Max Friedstein — English, coaching, and the work underneath

Communication is the whole of it.

I teach English to professionals, coach teachers and coaches, and work one to one with people who want to understand why they do what they do. It sounds like several jobs. It's one.

Life is speaking to you — are you listening?

Max Friedstein

Based in Wrocław, Poland. Working in person locally and online with clients across Europe and further afield.

If we want to change existing conditions, we must first transform ourselves, which means that we must become aware of our own actions, thoughts and feelings in everyday life.

Krishnamurti

Why an English tutor also reads tarot

Because the thing I'm actually working with is the same in every case. How a person speaks is downstream of how they think. How they think is downstream of what they believe about themselves, most of which they've never examined and much of which isn't theirs.

An advanced learner who freezes in meetings doesn't have a vocabulary problem. A teacher whose lessons feel flat isn't short of technique. Someone who keeps rebuilding the same relationship isn't unlucky. In each case there's a pattern running underneath, and it's legible once you know how to look.

Four things I keep returning to, and how they show up in the work:

  • EducationLearning changes people or it's just information transfer. I'd rather do the first thing.
  • LeadershipYou can't lead others past a place you haven't gone yourself. Most leadership problems are self-knowledge problems wearing a suit.
  • FuturismThe skills that matter are shifting fast. Fluency, judgement, and the ability to think for yourself are getting more valuable, not less.
  • ConsciousnessNine years studying how internal states shape external reality. This isn't decoration on the other three — it's the ground they stand on.

How I work

The principle underneath everything I do: life is reflecting you back to yourself. The difficulty in the room, the situation that keeps recurring, the person who gets under your skin — these aren't only obstacles. They're showing you something about yourself you haven't yet had a way of seeing.

This only works if you look kindly. Honest self-examination done harshly turns into self-criticism, and people who are criticising themselves stop looking. So the work is honest and compassionate at once, or it isn't the work.

An example from my own teaching. A corporate class here in Wrocław was giving off the sense that they already knew everything and had nothing left to learn — and it got under my skin. When I finally looked at it properly, I found I'd stopped learning too. I'd become absorbed in producing materials and had stopped questioning my own methodology. They were reflecting it straight back at me. Once I changed, the room changed.

In practice, that means sessions aren't only about technique. We work on the thing you came for — the presentation, the fluency, the difficulty with a colleague — and alongside it, on what that difficulty is showing you. Both together. The first without the second doesn't hold for long.

It applies to me as much as to anyone I work with, which is the only reason I can ask it of you.

Teacher, student. Student, teacher. There is no other.

Ways to work with me

Different doors, same house. Most people come through one and stay for a while before they notice the others.

Conversational English for professionals

B1 and above · online or in person in Wrocław

You get by in English. You're understood. But it doesn't yet feel like yours, and under pressure — the meeting, the client call, the moment you actually need it — something closes.

That's rarely a grammar problem. It's the thoughts you've had about your English so many times they've stopped being audible. We work on both: the language, and the thinking that's shaping what you're able to say with it.

CELTA and TEFL Level 5 qualified. Currently teaching at Berlitz Wrocław. Twenty five-star reviews on Preply.

Coaching for teachers, coaches, and leaders

One to one and small group · online

For people whose work is other people. You're good at it. You've hit the edge of what technique alone will give you, and you can feel that the next thing is not another method — it's a deeper read on what's actually happening in the room.

I bring nine years of training in The Science of Acting and the holographic approach to transformation, translated into something you can use on Monday morning. This is practical work: how to hear what a person isn't saying, how to stop taking their resistance personally, how to hold a room without gripping it.

Suits department heads and school owners as readily as independent coaches. No prior familiarity with any of this required.

One-to-one soul development

Longer-term mentoring · by conversation first

The deepest of the work. For people at a turning point who want to stop circling the same terrain — to see the beliefs and patterns that keep producing the same situations, and to develop the discipline of thinking for themselves.

It isn't fixing. Nothing here assumes you're broken. It's the slow, unglamorous, genuinely rewarding practice of coming to know yourself well enough to be your own guide.

Clients have worked with me for anything from three months to several years. We'd start with a conversation about whether it's the right fit.

Energy healing

Reiki and breathwork · in person and long-distance

For when something is stuck and talking about it hasn't moved it. Sessions work with the body rather than around it, which is often where the material actually lives.

Usui Reiki Master, Shamanic Reiki, and Core-Clearing Breathwork. I'll tell you plainly what a session involves before you book one — no mystique required, and none imposed.

Tarot and oracle readings

Single readings and longer mentorship · online

I don't use the cards to predict. I use them as a mirror — a way of getting a look at the thing you already know and haven't let yourself say yet.

People come for clarity at a crossroads, or because their own inner signal has gone quiet and they want help hearing it again. You leave with your own reading of your situation, not mine.

