About me
I'm Milana and I'm a psychologist and political scientist with a Master's in Management and Data Analytics from Frankfurt. I spent the last decade running operations at international companies, and I'm still doing it. Currently COO at one. I'm also training in Personal Construct Psychology. I write about the systems we live inside (corporate, political, psychological) and what they do to the people inside them.
How I got here
I trained as a psychologist first. Four years, honors, the works. I cared about how people make sense of themselves and the world.
In parallel I studied political science, because the systems shaping people aren't only psychological. They're collective, contested, designed. Political theory taught me to read structure: how institutions decide what we're allowed to think, how power moves through everyday life, how the things that feel most personal are usually political twice over.
Frankfurt was the bridge. A master's in management and data analytics. Quantitative. Operational. Focused on how organizations actually work rather than how they describe themselves in their values deck.
And ten years inside international companies. Building things, running things. I write this site between meetings.
Why this combination
Most people who write about corporate psychology have only observed it. Most executives who write about leadership have no psychological training. Sitting at the intersection (psychologist, still running an organization, paying the cost in real time, studying a serious therapeutic framework to make sense of all of it) is rare. It takes a long time and a specific set of choices.
I'm not writing optimization content. Not "five habits of high performers." Not "how to be more strategic." I'm writing about what it actually means to construct yourself inside a system that's also constructing you, and what gets lost in the process.
What I'm training in
Personal Construct Psychology. Developed by George Kelly in 1955. Kelly's claim is that people are best understood as scientists building working theories of themselves and the world. We construct meaning in order to predict and act. When our constructs fail us, we suffer. Therapy, in this view, is partly the work of revising the constructs we've inherited or invented.
It takes the inner life seriously without reducing it to chemistry. It treats the person as the expert on their own meanings rather than the patient of a diagnostician. And it maps unusually well onto life inside organizations, which figures, because organizations are nothing if not collective machines for producing constructs.
I'm a student of PCP for now. Practice as a supervised psychotherapist starts late 2027.
What this site is, and isn't
This is a place for serious writing about systems and the people inside them. It is not therapy, psychological advice, or a clinical resource. If you need real support with a mental health concern, please reach out to a licensed therapist where you live.
Selected interviews
SheCanCode - Spotlight on organizational psychology and HR
Bold Journey - On trajectory and approach
Canvas Rebel - Conversation on work and identity
How to follow
The newsletter is the simplest way. New essays go out by email, free, no schedule pressure. You can also write to me. I read everything. I will reply as quickly as possible.