The Sican Network: partners
Luana Landolina,
the coach of Sicani Villages team
From native Agrigento to Siena
from Galicia to Cairo and Lithuania
to “train” in winning strategies
Every self-respecting team certainly has a good coach. Agrigento by birth, cosmopolitan by vocation, Luana Landolina is the young coach of Sicani Villages. Thirty-seven years old, she studied in Siena where she earned a bachelor’s degree in Linguistic Mediation; then, the passion for Neurolinguistic Programming, studies with Claudio Belotti and Roberto Cerè, pioneers of Coaching in Italy; then, the experience in Spain where she lived several years, especially in Galicia, for the refinement of her training. And, then, from the Iberian Peninsula to Egypt, to Cairo, where he lived five months and, subsequently, a few months in Lithuania for an assignment at the Italian Institute of Culture.
“With coaching,” says Luana Landolina, who is also vice president of the Agrigento Confcommercio Giovani, “I help create a shared unity among the different network partners. From how to present yourself and communicate the focus of your business, to strategies to develop your talents and improve your performance. Fundamental in my work is then unhinging depowering beliefs.” In short, that internal saboteur, that malevolent little voice that tells us: no, you can’t do it, in fact you never will!
“Sometimes,” Landolina says, “the depowering power is hidden in only seemingly innocuous ways of saying things, which lead us, for example, to say that we like something to death: but if it is a good thing, why should it make us die? One should say: this thing I like to live!”
And it is also to change the approach and learn how to get out of the comfort zone, where the reiteration of tried-and-true behavioral patterns is, in itself, reassuring, that the figure of the coach is crucial in a team that wants to achieve satisfactory goals.
“As far as the Sicani Villages network is concerned,” Landolina says, “the greatest difficulty is the dispersion of the various parties involved, over a fairly wide geographic area. Physically, it is difficult to meet all together, although fortunately with conference calls, technology comes to our aid. In my work, there are also customized online meetings that teach, among other things, how to overcome the possible difficulty of proposing to each other, using appropriate language. Meeting live is, however, fundamental and is always an occasion that stimulates the birth of collaborations and new initiatives. After the two days in Siculiana that saw the involvement of some 20 project partners, for example, several tourist packages were born as a result of the synergy of the different business and production realities. Among the initiatives resulting from the residential internship is Giuliana’s “Seggi fora” path, which emphasizes the habit in small towns of sitting down to chat or perform small domestic tasks, sitting on the doorstep: a custom that is very much liked by foreign tourists, but also by those who live in the chaos of the city, where most of the time one does not even know all the neighbors.”
The strength of this motivational approach, is its immediate validity: “Motivation and enthusiasm,” Landolina says, “are always needed, in any context. And what at first may be seen as a disadvantage, like being behind a certain type of approach that has never been tried before, has as the other side of the coin the advantage of having no precedent to compare with, of being the first to do that particular thing.”
Luana Landolina has been coach of Sicani Villages since 2020, a span of four years more than enough to give her the opportunity to get to know the salient features of the Sican character up close: “Those who have espoused this project,” she says, “really think they can make a difference and are aware of the importance in promoting the territory, the enhancement of its human capital. That’s why the first step of my work is to identify the values, share them with the various stakeholders in the group and develop the strategies necessary to achieve the goals.”
Text by Angela Mannino
