There’s a choice I made years ago that, at the time, I couldn’t explain even to myself. I was already living outside Italy and speaking another language all day long: at work, with friends, sometimes even in my dreams. When I decided to train as a coach, I could have done it where I lived: excellent courses, no flights to catch, a language I handled well. Instead I went back to Italy, and made life complicated for myself with planes, counted days off and weekends spent elsewhere.
If anyone had asked me why back then, I would have answered something vague about how convenient it is to study in your own language. I only understood the truth later, inside Voice Dialogue sessions.
Because one thing I already knew, the way anyone who has lived abroad long enough knows it: at a certain point the language stops being an obstacle. You run a meeting, handle a negotiation, crack a joke and people even laugh. You are at ease, genuinely. And then you have to say something that touches you closely, and you need that particular word, that exact one. Not a concept, a nuance. The difference between feeling guilty and feeling indebted, between staying silent out of caution and staying silent out of surrender. And you realise that the exact word only exists for you in the language you grew up in, and that what you are saying in the other one is a good approximation. In everyday life you can live with approximations perfectly well. In a path that asks you to look inside yourself, they are precisely the thing you would want to avoid.
Voice Dialogue made this obvious to me. We work with the idea that many parts live inside each of us, and that some of them took charge very early on: the critic, the perfectionist, the part that steps aside to make room for others were formed in years when your second language did not exist yet. When one of these parts speaks up during a facilitation, it speaks with the words it learned to say things with. Asking it to express itself in another language means placing a simultaneous interpreter next to it, and that interpreter, however good, is already a form of control. Precisely what this work tries to loosen.
That is why I am convinced that certain paths should be walked in your mother tongue. Not out of nostalgia, but because that is where you get deepest, and an investment like this deserves to pay off all the way.
Over the years, this conviction kept running into the same conversations. Between the countries I have lived in and the ones I work in, I have people I care about all over Europe, and many of them accompany others for a living: some as coaches, some as counsellors or psychologists, some inside organisations in an HR role. Whenever I talked about the Voice Dialogue Facilitation Course, the conversation always came to the same point: aren’t you bringing it over here? For years I answered that it only ran in Italy, and every time I was left with the feeling of a promise postponed.
From today the answer changes. In 2027 the course also takes place in Madrid, in Italian, and registration is open.
I am saying this first of all to you who live in Spain and accompany people for a living: this edition exists so that you no longer have to choose between the training you want and the life you have built there. But I am also saying it to you who live in Italy and want to do this training in your own language, without giving up an experience: three weekends in Madrid are not three ordinary weekends. It is a city that fills you with a very particular energy, and anyone who works with the parts recognises it straight away: certain Selves that stay quiet at home wake up in a city like this. Stepping outside your own context is sometimes the quickest way to meet them.
Marzia and I took the time it needed, because bringing it outside Italy made sense on one condition only: that the quality of the work in the room stayed exactly the same. That is why the calendar is three weekends with a schedule built around flights, from Friday afternoon to Sunday lunchtime, so that the training lives alongside your work instead of competing with it. And that is why the group stays small, ten people at most: it is the condition for everyone to facilitate, be facilitated and receive supervision.
After several editions the same thing still strikes me: people arrive to learn a method and go home having met parts of themselves they did not know they had. It is the reason I do this work. And it is what I hope will happen in Madrid too, perhaps to some of the very people with whom, for years, this conversation ended with a what a shame, it’s in Italy.
Voice Dialogue Facilitation Course, Madrid 2027, in Italian.
Three modules of three days each:
- 19, 20 and 21 February 2027
- 19, 20 and 21 March 2027
- 16, 17 and 18 April 2027
Early bird offer until 30 September 2026.
To get it, just enter the code EARLYBIRD when you register.
Click here for the full programme.
For any questions, or to work out together whether this is the right path for you, write to us privately.
Together, we meet our selves