Coffee and Coaching

About Coffee and Coaching

Coffee & Coaching is an espresso, not a seminar. Each week, Bernhard Kerres explores difficult conversations leaders avoid—and why practicing matters more in the age of AI. Bernhard is an executive coach, founder of RolePlays.AI, and went from opera singer to tech CEO to Silicon Valley founder. He coaches executives at Henkel, PwC, and Strategy&, and teaches at London Business School. Leaders perfect slide decks but wing conversations that matter. Performance reviews. Restructuring. Feedback to high performers. Short. Intense. Actionable. www.bernhardkerres.com | www.roleplays.ai

Publisher

Bernhard Kerres

Category

education

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

4 Jan 2020

Latest episode

11 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

86 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   11 Oct 2026

   Respond, Don’t React: What to Do When You Are Triggered

   Press a button, and the coffee is there. Or: three pieces, coffee, water, on the stove, wait. Bernhard is drinking the second kind this morning. The waiting turns out to be the subject. FROM ROUTINE TO RESILIENCE Last episode was morning routines. Thanks to everyone who wrote in with theirs. Here is what the routine is actually for. “Morning routines help us to build up resilience. When we do that regularly, it’s like going to the gym. We build up a muscle, allowing us to deal better with stress.” “I always realize when I didn’t do my morning routine well enough, that not only my body reacts to it, but that my capability to react on stress is limited.” REACT OR RESPOND “We don’t want to react to stress. We want to respond to stress.” Resilience is the base. The trigger moments still come. Someone says something. Someone behaves a certain way. You know the feeling. Between the trigger and your answer you need what Bernhard calls a breaker. Something that interrupts the reflex and buys you the second in which a response becomes possible. THREE BREAKERS Feet. “When somebody triggers me, the first thing I think about are my feet. I feel my soles, and see how they connect to the floor.” Breathe out first. Not in. Out. Let the air go, let it flow back in, let it go again. Then answer. Something you can feel. An elastic band on the wrist, a small tug. Anything physical that pulls you out of the reflex. Pick one. It only works if it is already a habit by the time you need it. THE STRESS THAT CREEPS The dangerous kind is not the trigger. It is the slow accumulation. “It’s just these ten minutes more a day. This bit of work more, this bit of responsibility more, this bit of travelling more. And we all say: yeah, sure, I can do that, no problem. I’m strong.” Nobody notices, because by then it is just normal life. And it is the road to burnout. WHAT YOUR BODY TELLS YOU Sleep. How well, how long, how you wake. Rested looks like seven or eight uninterrupted hours and waking up energised. Nightmares, waking at three, waking very early with work already in your head, not being able to get out of bed: those are signals. Skin. Rashes that were not there before. Hair. Shedding that starts small and gets worse. “If you have these signs, it is more than time to address your stress levels. And it’s time to do a radical change.” Persistent physical symptoms are worth a doctor’s appointment, not only a coach’s. ON BEING STRONG “I think it’s one of the most ridiculous phrases we use for ourselves or in asking others to do something. Being strong doesn’t mean anything.” The better definition: understanding your body, and using mind, body and emotions in the combination that lets you thrive over a long period. It still allows a sprint. “But strong does not mean that your sprint becomes a marathon.” THE THREE TAKEAWAYS Build resilience with a daily routine. Five or ten minutes is plenty. Daily is the point. Find your breaker, so you respond instead of react. Listen to your body for the stress that piles up quietly. And today: a few minutes to be yourself. Look at a tree. A good coffee. A good conversation. LINKS: bernhardkerres.com | roleplays.ai #Stress #Resilience #Burnout #Leadership #Coaching #MorningRoutine

2. 

