Surviving Torture, Inspirational Journeys, and Receiving an MBE: A Discussion With Kolbassia Haoussou MBE

This week’s episode of Coaching Uncaged is here! 🙌💥

Back in early February, before the challenges presented by the pandemic and subsequent lockdown, we recorded a new series of in-person podcast episodes with a handful of our brilliant alumni!

It hadn’t felt like quite the right time to share them, but having shared the first two episodes in the last fortnight, here’s the third episode of our bonus series titled “Alumni Conversations”.

In this episode, Animas Centre Director Robert Stephenson is joined by coach and co-founder of the campaigning network Survivors Speak OUT Kolbassia Haoussou MBE.

Kolbassia shares his incredibly challenging, but deeply inspirational journey of fleeing persecution and torture in central Africa and the challenges of being a refugee in Britain, including his time spent in immigration detention and its subsequent effects on his mental health.

He also shares the support that he received from the charity organisation Freedom From Torture during this time, the impact that it had, as well as his own deep-rooted desire to help others that has allowed him to be where he is today - training as a coach, giving back to other torture survivors in his role now working at Freedom From Torture and being awarded an MBE as a result of his work helping support those that have suffered torture and sexual violence.

Kolbassia also touches on his experience of training as a coach, what it has added to his current role with Freedom From Torture, as well as his ultimate goal of taking his coaching full-time and where he sees himself making an impact on the world.

Find out more about Kolbassia and his inspirational work here:

https://www.freedomfromtorture.org/what-we-do/how-were-run/structure-and-people

And find him on Twitter here:

https://twitter.com/haoussou

We hope that you find this episode inspiring and don’t forget next week’s episode will be back to it’s usual Tuesday evening schedule!