speaking & facilitation
for CONFERENCES & EVENTS
A room can change
when the body enters the conversation.
Most conferences leave participants with more ideas and the same patterns. Most strategy sessions produce documents that don’t survive the Monday after. The difference is rarely the content — it’s whether the people in the room were actually present.
I bring embodied practice into speaking and facilitation: grounding ideas in felt experience, opening the body as a site of intelligence, and creating conditions where something genuinely new can emerge.
What I speak and facilitate on
Topics
Each topic can be shaped as a keynote, a workshop, or a facilitated process — depending on what your event or gathering needs.
Coaching & leadership / listening
Listening, beyond the words
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How the body shapes — and is shaped by — the quality of our listening. A practice-based exploration for coaches, facilitators,leaders, and anyone who works with people.
Strategy & change / sensing
What analysis can’t reach
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Using Social Presencing Theater and somatic tools to feel what an organisation or team is actually doing and what it might be trying to become.
INNER Leadership / somatic self-knowledge
Leadership begins in the body
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How we hold power is how we hold our bodies. An inquiry into somatic self-knowledge as a leadership practice — for individuals and groups.
Presence as professional capacity
Where performance actually begins
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Genuine presence is not a personality trait — it is a practice. For students, practitioners, and professionals navigating high-demand environments.
Where this work has landed
Case studies
EMCC Global Conference
2025 · International (Coventry, UK)
The art of listening
An audience of professional coaches and mentors from across the world. The question at the centre: what happens to listening when the body is included — not as a metaphor, but as an instrument? The session moved between concept and practice, inviting participants to notice how their own somatic state shaped what they could and couldn’t receive.
It included an audience in-person of ca. 250 people, and an online audience of ca. 80 participants.
What made it work
The EMCC audience brought deep reflective capacity but relatively little movement experience. The entry was conceptual enough to be credible, experiential enough to shift something. Several participants described it as the session they kept thinking about after the conference.
WU Wien — Student Counselling & Wellbeing Days
Since 2022 · Vienna · Recurring sessions
Presence as professional capacity
A recurring partnership developed with WU Wien Student’s Counselling.
The audience is students — often in high-performance, high-pressure trajectories — who arrive with little or no movement background and a lot of accumulated cognitive load. The session offers a practice-based introduction to the body as a resource rather than an obstacle.
In this seminars, different topics were addressed, such as “The Art of Listening“, “Awaken your Superhero Study Skills“, “Resting in Movement“or “Redefining Success”
What makes it recurring
The partnership has stayed because it consistently reaches students who have no language for what they’re experiencing — and leaves them with both a felt sense and a vocabulary. The simplicity of the entry point is the point.
Craigberoch — Deceleration Program
2022 · Isle of Bute, Scotland
4D Mapping for strategy — and the body that shows up to think
A residential gathering on the Isle of Bute, held by Craigberoch. The facilitation wove two threads: Social Presencing Theater’s 4D Mapping as a method for strategic sensing, and embodied warm-ups designed to open the specific qualities each session needed — not generic energisers, but somatic preparation for the particular kind of thinking the group was being asked to do.
What this kind of facilitation requires
Reading the room somatically, not just cognitively. Knowing when to slow the group down and when to let it move. Holding the tension between the strategic task and the embodied process without collapsing one into the other. This is where the work gets interesting.
format
What I can offer your event or organisation
All workshops run as half-days (4 hours), delivered in-house at your location, in another agreed location, or online. Each session is customised to what your team is actually navigating — not delivered from a template.
Keynote or lecture
A talk that is also an experience. Concepts grounded in felt practice — participants don’t just hear about embodiment, they get a taste of it.
45–90 min · conferences, symposia, academic events
English, Portuguese, Spanish or German
Workshop or seminar
A deeper dive for smaller groups. More practice, more space to reflect. Can be paired with a keynote for conference programmes that want more than a talk.
Half-day · 8–30 participants · academic, professional, or public contexts
Facilitated gathering or retreat
Full facilitation of a strategy session, leadership offsite, or residential gathering. Embodied methods woven throughout — not as add-ons, but as the primary instrument.
1–3 days · organisational or community groups · in-house or residential
Recurring programme
A series of sessions over a semester or academic year. Builds continuity and allows participants to develop an actual practice rather than a single experience.
1–3 days · organisational or community groups · in-house or residential
I don’t bring embodiment as a methodology to deploy. I bring it as a way of being in a room, which is either useful to you or it isn’t. That conversation is worth having before we agree to anything.
Ana Bernardes
Practicalities
Where, when, and in which language
Based in Vienna. Available across Europe, with particular presence in Austria and Portugal. Open to international invitations for the right contexts.
Thinking about inviting me to your event?
Tell me something about the context. What’s the audience, the format, what you’re hoping will be different after. I’ll tell you honestly whether I think it’s a fit.
I don’t send speaker packs. I have conversations.