Dusseldorf Tatjana Kiel has been working with Wladimir Klitschko for over 17 years. She organized countless competitions for the ex-professional boxer and planned with him early on after his boxing career. Together they developed the Face the Challenge coaching method.
Kiel has been head of Klitschko Ventures since 2016 and, together with her team, supports companies in the transformation that want to learn from the techniques of the former competitive athlete.
But since the war in Ukraine, everything has changed for the 43-year-old. Overnight, Kiel transformed from the managing director of a consulting firm to the Klitschko brothers’ aid activist – and has been in a state of emergency ever since, both emotionally and in terms of workload. “There are situations when you get stone cold,” says Kiel in the podcast “Handelsblatt Rethink Work”.
Tatjana Kiel helps in the Ukraine war: take care of mothers and babies
Together with Klitschko, she founded the non-profit company #WeAreAllUkrainians and has been organizing statements of solidarity, appeals for donations and – together with German industry – aid projects for people in Ukraine for months.
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Wladimir Klitschko, who is fighting in Ukraine like his older brother Vitali (mayor of Kyiv since 2014), says what they need – and Kiel does.
They ship tons of groceries and medical supplies, provide postpartum necessities to mothers and babies, equip hospitals, organize day centers and Christmas packages for orphans and much more.
Kiel believes one of the most important qualities is to regroup and concentrate every day – and to keep going: “How do I manage to keep going when a setback comes? Or when things happen that are so upsetting that they not only move you to tears, but actually burst into tears?”
With her ten-year-old daughter, she talks about the war while talking about peace. “It’s not about scaring her even more,” says Kiel. And they discuss a lot about what happiness and a good life mean.
Even before the Ukraine war, the Hamburg native started writing a children’s book with Wladimir Klitschko. It’s a story about willpower and it’s called “Wil the Cloudstormer”.
More: You can hear the previous episode of Handelsblatt Rethink Work here