About
Built by a neurodivergent practitioner. Grounded in ACT, the Emotional Culture Deck, and years of first hand experience of what actually gets in the way of getting things done.
About the workshop
The Oriɘntation Workshop was built on a simple observation. Most professional development addresses what people do but very little addresses what gets in the way of doing it.
The workshop sits at the intersection of two evidence-based approaches. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, a clinically validated framework for psychological flexibility, and the Emotional Culture Deck, a practical tool that promotes emotional literacy making the emotional dimensions of work both visible and operational.
Together they form a method for understanding the mechanism in place that makes capable people stall, avoid, or repeatedly fail to follow through on things they genuinely want to do.
Emotional regulation is not a soft skill. It is the infrastructure underneath every other skill. When the nervous system is calm and oriented, people can prioritise, initiate, tolerate discomfort, and follow through. When it isn't, even simple tasks become unreasonably hard.
This is true for everyone. But it is acutely true for neurodivergent people, and for anyone operating under sustained pressure - a restructure at work, a period of grief, a season of relentless performance demands. The nervous system under stress behaves the same way regardless of the cause. Tasks feel heavier and the gap between knowing and doing widens.
The approach is neurodivergent-first. Not because the workshop is exclusively for neurodivergent people, but because neurodivergent experiences make visible what everyone experiences to some degree.
What makes this different from conventional training is the starting point. Most programmes begin with skills, frameworks, or goals. This one begins with orientation — understanding where you actually are emotionally before asking yourself to perform. You cannot reliably execute from a place of emotional disorientation, no matter how capable you are or how clearly you understand what needs to be done.
This workshop is not therapy. It does not ask you to process your past or examine your relationships. It asks you to develop a practical, repeatable method for getting oriented before the work begins, so that when pressure arrives -and it will- you have somewhere to return to.
The facilitators
Christo Tsirikos
Founder · Facilitator
Everyone who knew me as a kid -from my parents to my schoolteachers- would gladly attest that I was born curious, a quality which no doubt later nudged me toward studying journalism, all because I couldn't stop asking "why?"
That same inquisitive instinct led me to Berlin for twelve years, where I worked at a community centre for gay, bisexual, trans and intersex men, constantly educating myself and later facilitating workshops on consent, vulnerability and emotional regulation long before those words made it into the corporate vocabulary.
Seven years ago, when I was diagnosed with ADHD, the diagnosis didn't change who I was but rather explained it. I finally had access to terms like "executive dysfunction" and "task paralysis," which named the maddening gap I have experienced, the one between intention and action- and in the years since, I became fixated on one question: what actually happens inside a person when they know exactly what to do and still can't make themselves do it?
A big part of the answer came from my own journey of recovery. Seven years sober, I have spent a long time in the helping profession, coaching, and listening to the stories of people whose lives had become unmanageable not because they lacked intelligence or will, but because their nervous systems were not "normal."
The more I researched emotional regulation and its relationship to execution, the more surprised I was that nobody had built something practical around it for the professional world.
So I did.
My goal in every session is the same: that everyone has an "A-HA" moment, when something just "clicks," and that each person leaves feeling more empowered than they did when they arrived.
Facilitator Name
Role · Qualification
Placeholder bio for the second facilitator. Same structure — background, training, and what they bring to the work. Keep it concise and in the same register as the rest of the site.