Melek booked in through Calendly. I had seen her on someone else's podcast and thought: there is a story here I need to hear. We did this one remotely via SquadCast, which felt a little odd for a project called 50 Lunches. But within ten minutes I had forgotten that.
She grew up in a village of twenty people in Bulgaria, moved to Chicago as a child, got recruited by Facebook out of nowhere, and rose to lead a team in people operations with full autonomy and unlimited creative scope. On paper, the dream. And for a while, it was.
What burnout actually sounds like
COVID hit. Facebook got busier than it had ever been. Melek was working fourteen to sixteen hour days, alone, on Zoom, with no human contact. Something broke. She told her manager: my soul is dying. A little bit more every day. Her manager didn't have much to say to that. Melek didn't either. She just knew it was true.
She went on sabbatical. Then refused a better Facebook offer to go back to California. Then just kept traveling. Three months became three years. The mini-retirement that wasn't supposed to happen.
The garden in Egypt
She ended up in Dahab, a small town on the Red Sea in the Sinai peninsula. She described it as the Bali of the Middle East. She was there for a month and a half, deliberately choosing the most uncomfortable options she could find: a singing workshop, hypnotherapy, things she had never heard of and had no reason to trust.
The one that changed everything was called authentic relating. She nearly left halfway through. She felt emotionally naked. But she stayed, and in the final exercise something happened that she couldn't name at the time. A stranger understood what it was like to be her. Not what she did or what she thought. What it was actually like to be her, from the inside.
She said she had been carrying the experience of being herself entirely alone her whole life. Even with friends, even with people who loved her, she had never felt truly seen. That afternoon, for the first time, she did. The relief was so profound that she built her life around recreating it for others.
Harmony Lab
A few months after Dahab, she rented an apartment in Bulgaria and invited people to an authentic relating workshop. She was terrified nobody would come. Thirty-five people showed up. She took it as a sign.
Three years on, Harmony Lab runs workshops for corporate teams across five continents. She works in South Africa now, watching colleagues who have never spoken to each other discover they have everything in common. The quality of your work determines the quality of the rest of your life, she says. Eight hours a day is too much of your life to spend in a toxic environment.
The fear that doesn't go away
What surprised me most: Melek is nervous before every single workshop. Even now. Even when teams are contractually obligated to show up. She worries nobody will participate. Nobody will like it. None of that has ever happened, not once across hundreds of workshops. But the fear comes anyway.
She had a clean way of framing it. Staying small meant being safe at some point in our lives. The inner critic is not wrong, exactly. It is just late. It was useful once and now it is not, and we have to consciously tell ourselves: I am now safe to be big. I had the exact same conversation with myself about coaching. Every client session, same fear. Every time it disappears the moment I am in the room. She described it identically. Once she is in the workshop, she is in flow. The fear and the calling occupy the same space.
How to actually build real connections
The last third of the conversation got practical. I gave her a hypothetical coaching client: someone who struggles with surface-level relationships, lacks self-love, and wants a few deep friendships rather than a wide circle. She started with values. Not as an abstract exercise but as a filtering mechanism. If your highest value is freedom and you are living in a rigid nine-to-five, you will push away aligned people before a conversation even starts. You can't attract what you are not living. Start there.
Then she talked about being the village. She moved back to Chicago in her twenties with no friends. She started hosting dinner every Wednesday: potluck, board games, anyone welcome. At first almost nobody came. She kept doing it. Three years later, twenty people every Wednesday. She didn't wait for community to find her. She became the community first.
And then the empathy game. A simple exercise from authentic relating: share something real for two minutes, then your partner repeats your exact words back to you. Not a paraphrase. Your words, in their body. Hearing yourself through someone else is unexpectedly powerful. You witness yourself. You feel heard in a way that most conversations never produce.
