About Me
I am Barbara Legat-Kasel — Mental Fitness & Resilience Coach, author, and founder of Aspire Academy.
For more than three decades, I have worked in high-performance environments — across international business, elite sports, and leadership contexts. I support leaders, professionals, athletes, and teams who carry responsibility, pressure, and expectations — and who understand that sustainable success requires more than skills and strategy. It requires above all inner stability.
My Journey
My professional foundation My career is rooted in international corporate environments. For decades, I worked across global sales, creative buying, leadership dynamics, and complex organizational systems — building markets, managing international supplier networks, negotiating at executive level, developing assortments, and shaping commercial strategies in the fashion and textile industry. As an international fashion buyer, I operated at the intersection of creativity and performance: translating trends into business results, balancing budgets with vision, navigating fast production cycles, and carrying responsibility for revenue, margins, and long-term partnerships across Europe and beyond.
The Method Behind the Approach
My work is not built on one method — it’s built on perspective.
I understand performance from three angles that rarely exist in one place:
🔹 the strategic perspective of international business and leadership
🔹 the scientific perspective of neuroscience, behaviour and identity
🔹 and the lived perspective of emotional resilience and human capacity
This combination is the foundation of the results my clients experience.
I don’t work on performance from one dimension — I work on the full system that drives it.
My certifications in NLP, neuroscience-based coaching and positive psychology give me a strong methodological foundation — but the real impact comes from applying them in a way that shifts how a person thinks, leads and feels from the inside out.
My background in international commercial leadership taught me how people operate in environments of pressure, speed and complexity.
My background in mental performance and competitive sports taught me how the body influences the mind — and how confidence is built, sustained and recovered.
And my lived resilience taught me how emotional honesty and inner safety change the way we show up — in performance, in leadership and in life.
Every client — individual or organisational — benefits from this integration.
Not a motivational boost.
Not a temporary high.
But a shift that strengthens who they are at their core.
My philosophy
We train our bodies to stay strong —
but most people never train the mind that has to hold pressure, responsibility, emotion and performance.
And yet mental fitness is what determines how we lead, how we perform and how we cope —
especially when life gets difficult.
I don’t believe that real strength comes from ignoring emotions or pretending nothing affects us.
Real strength comes from understanding how the mind, the nervous system and identity work together —
and from building inner stability that doesn’t collapse when pressure rises.
Mental fitness combines the body, the mind and identity — including:
- How the nervous system responds to pressure and uncertainty
- How thoughts and self-belief shape decisions, behaviour and performance
- How emotions influence clarity, communication and confidence
- How subconscious patterns determine whether we grow, lead or hold ourselves back
- How visualisation and goal-setting create a mental blueprint that drives behaviour and long-term success — not wishful thinking, but strategic self-direction
Mental fitness is not motivation.
It’s not about suppression, toughness or pretending.
It’s the inner infrastructure that allows high achievers to perform, lead and live sustainably —
Mental fitness isn’t just motivation –
it’s about giving the brain and nervous system what they need to grow, achieve and expand without losing balance.
Let’s build the inner strength that makes performance sustainable.
- 1:! High-Performance Mentoring
- Corporate & Leadership Programs