How I got here

Max dancing on a beach
Max at a temple in Bali
Mount Kailash, Tibet
Ponderosa pines outside Flagstaff, Arizona
Dance, then travel, then Kailash, then the pines outside Flagstaff.

In 2017 my partner's mother asked me a simple question: why do you dance?

I was a professional dancer. Years of training, money, sweat. And I had nothing. "Because I do" was the best I could manage, and it didn't survive contact with the question.

That same summer my knees gave out from pushing a body I'd been using as an instrument of ambition rather than living in. Both things landed at once: I didn't know why I was doing what I was doing, and I couldn't keep doing it.

What followed was less a plan than a fall. A Vipassana retreat. Travel. And in an Ayurvedic clinic in southern India, meeting Dr. Helen Mosimann-Kogan, who was living in a way I hadn't known was available — she knew why she thought what she thought. That was the whole of it. She was awake, and I was not.

I came to this work as a former professional avoider.

Nine years of training with Helen and The White Rabbit Reveals followed, in The Science of Acting and the holographic approach to transformation. The central idea is simple to state and takes a lifetime to work with: your external reality mirrors your internal state.

Then I did something that surprised everyone, including me. I went back to university in Flagstaff, Arizona, to study ecology — two years measuring how Utah juniper survives drought. I'd expected academia to pull me away from all of this. Instead it gave me the ground under it.

The juniper grows seventy-five feet down before it makes any real progress upward. Nothing visible happens for a long time. I recognised the shape of that immediately, and it's the honest description of what this work asks: a long unglamorous period below the surface, followed by growth that looks sudden to anyone who wasn't watching.

I've since taught this in mentoring rooms, in energy work, and — for the last two years — in English lessons, where it turns out to be startlingly useful. If you've never quite resonated with woo-woo spaces but you're still looking for something with depth in it, that's where I stand too.

Background

Language teaching

  • CELTA, Cambridge University 2025
  • English Instructor, Berlitz Wrocław 2025–
  • TEFL Level 5, The TEFL Academy 2024

Transformation & coaching

  • Pathway Navigator, The White Rabbit Reveals 2024–
  • Licensed Consultant, The White Rabbit Reveals 2020–
  • The Two Year Program, TWRR 2020–21
  • The AZOTH Key, TWRR 2018–19

Healing & academic

  • Usui Reiki Master, G.N. Meditation Center, Nepal 2018
  • Reiki II, Arati Healing Center, Thailand 2018
  • Shamanic Reiki, The Sanctuary, NY 2017
  • 200hr Yoga Teacher, Brahma Yoga, India 2018
  • B.S. Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, NAU 2024
  • B.F.A. Dance, minor Gender Studies, NYU Tisch 2017

What clients say

Across English lessons, mentorship programmes, and energy work. Different rooms, same reports.

English lessons

Max is a wonderful person and teacher. He puts in an incredible amount of effort and designs the lessons creatively, individually, and with a lot of passion. You learn and improve your English with a lot of joy and, above all, almost effortlessly.

Cheyenne · Switzerland

Max is a great English teacher, but I'd rather learn from him how to live more beautifully. He's a kind soul with an open mind, friendly and deeply empathetic. Time spent with him leaves you a better version of yourself.

Kinga · Poland

Highly professional, and he points out my weaknesses precisely, which has helped me improve a great deal.

Greyson · Preply

Mentoring and coaching

The past nine months have been the most transformational times of my life and also the hardest. Any time I felt unclear in myself, my sessions with Max helped me understand why, what was beneath the surface, and what I have been unable to see in the past.

A. · Massachusetts

He shone light on patterns, beliefs, and ways of thinking that I had been blind to my entire life. I've experienced so much inner freedom through this work, and that has been possible by doing it with someone so grounded, supportive, and insightful.

M. · Hawaii

Working with Max has shown me that I am not broken, that I do not need to be fixed or cured, and that I already belong. I belong just by being, by belonging to my true self.

R. · Netherlands

Energy work and readings

Max's understanding of energetics and his shamanic abilities are a refuge to me at times when I forget who I am. The thing I appreciate most is his way of empowering me through this process, always bringing things back to me and my life in the here and now.

I. · Australia

He balances the act of deep spiritual channelling with his capacity to remain grounded, present, and available for what his client is moving through.

C. · Pennsylvania

Getting a reading from Max is getting an outside look into your soul, and advice that is soft and gentle and guides you to a more aligned path.

H. · Arizona

Start with a conversation.

Tell me where you're at and what you're after. If I'm the right person you'll know quickly, and if I'm not I'll say so and point you somewhere better.

Already working with me? Book your next session.

Max Friedstein · Wrocław, Poland maxfriedstein.com