Lutz Otto

Personal, Executive and Leadership Coaching

Making a meaningful difference in the lives, groups, and teams I serve brings me deep fulfillment. Assisting people to grow, working past significant issues, and continually evolving in becoming their best selves, is where I find my purpose.

That which I create the space to support my clients with includes:

• Building self confidence and/ or self-worth. Building self love and compassion practices. Exploring identity. Exploring who you are.
• Making conscious choices, reframing perspectives, shifting thinking patterns or behavior, building resilience, and successfully working through transitions.
• Moving beyond difficult stages of life. Becoming whole, through integrating all of who you are, both your light and shadow.
• Shifting into new work roles, managing ourselves in work contexts, and/ or accelerating performance.
• Moving forward [integration and subsequent journey support] with that which you learned, discovered or reconnected with, on a well-being, healing, psychedelic, or self-development retreat or quest.
• Understanding how our beliefs, emotional states, life experiences, and unconscious cognition, influence our actions and behaviours; And then evolving beyond these.
• Building well-being practices and living with deeper harmonious meaning.

​My style:

• Is supportive, straight-forward, intuitive, and outcomes focused. I authentically engage, am comfortable working with “difficult stuff”, and work best with clients who are committed to their objectives. I steer away from the abdication of responsibility. Psychological safety, and non-disclosure, is a not compromised.
• Is based in the acceptance that sometimes life is easy, sometimes life is hard, and that both spaces co-exist to beautifully co-create our evolving life story. I accept that sometimes transitions can be downright scary. I believe that hope and optimism empower us, and when coupled with our inner resources we are able to do great things.

My methdology:

At a base level, I practice from the person-centered [we all have the potential to grow and thrive] psychological philosophy. My methodology is Integrative and collaborative. Through our conversations I draw on psychology, leadership, systemic thinking, neuroscience and well-being principles [the mind-body connection is inseverable]. The basic scientific principles that observe, “energy flows where attention goes, form follows flow”, and “nothing happens in isolation”, underpin my coaching processes.

Our journey together, is outcome oriented. If not coupled with focused and committed effort, the best plans, new year resolutions, and lifelong dreams, go amiss. Transformation starts unfolding, even if in a different form to what we initially thought, when our intention shifts from thinking and talking, to committed action.

Where I developed my experience:

My experience has been developed in one-on-one coaching, psychodynamic group work, team coaching, mentorship, change management, and leadership roles. I am a business school graduate, who has completed numerous certifications and programs. I have international coaching certifications and am bound by the Global Code of Ethics for the Association for Coaching of which I am a member. I have consciously grown through significant personal and professional change, as well as learned from success and failure. I have invested in inner work and self-development, and through my journey understand what growth, or transformation, uniquely demands from us.

Prior starting my coaching practice, I gained extensive local and international executive leadership experience. This included the implementation of numerous change processes, major business turnaround and serving for over a decade on the SA executive team of a FTSE100 London Stock Exchange listed multi-national. Having worked in different environments, and travelled to 37 countries, I am comfortable in culturally diverse settings.

Some of the most life transformative work I have witnessed is at the intersection of where nature, ecology and psychology meet. Through Spirited Adventures, my parallel business, we run well-being, healing, self-development and leadership retreats in wilderness. I have guiding experience dating back to the late nineteen eighties, and am licensed and highly qualified as a walking safari and mountain guide.

How I am described:

A respected international executive coach shared this: “Lutz is direct and insightful, driven yet humble, compassionate and kind. He easily connects to people, whilst his authenticity, veracity and depth of holistic experience positions him uniquely to facilitate personal and leadership transformation work”.

Where I work:

My physical office is based in Paulshof, Sandton, South Africa. I work in person, either indoors or out in nature, as well as via online video conferencing, and serve clients in South Africa, Europe, and the USA.

Outside of work:

When my wife and I have the opportunity, we love spending time in the bush, mountains, beautiful uninhabited beaches, and in the garden at home. I am a lifelong runner, both road and trail, backpacker, climber, skier, and adventurer.