Tools & Methods - salomons.coach

27 Jun

Your Strengths Are Why You’re Stuck.

Every senior leader has a signature strength: the thing they're known for, rewarded for, promoted for. It's also, more often than anyone admits, the thing holding them in place. On outsight, endings, and why growth at the top is less about adding a strength than loosening your grip on the one you trust most.

27 Jun

You Don’t Plan a Career Switch. You Explore One.

Blue gradient hero with a golden dotted path winding from left to right toward a compass on the right; headline reads 'You don’t plan a career switch. You explore one.'

Senior leaders are trained to remove uncertainty, yet a career switch resists exactly that. You can't analyse your way into a new identity; you have to explore your way in. Here's how the Pioneer Map and The Expedition guide the senior career pivot — and the theory beneath the method.

26 Jun

Transactional Analysis for Leaders: The Foundations, and How to Use Them

Infographic showing three TA ego states—Parent, Adult, Child—on the left and three leadership actions—Develop, Manage, Stay strategic—on the right, with a central 'A' node labeled Lead from Adult.

A clear, deeper introduction to transactional analysis: where Eric Berne's Parent, Adult, Child model comes from, the psychology of why we shift between stances, how it connects to Kahneman, Rogers, and psychological safety, and how to apply it in everyday leadership.

10 Jun

AI Can Coach Your Career. It Can’t Coach You.

By salomons.coach
In AI, Blog, Change & Transformation, Self & Personal Growth, Tools & Methods

Silhouetted heads in a line with one highlighted gold figure and a glowing vertical bar, against a dark gradient background; text mentions AI and coaching relationships.

Generative AI is a superb career thought partner — for CVs, interviews, search strategy, and rehearsal. But coaching isn't information. Drawing on systemic and provocative coaching and three decades in the leadership chair, Jan Salomons argues that the deeper work, seeing your system, facing your blind spot, growing past your own comfort, is precisely what an AI built to agree with you can never do.

07 Jun

Your Stress Profile: A Mirror to Start Mastering Stress

"I'm stressed" is true, useless, and where most people stop. This is how I turn that vague sense of pressure into a map you can actually act on, the nine dimensions behind my stress profile, the research they rest on, and how the picture becomes a coping strategy rather than a label.

15 May

The full logic (and context) of yes and no

Hero banner: dark blue gradient with concentric rings and a gold 'yes' at center, title 'The full logic of yes and no' on the right.

A yes from Beijing and a yes from Amsterdam can come out of the same mouth in the same meeting and mean radically different things. A reference-grade walk through the four cross-cultural frameworks — Hofstede, GLOBE, WVS, Schwartz — and the two psychological theories underneath that explain why.

08 May

How to read and apply the Cross-Cultural Leadership Compass Report

By salomons.coach
In Blog, Organizations & Culture, Tools & Methods, VUCA & Leadership

Man in a white shirt sits at a wooden desk, reading a report titled 'Cross-Cultural Leadership Intelligence' with a laptop and a dark mug nearby in a professional office.

If you have downloaded the Cross-Cultural Leadership Compass, this article provides the knowledge how to use the report as your compass to navigate the cross-cultural map. I you want to download an example report, click here. Cross-cultural leadership reports are

29 Apr

4R Model – Step 1 – Reflect

Two side-by-side circular infographics showing the four-stage journey (Reflect, Reset, Re-Align, Rise) for Individual and Team paths.

Setbacks demand action. Reflection demands stillness. The first stage of the 4R™ Model asks you to do the harder thing — stay with what happened long enough to make sense of it. Why Reflect is the foundation every transformation is built on.

29 Apr

The Five-Minute Reset: What One Stanford Study Changed About How I Coach

By salomons.coach
In Blog, Self & Personal Growth, Tools & Methods, Workshops & Events

Infographic-style hero showing a breathing cycle graph with two curved lines and markers, labeled ‘INHALE’ and ‘EXHALE,’ on a pale background; includes the page title nearby: ‘The 5-Minute Reset’ with a subtitle about cyclic sighing and breath patterns.

A 2023 randomized trial pitted four breathing techniques against each other. The winner takes five minutes a day. Here's what it taught me and how I built it into my coaching practice.

12 Apr

Your Cross-Culture Leadership Compass

By salomons.coach
In Blog, Organizations & Culture, Tools & Methods, VUCA & Leadership

Most cross-cultural leadership problems don’t look like cultural problems, until they cost you performance. Misaligned expectations around trust, feedback, hierarchy, and decision-making silently undermine teams, delay results, and create friction that leaders misread as personality or competence issues. The Cross-Cultural Leadership Compass translates decades of academic research, including Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions, GLOBE Study, World Values Survey, and Schwartz Theory of Basic Values, into precise, actionable leadership insights. Instead of generic awareness, it gives you a data-backed map of where cultural gaps actually impact your role, your team, and your results.