave Climate-KIC to co-found the non-profit Scaling4Good, which aims to connect impact initiatives and institutions who are trying to do good to enable greater and faster systems change.
As Anne and Anaïs are both coaches and mindfulness and yoga teachers, they discuss the modalities of coaching, the search for meaning and purpose and how we all have this innate desire to do something good. Anaïs writes regularly on the topics of values and leadership, and offers her thoughts about the disconnection between individual and collectively held values.
Anaïs also shares with Anne her favourite tips to connect with nature, culminating with the question:
Who are you that I am also, and who am I that you are too?
A deep and insightful interview with a remarkable changemaker.
Happy listening!
Selected links from episode
You can find out more about Anaïs on LinkedIn as well as Wikipedia (in German)
and meditate with her (in English and German) on Insight Timer
Find out more about Scaling4Good
Discover the course in Regenerative Leadership Anaïs co-leads for the University of St. Gallen and a blog post she wrote on the topic.
Loving Kindness or Mettā meditation (Maitri in Sanskrit).
Caring Economics, the book by Tania Singer and Matthieu Ricard with a foreword by his holiness the Dalai Lama.
The Mahadevi Yoga Centre in London