Ilkka Rajala

Who I am

Three worlds, one question.

I work in three worlds that rarely meet. In business I develop organisations, leadership, sales and change. In high performance I coach leaders, athletes and special forces soldiers from several countries. The inner world of the mind I have studied since I was 13. I have meditated for more than fifteen years and travelled around the world to learn from shamans and other teachers. My clients are very different from each other, and that is why I have wanted to know many ways of thinking and living.

The question is the same everywhere: how people really work and how that can be changed. My strength is seeing how thinking works. I notice structures that many coaches miss, and based on them I choose the approach that helps. When I know what is going on, change happens fast. In my training I teach the same skill to others. It is called metacognition.

I have completed more than a hundred trainings on the human mind: methods from psychotherapy, NLP, hypnosis, solution-focused work, somatic methods, systems thinking, and subjects related to consciousness and spirituality. I'm loyal to the result, not to the method. I use what holds up to scrutiny and works in that particular situation.

In the same week I might run with special forces in combat gear and lead a meditation session the next day. I use a lot of humour and challenge rigid thinking. My own included.

I was 13 when my father brought Anthony Robbins' Personal Power cassette series back from the United States. My English was weak, but I got the idea: you really can change the way you think and act, and then the results you want start coming into your life. Around the same time I wrote down on paper what kind of person I wanted to be: honest, brave, committed to growing and deeply respectful of others. On the side of good. That paper still stands. At school I also swore I would never do a job that involved performing, because I was afraid of speaking in public. Today I train people for a living.

My first education was in media, where I focused on graphic design and video production. My working career, though, was on the commercial side. I studied leadership and worked as a salesperson, sales manager, product manager, marketing manager and store manager of the largest Apple store in Finland. I studied self-development alongside work the whole time.

I moved to an international consultancy as training director. The company ran large business development projects for Finnish companies. I was responsible for coaching programmes for salespeople and leaders and gave more than 200 trainings on sales, interaction and change management. There I learned how processes, metrics and meetings really work. And that they only work if people come along. In 2008–2009, as an Apple Certified Trainer, I trained a large share of Finland's Apple salespeople.

I founded NLP Akatemia. Richard Bandler, co-creator of NLP, originally studied mathematics and computing. He looked at the human mind as a system with a structure. I spent years learning from Richard. I have taught more than 100 NLP Practitioner courses. In 2012 Bandler awarded me the highest certification, Licensed Master Trainer of NLP™.

I have done systemic analysis since my consulting years and built systems for it: assessments of business, strategy and leadership, and monitoring of markets and the situational picture. From 2015 to 2020 I helped found an AI company where I taught AI to read from speech and text how a person thinks. I used it in company mergers, for example, when we needed to understand how two organisations think. I still have the technology.

I combine everything above. I develop organisations and train leaders and staff. These days I speak most about leading thinking, mental resilience and thinking in the age of AI. I also coach people who have a lot at stake. Some of what I taught ten years ago no longer holds up to scrutiny, and I say so openly. I update the way I do this work every day and build new things.

One thing

Look inside. It's the greatest adventure in the world.

A friend once asked me what I would tell everyone if I could say only one thing. The answer was easy: look inside.

Inside us is the understanding of why we act the way we do, alone, as a team and as an organisation. Many important answers are found in our own inner system. Exploring it takes something concrete: a clear method and tools that work. Vague soul-searching isn't enough.

Book

Voittamaton (Invincible)

11 key abilities for success and peace of mind

The book starts from the idea that success is a set of skills you can learn. I wrote it together with Davide Floreno and Petri Matero. Published in Finnish.

Frequently asked.