“I always felt like something was missing. And I didn’t know what. I thought it was my problem.”
She spent most of her adolescence reactive and not knowing why. From the outside, her life looked…fine. Normal. The family was there, the friends were there. But still, something was missing, and it took her years not only to understand what it was but also to make it her mission to fill that gap. “I said I’m going to become what I didn’t have,” she says. “It was understanding. It was communication.” That search is what brought her here.
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Christiana Genie is a Behavioural Specialist, Parenting Strategist, international speaker, and founder of Inner Growth Academy. She works with organisations in Cyprus and internationally to help leaders build psychological safety, strengthen communication, and create environments where people speak up and collaborate more effectively. She has worked with organisations including SIA, KPMG, and Bioland, and is accredited as a senior coach with the EMCC, with certifications in structural coaching, mindfulness, and workplace happiness.
She grew up the eldest child on both sides of a large Cypriot family, which meant that everything she did was new territory and under scrutiny. Her first relationship, her first piercing in her ear, every first “rebellious” step placed her in the spotlight to be judged.
“I always felt like I was the black sheep,”
she says.
Her first degree was in Information Technology, a choice driven more by expectations than personal interest. Later, she studied Graphics and Multimedia Design in London because she had wanted to become a fashion designer and been talked out of it. She thought she had finally found the start of her own path.
But then she returned to Cyprus, went into nine-to-five work, and found it was slowly wearing her down. Not the work itself but the corporate structure. The fact that she could build something, and someone could walk in and change it because it did not match their vision. “It was just because as a person I couldn’t adapt to that structure.” So she created her own.
A different path emerged: coaching. She completed her first coaching diploma in Child Coaching, wanting to be there for children the way nobody had been there for her. She worked with adolescents, the age group she had found the most difficult, and discovered that there was a large gap in the coaching space.
“When I worked with children and adolescents for a few years, I realised that if the parents are not aware, it is very difficult for a child to step out of the role,”
she says.
That led her to work with parents as well. What she could do with children in six months, she could do with parents in one month.
Then COVID arrived. The children’s groups disappeared. She was left with the parents, and then, through them, she was invited in by HR managers who had seen her work and wanted to bring it into their organisations. Christiana was again back in the corporate world, but this time on her own terms.
The word she keeps returning to throughout the conversation is dynamics. Not culture or strategy. Dynamics: the patterns of behaviour that form between people and determine everything that follows. She worked with a US company where she spent time with each employee individually, mapping what they wanted, and trying to understand what their real motivations were. When she shared what she had found with the employer, he was shocked. He was not aware of any of the motivations. This was true even for employees who had worked for him for years, simply because nobody had ever asked them. Together, they built a system of personal incentives around what each person actually cared about. “It was amazing how they skyrocketed,” she says. “The people were finally being paid attention to. Companies don’t spare the time to do this. And if we don’t start today, in two years it will be very hard to keep employees.”
The centre of her work is communication as a pathway to connection, and that is where many organisations are failing their employees.
“Many people tend to believe that if you do a fun event, people are going to immediately come close. You don’t need a fun event. You need a true connection event. Something where everyone understands that they are all the same. That they share the same difficulties, the same passions,”
she says.
The difference, she argues, is between people leaving an event slightly more familiar with their colleagues and people leaving an event changed. “Sometimes even a small event where every single person leaves there feeling changed makes a much bigger difference than people just coming, grabbing a drink, and leaving straight away.”
The values that Christiana Genie moves through life are freedom, trust, and truth. Freedom first, in every form, whether freedom of speech, freedom to choose, freedom to create. “In companies that I visit, one of the things I always ask is how much of themselves they can bring into your workplace,” she says.
“Companies that are rigid and don’t allow the person to come as they are, they lose people. Because people want to be seen for what they are.”
The bonuses and the surface-level rewards only go so far. “Feeling seen, feeling visible, makes a huge difference,” she says. “Now they want that.”
Her message to the next generation has two parts. Learn to listen to your own voice, not the talk around it. “Turn inwards. Start learning about yourself, your programming. Don’t just set goals and go get them. You have to understand what you’re creating towards.” And the second: do not be afraid of effort. Too often, she sees teenagers who want the result without the work. “You have to put in the work. And it is amazing to work. It is nice to give, to serve, to create in this world.”
Christiana Genie is a guest on The Future Makers: Women Building Cyprus. The full episode, including her approach to psychological safety, the dynamics she looks for when she enters an organisation, and why she believes consciousness is the most important thing missing from corporate culture today, is available to watch now.
The Future Makers Podcast is a series of in-depth conversations about how future-makers are made, in Cyprus and beyond. Host Annetta Benzar sits down with people who are a leading force in our shared future and looks past the titles. Together, they travel back to the people and moments that shaped them, walk through the choices and challenges they are living through now, and look ahead to the futures they are trying to build.
The first season, Women Building Cyprus, follows women whose work and decisions are shaping the future of the island.
A production of The Future Media.
