Our work is to transform how people work.
Making mental health a core part of organizational culture so people can keep doing the important work the world needs.
Through consulting, learning spaces, and community initiatives, we support organizations and individuals in building healthier, more sustainable ways of working.
The foundation:
Driving systemic change.
The Self-Investigation is registered as a nonprofit foundation in the Netherlands and operates globally.
We exist to respond to a work environment that has fundamentally changed. Expectations are shifting, and technology is reshaping how we work. Our role is to help organizations create safe, healthy work environments that sustain performance by inspiring people.
We work with organizations to navigate this shift — not reactively, but strategically. To treat it as an opportunity to rethink how we work, how leadership is practiced, and ultimately, how the world of work can contribute to a better future.
As a nonprofit, we reinvest our knowledge, partnerships, and learning into community initiatives that expand access and accelerate change across sectors and regions.
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Born for relief.
Driven by purpose.
The Self-Investigation was founded in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, when professionals across sectors faced unprecedented stress, uncertainty, and emotional strain.
Our founding team, coming from high-pressure professions, witnessed firsthand how demanding work environments often lacked the structures needed to sustain mental health.
What began as a response to an urgent moment evolved into an actual movement.
The pandemic did not create the problem — it revealed it.
Today, in a world shaped by rapid technological change, global instability, and evolving expectations of work, our mission remains deeply relevant.
We exist to help workplaces become places of possibility and hope.
Our approach?
Prevention as a pathway to transformation.
Lasting workplace change doesn’t come from isolated wellbeing initiatives. It happens when leadership, team practices, and organizational structures evolve together.
That’s why our approach combines multiple dimensions:
Evidence-based approaches
Our work draws from psychology, neuroscience, and mindfulness to ensure that every intervention is grounded in research — not trends.
Leadership and organizational strategy
We help organizations translate mental health into leadership behaviors, policies, and decision-making processes that shape everyday work.
Participatory learning
Change is most effective when people experience it, not just hear about it. Our sessions are interactive, reflective, and rooted in real workplace scenarios.
Structural integration
Beyond individual awareness, we support organizations in embedding wellbeing into routines, communication norms, and cultural expectations.
If you lead people — or care about the culture of your organization — this probably sounds familiar.
A multidisciplinary, global network.
Our team brings together:
Professionals from high-pressure fields
Mental health and wellbeing specialists
Educators and facilitators
Organizational and leadership practitioners
Our team shares a common commitment: reshaping workplace culture so that people can continue doing meaningful work without sacrificing their wellbeing.
Many of us have personally experienced burnout or high-pressure professional environments, which informs our ability to design interventions that are realistic, empathetic, and impactful.
Operating as a multilingual and internationally distributed network, we combine professional expertise with lived experience to support meaningful change across contexts.
Meet the team
Board of directors
Mar Cabra
Executive director, Co-founder and chairman of the Board
Mar is one of the co-founders of The Self-Investigation. She is a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, digital wellness educator and Acumen fellow working on raising awareness on how technology is changing the way we interact with ourselves, each other and as a society.
She writes a column in Spanish newspaper El Confidencial on this topic. She’s committed to creating a healthier working culture in journalism to prevent others from burning out like she did after leading the technology and data work for the Panama Papers investigation.
Kim Brice
Co-founder, secretary of the Board, Coaching Director and Trainer
Kim is one of the co-founders of The Self-Investigation. She provides personal leadership and burnout coaching as well as mindfulness-based stress reduction and resilience trainings to a broad public, including journalists and change makers.
Prior to starting her personal development work, she served as a global freedom of expression activist and later as a founder and then organizational advisor to many media, journalism and social justice support programs around the world.
She believes creating a more balanced, compassionate and sustainable world starts with nurturing those qualities in ourselves.
Aldara Martitegui
Co-founder, member of the Board, trainer and coach
Aldara is one of the co-founders of The Self-Investigation. She is a journalist, psychologist and coach specialised in emotional intelligence and mindfulness.
She currently works as a journalist covering mental health for the Spanish newscast “Noticias Cuatro”. In recent years, she has supported and trained dozens of journalists in stress management and burnout prevention.
Staff
Paula Montañà
Operations Director
Paula is a journalist and program manager with experience in designing and delivering training projects and building partnerships with media organisations worldwide for the European Journalism Center and the Google News Initiative.
Since 2022, she leads all operations at The Self-Investigation. She manages workflows and schedules, makes sure that projects run smoothly and always seeks for ways to maximise The Self-Investigation’s impact and collaborations.
Silvia Muller
Development and Partnerships Director
Silvia takes care of the business development strategy at The Self-investigation. After years in hyper-growth tech startups and several entrepreneurial projects related to mental health in the workplace, she specialised in commercial strategies for social impact projects.
She joined the Self Investigation team to pursue her desire to contribute to a healthier and fairer world. Silvia is also certified as a Transformative Coach and Yoga teacher, as part of her quest to support her own mental wellbeing in intense, burnout-prone work environments.
She has a degree in Economics from Bocconi university and studied Strategic Management at the Rotterdam School of Management.
Mariam Mamdouh
Project Manager
Mariam Mamdouh is a project manager with experience in creating positive change and driving training projects towards their ultimate goals. Since 2022, she has worked with The Self-Investigation on several projects, some of them serving communities in the Middle East, Africa, and South-East Asia.
She’s currently the Project Manager for the Mental Health in Journalism Summit. Prior to joining the team, she worked as a freelance translator and later as a social media specialist for ARIJ Network (Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism).
Our network of trainers
AX Mina (Ana)
Trainer and Coach
AX Mina is SVP pf Specialized Support at the American Journalism project. She is also a strategic consultant, trainer and leadership coach who’s supported news leaders and managers through programs with LION Publishers, The OpEd Project.
