Anca Zinculescu (assistant teacher)
“We may not be responsible for the world that created our minds, but we can take responsibility for the mind with which we create our world.” – Gabor Maté
What inspires you to be an assistant teacher?
I was invited into this role and I said yes without hesitation, because it deeply resonates with where I am in my own journey. I know what it feels like to be in the Coaching and Counselling Year 1 programme: the discomfort, the breakthroughs, the moments where everything starts to shift. Being close to that process again, from the other side, feels like a privilege. I also believe that real learning happens in a community and I want to contribute to that community. This isn’t just about giving back but it’s also about my own continued growth. I learn best by being in the room, being present and staying curious. That’s what inspires me.
About me
My path has been anything but linear. I spent many years at the European Space Agency in project management, and before that I worked in marketing and web design. On the outside, my life looked structured and purposeful. On the inside, I was going through something that I didn’t yet have words for. Becoming a mother cracked me open in ways I wasn’t prepared for. That personal experience and the slow and painful process of finding myself again, eventually, led me here. I launched A2Z Coaching in May 2024, specialising in matrescence: the profound identity transformation that women go through when they become mothers. I work with mothers in Amsterdam and online, in English and Romanian, combining coaching and counselling approaches. I’m a mother of two, and I am still very much in my own process. That’s not something I hide, it’s something I consider part of what makes this work so important and my support real.
Why have you chosen the ACC and what did the training bring you?
I chose this training because I was looking for an approach that matched how I naturally see people: with curiosity, without judgment and with a genuine belief in their capacity to grow. What I found was exactly that, and more. The training gave me a framework that validated what I instinctively felt about the coaching relationship: that the most powerful thing you can do for someone is hold space and ask the right questions, rather than offer answers. It also gave me a lot of myself back. Working through the programme while simultaneously doing my own personal work meant that the two fed each other in unexpected ways. It shaped not just how I coach, but how I show up as a mother, as a partner, as a person.
Who is my hero and why?
My hero is my friend Gia, whom I met during my training programme with ACC. She didn’t make the news and she doesn’t have a platform, but what she did takes a kind of courage that I find extraordinary. At one of the hardest moments of her life, she chose to give her son the freedom to decide whether to stay with his father or come with her. She knew it might break her heart. It did. But she trusted both herself and her son enough to let him make that choice, even when every part of her must have wanted to hold on. As a mother, I cannot imagine a harder thing to do to love someone so completely that you put their autonomy above your own pain. That, to me, is what real strength looks like. Not the absence of fear, but the willingness to act with love even when it costs you everything.
