Workshop: Inherited Collective Trauma
Program spotkania:
Delivered by Dr. Lara Tcholakian
Turning Transgenerational Stories and Personal Experiences Into Leadership Strength
Every woman brings a personal history into the room, shaped by her childhood, her life experiences, the pressures she has faced at work, and sometimes the pain carried by her family, her community, and the women before her across generations. For some, that inheritance is tied to Poland’s long history of partition, war, and occupation, while for others it comes from very different places, events, and family stories, each unique to the woman who carries it. Whether we have always lived in this country or have made it our home, that history travels with us into our work, yet leadership training rarely makes room for this part of who we are. In this three-hour workshop, we will explore how the parts of our past we have never fully processed silently shape our feelings, reactions, and the way we make decisions and build trust with others. Through personal reflection and small-group conversation, participants will see their own stories with new eyes, discover that understanding what we carry is a powerful source of strength, clarity, and freedom as women and leaders, and leave with simple practices they can bring into their professional and personal lives.
Key learning outcomes
• Recognize how personal, collective, and inherited experiences, including those passed down through families and communities across generations, continue to shape the way we feel, react, and lead long after the events themselves have passed.
• Understand why insight alone rarely changes behavior, and explore what deeper work helps shift the emotional patterns we carry in our bodies and our reactions under pressure.
• Identify the double weight many women carry, where inherited history meets the expectations placed on women in their families, cultures, and workplaces.
• Distinguish reactive leadership from conscious leadership, and learn to notice when an old pattern takes over so we can choose a different response.
• See our own stories as a source of strength, clarity, and freedom, and leave with at least one personal practice and a shared language, built through reflection and conversation in small groups, for leading from a more grounded place.
This workshop will be held in English and is open to everyone.
Further details will be announced soon.
17:00 – Powitanie i welcome drink
17:45 – Premiera nowego logo i strony internetowej PPW
18:15 – Networking, muzyka i zabawa z DJ-em
23:00 – Zakończenie wieczoru
About Dr. Lara Tcholakian
Lara Tcholakian, PhD, is a scholar, author, and practitioner whose work lies at the intersection of leadership and lived history. She has led in boardrooms, worked in field offices, and taught in classrooms. She spent more than fourteen years as a C-suite executive in telecommunications, leading organizational transformation, governance, and crisis leadership amid rapid growth and regional instability, after nearly a decade in international development across the South Caucasus, Peru, Sri Lanka, and Canada.
She studied in Canada and France before earning her PhD in Management and Organizations at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Today, she is a founding partner of Elevate, a conscious leadership advisory and social enterprise with a presence in Amsterdam, Nairobi, and Yerevan, and a professor at Matena School of Leadership.
Her Armenian-Lebanese-Canadian background and lived experience of conflict give her a deep personal understanding of what it means to lead while carrying the weight of a people’s history, a theme she explores in published articles and in the co-edited book Leaders Emerging from Collective Trauma: Journeys of Transgenerational Healing.
Date
- 14 Nov 2026
Time
- 11:00 - 15:00
Cost
- Ceny biletów: wkrótce
Labels
- Wydarzenie Otwarte
Location
- Eerste Ringdijkstraat 4, 1097 BC Amsterdam
Organizer
-
Stowarzyszenie PPW