She was a founding board member of the News Product Alliance and is a Senior Civic Media Fellow at the USC Annenberg School for Journalism and Communications. She is a certified trauma-informed yoga teacher and lifelong mindfulness practitioner.
Jeremy Clifford
Leadership Trainer and Coach
Jeremy is the founding director of Chrysalis – a change and transformation advisory business specialising in leadership team building, coaching and helping organisations to manage change in the workplace.
Jeremy is a qualified coach, project manager and trained in change management.
Emma Thomasson
Leadership Trainer and Coach
Emma Thomasson is a British journalist, consultant and trainer based in Germany. She previously worked for Reuters as a correspondent and bureau chief in Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, South Africa and the UK.
She has reported on a wide range of topics including business, technology, economics, politics and international law. She is also a leadership coach and an advocate for better workplace mental health.
At Reuters, she helped run a peer network, which supports journalists suffering from stress and trauma, and ran workshops on burnout and resilience. She also set up a global mentoring network to promote diversity and support mid-level managers.
Natalia Martín Cantero
Compassion Trainer
Natalia Martín Cantero is a journalist and university lecturer based in Brussels (Belgium). She has written extensively about mental health and wellness in Spanish-speaking media worldwide, including El País, Univision Noticias, and Agencia EFE, where she worked as a United States correspondent for seven years.
Her book, ‘Think Well and You Will Get It Right: Compassion, Mindfulness, and Other Refuges for Maintaining Hope in Today’s World,’ was published in January 2024 by Plataforma Editorial.
She is a Stanford Compassion Cultivation Training (CCT) instructor and a certified mindfulness and yoga instructor.
Yula Altchouler
Resilience Trainer
Yula Altchouler is a cross-media journalism professional with over twenty years of experience as an independent researcher, producer, and director of documentary projects.
While supporting other producers as a story coach, she often saw that people need more than guidance in shaping their projects alone.
In recent years, Yula has combined her work in media production with her role as a psychosocial therapist and coach. She has a special interest in family history and dynamics and brings a strong sensitivity to diverse cultural perspectives. At The Self-Investigation, she brings both worlds together – journalism and mental health-supporting resilience and personal growth within the journalistic field. She offers therapy, coaching, and training in Dutch, Russian, and English.
Martina Rua
Digital Wellness Trainer
Martina is a journalist specialized in innovation and productivity. She has been in the communications industry for 23 years. She took a postgraduate course in Digital Journalism from Pompeu Fabra University and Google, and a she has a diploma in Emotional Intelligence and leadership.
She has been a columnist for the newspapers La Nación in Argentina for 15 years and is co-host of Radio Metro. Martina is a visiting professor at the University of San Andres. Is co-author of the books “La Fábrica de Tiempo”, “Cómo domar tus pantallas” and the podcast “Cómo fabricar tiempo” with over 2 million listens. Winner of the Accenture award for Innovation journalism, and TOP 15 HR Influencer in Argentina 2021 and 2022.
She works with leadership teams from global companies to catalyze their innovation, productivity and wellbeing.
Elena Sancho
Coach
Elena has 20+ years’ experience in strategy and organizational management with private & public companies as well as international NGOs working on social development, environmental sustainability and human rights.
She has led multidisciplinary and multicultural teams, supporting them in both their personal development and effectiveness as teams, in a wide variety of organizations and programs.
With the ever-changing nature of international development work, she brings innovation, and she is a dynamic challenge solver. She is a PCC certified coach by the International Coaching Federation (ICF), and a 6 Team Conditions and Organization and Relationship Systems Coaching (ORSC) practitioner.
Rocío Ovalle
Coach
Rocío is a journalist and an ICF certified coach, with training in Integrative Body Process and financial intelligence. She is an Acumen Fellow, a global network of change leaders, and she also has extensive experience in communication for change and the third sector.
Her mission is to accompany people to transform their world, helping them increase their self-knowledge, recognize their needs and improve their emotional management so that they achieve their goals.
Dean Yates
Trauma and Moral Injury Trainer
Dean has been a journalist for 30 years and is the author of a highly acclaimed memoir called Line in the Sand that will be published on June 27, 2023. Dean has found renewed meaning in life by sharing his story of recovery from trauma and reconnecting with his family. Dean led Reuters teams that covered the 2002 Bali bombings and the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami. Dean was bureau chief for Reuters in Iraq from 2007-2008. It was during this time that a U.S. Apache gunship killed two Reuters journalists in Baghdad.
Dean created and rolled out a mental health strategy for Reuters from 2017-2020. It was a unique role in global media. The successes and failures of that initiative guide Dean in the workplace mental health training he does today.
Cat Lau
Emotional Wellness Trainer
Cat is an emotions coach and educator and has supported high-impact individuals through their internal healing and transformation.
She has guided and trained mental health activists, social entrepreneurs, and coaches in emotional well-being for employees of the UN, UNICEF, World Economic Forum. She has also designed and facilitated emotions trainings for Change.org and Amazon.
Ana Zellhuber
Trainer and Psychoanalyst and Emergency Psychology Specialist
Ana is a psychoanalyst and emergency psychology specialist. She is the founder of Vinland Solutions, a Company dedicated since 2005, to give psychological support to journalists, photojournalists, human rights defenders and women in politics who because of their jobs or their gender have been a target of persecution or violence.
She supports individuals suffering from post traumatic stress disorder, acute stress, depression or who are in need of support while they are being relocated for their safety.
Across 70+
countries
Multilingual
global team
Consistently high
satisfaction rates
We have worked with:
