Coaching Hike for Academics
The thing slowing your academic career isn’t your research.
It’s everything around it.
A 4-hour outdoor coaching walk starting and ending in Vienna where you work on what’s actually blocking you in conversation with peers who get it, and with a coach and mentor who has lived it.
You know what you need to do. You’re just not doing it.
That’s not a motivation problem. That’s what happens when you’re trying to figure out your career, manage your supervisor, question whether academia is even right for you. All while pretending to focus on your research.
Most PhD candidates are carrying questions they never get to ask out loud. Not in their department, not in seminars, not in their annual review. Questions like:
Is this the right path for me, or am I just finishing because I started?
What do I actually want from an academic career — and do I even want one?
How do I stop performing competence and start feeling it?
What’s the thing I keep avoiding, and what would happen if I stopped?
These questions don’t get answered in your supervisor’s office. They get answered in conversation. Specifically, the right kind of conversation, in the right kind of space.
Four hours for your career development
The route isn’t random. Its shape — a gentle ascent to a summit, then back down — maps onto how good thinking actually works: warm up, go deep, integrate.
The walk opens with ten minutes of solo walking. No introductions yet, no small talk. Just space to arrive and identify what you’re actually bringing today.
From there, you move through five structured coaching rounds of twenty minutes each. In each round, one person is the coachee and one is the coach — roles assigned in advance, no mid-walk switching. You bring a real issue. Your partner asks questions. You think out loud. That’s it.
At the summit, the group pauses. Dominik offers a short reframe — a question or a concept that opens new territory. Then one minute of silence, standing still, before the descent begins.
Between every round, five minutes of silence. No phones, no small talk — just space to let the last conversation settle before the next one begins.
The walk ends with a short closing circle. One sentence per person: what you’re taking with you.