Petra Bock

She works as an executive coach, is the author of numerous internationally translated best-sellers and a sought-after speaker. As a transformation researcher, she has spent many years investigating fundamental political system change and the history of human ideology and philosophy. Driven by the question of how we might realise our full potential of freedom, effectiveness and life quality in our own lives, in economy and society, she founded the Dr. Bock Coaching Academy in 2008, today one of the leading institutes for advanced training within the field of professional coaching in Europe, operating in Berlin and Zurich. She originated a methodology and award-winning practice of human mindsets and behaviours that enables individuals and organisations to break free from blockages and unlock their full potential. Her latest book "Der entstörte Mensch" (DROEMER) is a pragmatic utopia and a socio-philosophical contribution to a discourse on a brave new culture of life as we enter the Anthropocene.

PETRA BOCK: Since the 1980s, as Phillipp Felsch noted, thinking has migrated from philosophy to art. In this respect, artists play an important role. For me, art is an expression of the development and quality of human thinking. I wish that artists today have the courage to not lose sight of the critique of critique. The autodafe (the self-immolation or destruction of works of art for ideological reasons, editor's note) of art that contradicts a certain ideology is a shuddering kowtow to non-thinking. Never did I expect that this could happen again. I do desire art to be self-aware and world-aware, to provoke, to force us to pause, and to prove exciting and unwieldy in the face of narrow-minded ideologies of whatever origin.

PB: Crises and changes are necessary to make way for the new. Old systems become fragile, new ones emerge. Without this process, there will be no better future. For it to become genuinely better, new narratives are required which no longer imagine the future solely as a dystopia, but as a vision of a process of achievement both filigree and complex. The old narratives of a dysfunctional humanity of the Holocene are deceased. Vivid instead will be the narratives of a consistently life-friendly Anthropocene - even if they have yet to find their way in this century.

PB: Important for my work are: art, cognitive science, cultural studies, history, politics, philosophy, anthropology, earth systems science, neuroscience, architecture, psychology, pedagogy, and education. At the moment I am reading a lot by Peter Sloterdijk ("After God") and Francois Jullien ("There is no cultural identity").

PB: I request a mental paradigm shift at the species level. I call for a transition from a bipolar-hierarchical and linear-causal survival thinking, which is about competition and dominance, towards a pulsating, network-like thinking of unfoldment, which is based on diversity and cooperation, and from which a consequently life-friendly new civilisation can be generated. I call this civilisation in my book "Der entstörte Mensch" the "Vivilisation", the life and quality community of all life on earth. This includes plants, animals, and shared livelihoods. We need a new, radical humanism that points beyond itself and understands being human as a self-conscious part of the biosphere.

PB: I have three rituals. I think and write best in the morning hours after a run. In the second half of the day, drinking black tea in a very specific cup helps me get over the afternoon slump. And when nothing helps anymore, Mozart certainly does. Especially the Piano Concerto No. 27 or the Haydn cello concertos, as performed by Sol Gabetta.​