Before I Taught Anyone to Regulate, I Had to Survive.
Before the TEDx talks and neuroscience, there was a childhood in Poland, a son I lost, and years I don't remember living. This is how Your Brain Coach D began.
I was born into a storm.
My father left when I was four. My mother was somewhere else most of the time: on stage, in another city, in another world. The person who actually raised me was my grandmother. She loved me without conditions, and that was the first thing I ever learned: love exists even in the middle of a storm.
Epilepsy. Dyslexia. I was called stupid. I was told children, like fish, have no voice, and that if people found out about any of it, it would ruin my future. So I learned to hide. And I learned to fight twice as hard for half the result.
Then martial law came to Poland, and we fled. I remember the poverty for the first time, a relief truck arriving with Christmas gifts because we had no food, and the shame of that. I remember the first time I had a new pair of jeans instead of a bag of secondhand clothes, and how strange that felt.
At eighteen, back in Poland, I thought I’d found love. I thought it was my way out.
It wasn’t. It was violence, control, fear. Some nights I didn’t know if I’d survive until morning.
Patrick
Then Patrick was born. My son, my light. For the first time in my life, I felt like life was finally giving me something back. He was the happiest little boy.
He was sixteen months old when he fell asleep and never woke up. I held his body, cold, in my hands.
For two years, I did not live. I have almost no memory of that time, only that my skin hurt, my eyelashes hurt, and even breathing was too hard. I tried to end my story. One thought stopped me: if I disappeared, my mother would not survive it. So I stayed. Not because I was strong, but because staying was the only choice left.
If you are in distress right now, please know you are not alone:
• In the US: Call or text 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.
• In Poland: Call 116 123 (Free and confidential, 24/7).
• International: Find a crisis line at OpenCounseling Hotlines.
Rising From the Storm
Rebuilding
I rebuilt. University. Education. New beginnings. I became a mother again, twin daughters this time, and got married. I made them a promise: they would grow up with stability, even if I had to build it alone. I earned my degrees while people told me education wasn’t for someone like me.
I built companies. I taught thousands of students. Spoke to hundreds of thousands; I entered rooms of power, was part of an advising body for a Polish president, and negotiated the national minimum wage in parliament, working across institutions and media. For a while, I thought I had finally arrived. I was recognized on a national level as an expert in my field.
Then the government changed, and the storm came back from a direction I didn’t expect. I was blacklisted. Warned that speaking the truth would cost me everything. I chose integrity anyway, and I paid for it — I sold my business for almost nothing, packed one suitcase, and left Poland for America to start over.
Starting Over From Experience
Nobody in America cared what I’d achieved or who I’d been. Fifteen years of experience, work with the European Union, none of it mattered here. I was invisible. I thought being a US citizen would make life easier. It didn’t.
I cleaned houses. I sorted hangers in a warehouse alongside convicts on a work-release program. I started over from nothing, and this time, nothing was strangely on my side; my ego had already been stripped down, and I knew, somewhere underneath all of it, there had to be more to life than surviving it.
So I studied neuroscience. Brain health. I pulled everything I’d learned from years in top-level leadership and asked a different question: what does the brain actually do under pressure, under loss, under years of caring too much?
And I finally understood something. Every collapse, every storm I’d been through, had one thing in common. I was strong on the outside. I had never learned how to feel safe on the inside.
Strong on the Outside. Safe on the Inside.
Where Your Brain Coach D Was Born
That’s when Your Brain Coach D was born not as a brand, but as a response to my own life. Because of a brain health approach and neuroscience, after having epilepsy raging in my life, I arrived at a point where, for the first time in 40 years, I had a normal EEG multiple times in a row. Grand mal seizures, anxiety, and depression let go of their grip on my life, and I could finally say I’m seizure-free.
Today, I work with women in leadership and speak on stages I could only have dreamed of. I work with women who are strong on the outside and exhausted on the inside women who want more out of life with less stress, and who want to lead with clarity, integrity, and joy.
My goal is to help you feel fulfilled and excited about life again, aligned in who you are and how you are perceived. No more feeling disconnected or living a double, performative life.
"The truth is, no storm lasts forever. No darkness is permanent. You are not behind. You are not weak. You are not failing. You are in the middle of your own journey, and you will rise again."
Strong on the outside, safe on the inside.Where I Work From Today
Nearly 20 years in leadership, neuroscience, and organizational work, with clients across six continents. TEDx speaker. Bestselling author of The Magic of Dreaming Big, Acting Small, and Achieving Success. Trained by Dr. Daniel Amen, mentor at Amen University, founding member of the Neuroencoding Institute. Former advisor to Polish President Bronisław Komorowski, former labor market analyst and Shadow Cabinet Member who helped shape national workforce policy. MSc in Sociology, a double BA, and postgraduate credentials in HR and Global Management.
None of that is the true point of this page. The point is that everything I built afterward, the method, the coaching, the talks, came directly out of learning how to survive my own life first.