After 32 years of working within a multinational company, Hulya chose to follow her passion of becoming a coach, mentor and workshop facilitator. She motivates and empowers company management teams and their employees to move forward in their professional life. Additionally, she specialises in growth management with young adults and teenagers, assisting them through anxieties, fears and internal roadblocks. She is bridging the gap between academia and professional life, and helps parents to understand their children. Additionally, she is an author and best life coach award winner.
Hulya Kurt, Career & Family Coach/Facilitator/Speaker
Introduce yourself! Please tell us about you and your life, so we can get to know you better.
Here is some background about me:
Origin Turkish, I grew up like any other Turkish person in Germany, Bremen. As I was 18, we went back as a family to our home city, Istanbul, where I started my career as a sales secretary in various companies and landed eventually in a multi-national one, called Reuters.
I started to carve out my career, becoming Customer Supervisor, Business Admin manager, travelled around the world. Hired and fired people, did certifications, married, got a kid and was called to Geneva, Switzerland headquarters in 2005, where I occupied many senior roles.
Worth to mention that I don’t have any bachelor’s nor MBA/PHD and I call myself from zero to hero.
Long story short as in each multinational, layoffs have been announced and I was part of the redundancies right before the pandemic.
And I made a conscious decision to follow my passion of becoming a coach, mentor and workshop facilitator and inspirational speaker.
I love humans, I love travelling and inviting people to my home, cooking Turkish for them and reading from the Turkish coffee cup your future.
I live together with my son, who is my treasure on earth.
Your business InnKick focuses on helping people in their career journeys. How did it start? Can you tell us a little bit about it?
From my extensive corporate experience myself and observing my peers. I was fortunate enough to climb up the ladders, find projects which are stimulating, started the Diversity and Inclusion stream as I love creating something new. However, I could see how difficult it can be to manoeuvre in the minefield of professional life. People need support, assistance, ideas, new perspectives. The need the kick, the nudge to innovate themselves. This is where the name of the company comes from as well. I give that necessary push, that necessary motivation and belief in yourself to start looking around, make a decision and take deliberate steps to jump out of your hamster wheel. This is the title of my book. Moreover I created a framework, my accredited signature program, “Drive & Thrive your Career” and made it available for the wider audience.
Life is too short to stay in the state of fulfillment.
What kind of audience does InnKick target?
4 target audiences:
1st: Professionals in their mid-career who dong feel satisfied anymore and looking for a change.
2nd: Corporates, providing workshops on Assertive communication, The Leader as a coach, Well- being at the workplace, Women in Leadership
3rd: Families – Parents who want to improve their relationship with their growing child and I guide Teenagers to find their purpose and help them navigate and master anxiety, their fears, time management, organization skills and many more.
4th: Bridging the gap between the Higher Educational Institutions and the real professional life with providing guidance on humans skills, like networking, building relationships, CV, Linkedin, Interview preparation, managing difficult conversations, how to ask, first days in the office.
What are your current goals of InnKick?
Having a positive impact on humanity, starting with the lifecycle of teenager up to their parenting and professional life. Empowering, encouraging, and teaching the human skills needed to tap into their own being and feeling resourceful.
Therefore, we are reaching out to Private Universities, corporates and leaders who want to make an impact on society, whilst challenging and disrupting the status quo.
What would you like to achieve for yourself and InnKick in the future?
Becoming a source of inspiration and knowledge and educating, coaching humans to become their best version of themselves, whilst showing compassion. A one stop shop and a partner for lifelong learning.
Who inspires you to be the best that you can be?
Whereas, I have some role models like my father or previous manager, I inspire myself.
What can I do better today, what is out there that I need to learn or read. It is a combination of outer resources and people combined with my curiosity and eagerness to be a better version of myself compared to yesterday.
What is your work inspired by?
By different authors, podcasts, webinars that I attend in the field of leadership and career progression but also I get inspired by my connections, by some Linkedin thoughts and articles.
Tell us about your greatest career achievement so far.
As I mentioned, I am proud of myself that I could break the barrier of no higher education to become a senior leader in a multi-national company, managing countless teams, projects and new initiatives. Moreover, taking the leap of faith to become an entrepreneur after my corporate life and starting my own company is a mega achievement for me.
If you could change one thing about your industry, what would it be and why?
In the corporate world, we still have too many leaders and managers who are autocratic and who are toxic. Hence, we need to educate and have coaching practises not only a one of workshop but continuously. You don’t learn with a one-off workshop. To learn you need to practise 100 times before you can change your thought process and habits. I believe in long life partnership with coaches at the workplace.
The same for teachers who can’t cope with managing the curriculum and the generation of students. They need assistance on a continuously basis.
Tell us about a pivotal moment in your life that brought you to where you are today.
In a human’s life, there are many pivotal moments. One of them is the move from Germany to Turkey when I was just 18 years old and it was a culture shock. I had to adapt, I had to learn the language, I had to prove myself.
The most important treasure for a woman is giving birth. So having my son in my arms changed my priorities.
Moving in 2005 from Istanbul to Geneva with my family, where wed did not know the language, my husband took a step back and was a houseman and me integrating into a new culture and new senior position.
Finally, my husband passed away in 2021. A sudden death, which was not expected. Keeping up with life afterwards, staying afloat together with my son who suffered from anxiety and panic attacks was not easy.
It taught me yet again how to look at life, increased my resilience level. Let's not take life too serious. Life is a dance. Let's flow.
