Meet the Professor: Anna Yulusova on Communication, Coaching, and the Mindset of a Champion

What do elite sport, executive coaching, and business communication have in common? For ESEI professor Anna Yulusova, they are all expressions of the same underlying principle: that how you connect with others determines how far you go.

Anna teaches ESEI’s Effective Business Communication course, bringing with her a professional background that few people in any classroom could match. We sat down with her to find out what drives her teaching, what she hopes her students take away, and how Anna herself, a three-time Russian kickboxing champion and Asian champion, ended up in Barcelona building a career in coaching.

A Life Built Across Disciplines

Anna was born in Russia and has lived in Barcelona for 25 years. Before becoming an educator and coach, she was a professional athlete with a record that spans three different sports. She began swimming at the age of two, with parents who were swimming coaches, and won her first competition at five. At 15, she transitioned to pentathlon, a discipline that combines five sports: running, swimming, shooting, rowing, and sailing, and became the USSR champion. She then moved into kickboxing, going on to win the Russian championship three times and the Asian championship.

That foundation in elite sport shapes everything Anna does today. Her academic path is equally wide-ranging: a double degree in psychology and international relations from Russia, followed by studies in Spanish, business and marketing in Barcelona, and eventually a ICF qualification in executive coaching. She also holds certifications in NLP and group coaching.

Before moving fully into coaching, Anna spent 12 years in the corporate world, working in International Development and later in Treasury with responsibility across more than 50 EMEA entities. Part of her role involved opening new offices across Eastern Europe and Turkey, giving her first-hand experience of how differently people work, communicate, and build trust depending on where they are from.

“I was the person who connected everything, like a bridge,” she says. It is a role she has carried into her teaching.

Two years ago, Anna stepped away from corporate life to launch her own executive coaching business, where she now focuses on self-leadership, elite performance, and what she calls the mindset of a champion. That coaching work is built directly on what she learned as an elite athlete: how to perform under pressure, how to build mental resilience, and how to maintain focus when conditions are difficult. “It is about how you can perform in crisis situations,” she says. “The mentality, the mindset that I bring from professional sport.” These are not skills that belong only to sport. They are skills that define leadership.

“It is all about self-leadership,” she says. “The mindset of a champion, adjusted to how you can be a better leader in your life.”

Teaching Communication That Actually Works

The course Anna teaches at ESEI centres on something that sounds straightforward but is often harder to teach than it seems: how to communicate effectively in a professional context.

Her approach is grounded in a core insight that she returns to repeatedly in the classroom. “The biggest thing in communication is not a message you try to communicate.It is how people receive your message.”

From that starting point, the course explores different communication styles, how to read the person in front of you, how to frame a message for different audiences, and how to present with impact. “We have to learn about our own communication style,” she explains. “So we could adjust to the other person’s communication style.” Students also work on understanding verbal, non-verbal, and para-verbal communication and how all three work together in practice.

Rather than working through theory in isolation, every topic in the course is anchored in real examples. Anna draws from her corporate career, her coaching work, and her athletic background to give students something concrete to hold onto. The class also analyses real communicators through real life examples, examining what makes certain people compelling and why.

“If you only give topics without real examples,” she says, “it does not work. You can Google everything now, but if you do not integrate it into something real, it stays abstract.”

The coursework pushes students to reflect on how they actually communicate day to day, not just in professional situations but with the people around them. “I always give them reflections on how they interact with the world, how they communicate with people who are in their lives daily,” Anna explains. The aim is to help them see themselves from a new angle and begin making deliberate adjustments.

From the Classroom to Real Life

Anna is candid about what she wants students to leave with. It is not a certificate or a set of frameworks. It is a shift in how they see and approach every conversation.

“I hope they start communicating better,” she says. “That they know the way they are communicating, that they see themselves from another perspective, and that they can adjust to other people.”

That adjustment piece matters. Many people default to communicating in the way that feels natural to them, without stopping to consider whether it is working for the person they are speaking to. Anna’s course asks students to flip that around.

She also noticed a pattern in how students sometimes approached the class: with so much anxiety about getting it right that they stopped themselves from trying at all. “They were sometimes frozen instead of playing.” Her advice for anyone starting the course is simple. “Be open. Do not take it too seriously. Play. You are in a safe environment. Use it.”

What She Brings to ESEI

ESEI has always placed value on faculty who bring real professional experience into the classroom rather than teaching in the abstract. Anna’s profile fits that philosophy closely. She is not just an academic who studies communication; she is someone who has had to master it across genuinely high-stakes environments, from finance boardrooms to international offices to elite competition.

For students in her course, that combination means learning not just what effective communication looks like in theory, but why it matters and how to build it as a skill over time.

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