   27 Sept 2026

   Four Things to Do Before the Day Owns You

   Press a button. Coffee in three seconds. Or: grind, measure, tamp, froth, wait. Which morning do you actually want? THE ARTICLE THAT STARTED IT Hana Kabele Gala, PhD wrote "Screw Your Efficient Mornings." She had a fully automatic espresso machine. Then a Nespresso. Five or six cups a morning, because it was so easy. Then she stayed with friends in Germany who owned no coffee machine at all. Just a small percolator. "Time slowed down. We were just there. It wasn't giving me anxiety. It felt like freedom." "I had pushed the efficiency so far that I had killed the one part of the ritual that was actually mine." "I don't want my coffee faster. I want the minutes back." FOUR AREAS THAT MAKE US HUMAN Ideally a morning touches all four. Realistically, one or two. That is enough. PHYSICAL. 15 to 20 minutes. Jumping jacks to wake the body up, then arms, belly, legs. No fixed plan. "I feel my body, I feel grounded, and it's really beautiful." Over the summer it was the mountain behind the house instead. 30 minutes up, 350 metres, then the lake, the birds, the wood cracking. SPIRITUAL. "For me, spirituality is often connected to nature." Not a religious person. But: "there are things which I can't explain, and there is this belief that there's something which is bigger than us." Last week in Wrexham, North Wales, a sign at the cathedral door: people of all faiths and no faith are welcome. EMOTIONAL. One or two minutes lying in bed. Grateful to wake up, to feel the body, to embrace yourself before the day starts. Then the people. A habit borrowed from a friend: a short Monday morning message to those closest to you. "Even if you live alone, think about the people who check in with you, the people who are there for you whenever you need them." INTELLECTUAL. Bernhard built his own morning briefing app. AI, coaching, executive education. Plus one item deliberately outside his field every day. Recently: the fine networks fungi use to communicate across a forest. "I find it always fascinating to learn something new every single day." THE EXPERIMENT Several coaching clients turned up stressed. Powering on with energy, but it was showing in their reactions. Bernhard asked about their mornings. Several had no routine at all. So he set them a two-week experiment. "After two weeks they came to me and said: Bernhard, wow, that is really amazing. It changed so much of what I'm doing and how I feel on that day." Not ninety minutes. Ten or fifteen. "When you run out of your home in the morning completely stressed, I can promise you that your day won't get less stressful, rather the opposite." "But when you find yourself again in the morning, when you're grounded, when you are yourself, your resilience will increase massively." YOUR TURN Start today. Not next week. Ten minutes. Run it for two weeks, then assess. Did anything change? And write in. Bernhard would like to share listeners' morning routines on the podcast. HANA'S ARTICLE: hanakabelegala.substack.com/p/screw-your-efficient-mornings HANA ON LINKEDIN: linkedin.com/in/hanakabelegala LINKS: bernhardkerres.com | roleplays.ai #MorningRoutine #Rituals #Leadership #Coaching #Resilience #Coffee

3. 

   15 Sept 2026

   A Summer Like in My Childhood - And What I'm Taking Back to Work

   It's back to school. After a real break - from the podcast and from the busyness - Bernhard returns with a summer that felt like childhood, and three things that made it so good. "When my friends ask about my summer, I say it was a summer like in my childhood. An absolute dream." ONE - NATURE Morning workouts became boots on and up the mountain, or an hour kayaking on a glass-flat lake. No drives, no planning - just step outside. Back in Vienna, he misses it. The trees here sit between houses. There's a simple exercise anyone can try: look at a tree for 40 seconds. It calms you down, and there's research behind it. For Bernhard, nature is also part of the spiritual component of a morning ritual - something we rarely think about, and often need. TWO - NO COMMITMENTS Waking without an alarm. Refusing to put anything in the diary. Some mornings meant another hour of sleep, some a book, some a hike, some just coffee in the sun. "That gave me the chance to be much closer to myself. Normally my body has to function around my busy life. This summer it was the other way around - I listened to my body. When it needed rest, I rested. When the energy was pumping, I went for a swim." THREE - TINKERING Physical tinkering: baking a few cakes. (A small confession - though he's from Vienna, he baked his very first cake only a year ago.) Digital tinkering: a project with his friend Dietmar Muchitsch, founder of the Graz marketing agency wolke blau. The two got talking about the future of the web. Websites have a flaw - they are one-directional. You have to hunt for information, and no real conversation happens. So they built websites that talk back: a chatbot that holds a conversation with visitors, with strong analytics behind it that show what people are actually looking for, which questions the site answers, and which it doesn't. Try it at pausenlos.ai or on bernhardkerres.com - the chatbot there knows a little more than the page itself. WHAT COMES BACK TO WORK With Graz tomorrow, Wales next week, then Germany, the busy life resumes. But one practice carries over: every two months, Bernhard keeps a week completely free - a creative week. Nature, no commitments, no expectations about what to produce, and space to tinker, whether with technology, cakes, art, or writing. It refreshes him more than almost anything else. "I'm grateful for a summer like in my childhood. And grateful that I can create and work with many of you." LINKS: bernhardkerres.com | pausenlos.ai #Coaching #Leadership #Wellbeing #CreativeTime #BackToSchool

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

1 ratings

Spotify

4.6 / 5

7 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 24 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

25

Social presence

0

YouTube

0

Engagement

60

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