What is mindfulness, really? And what happens when we confuse achieving with living?
In this episode of Fail With Me — Stories and Stanza's series on mental health, resilience, and the messy, beautiful work of becoming — host Abhra Pal sits down with Dalida Turkovic, an ICF-certified leadership coach and certified Mindful Self-Compassion teacher with 30+ years of experience guiding executives and communities across Asia, Europe, and beyond.
Dalida Turkovic's story is anything but theoretical. She fled the Yugoslav War in her early 20s, landed in China with almost nothing, spent 30 years building a career and a practice from scratch — and learned, through depression, burnout, and the quiet discipline of embodied awareness, how mindfulness becomes the skill that carries us through life's relentless changes.
In this conversation, we explore:
→ Why mindfulness is not about silencing your mind — and what it actually means to \"let thoughts flow\"
→ The \"frog in the well\" — why self-awareness is the first real act of leadership
→ Why mindfulness without compassion is incomplete
→ The three phases of practice: striving, disillusionment, and radical acceptance
→ What the \"hyper-achiever trap\" costs leaders — in their body, their relationships, and their teams
→ How to begin a mindfulness practice in just 10 seconds
→ Why redefining success as the quality of human connection might be the most radical leadership move of our time
A moment from this episode:
\"Sometimes we think we are in a space where we got it all — but we are actually stuck in a well. What mindfulness offers us is to begin to see different scenarios, that there is more to what we can perceive.\" — Dalida Turkovic
Connect with Dalida Turkovic: Website & Coaching Inquiry → https://www.dalidaturkovic.com/contact
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