Robert Vilkelis
Robert VilkelisNLP Master Trainer, Speaker Coach, Educational Consultant, Journalist

Who am I?

I’m a speaker-coach entrepreneur, published journalist and UCL graduate based in London, UK. You’re likely to see me around delivering seminars on strategic communication, interviewing figures in EdTech and pursuing my career in designing and delivering transformative professional development training. My native habitat is Prêt à Manger, where I hunt for indigenous filter coffee.

I’m the co-founder of Masters of Impact, a strategic communications company that rapidly shifts what you do as a communicator through transforming the mindset of how you approach speaking to people. On a regular basis, I work with people to enhance their public speaking, leadership and conversational communication styles.

Passionate about learning and teaching, I’ve also developed a unique coaching methodology, Commitment Inquiry, to help you recognise, align on and pursue what’s important to you. You can learn about its long-term efficacy in my dissertation, “Shifting the mindsets behind students’ wellbeing: evaluating the efficacy of a second-order change coaching intervention in higher education”. If you’re interested in copy of my research, be sure to send me an email! 

  • Reflective and exploratory writer
  • Strategic communication skills trainer
  • Life-long learner

We live in a time of innovation, uncertainty and rapid transformation. Amidst changing tides, who we need to be are individuals who can jump up and ride the waves, not be caught within them. What I stand for is a world where we retain our natural confidence; a world where our decisions are in line with our direction; a world where we can acknowledge critics, yet not be held down by them.

Who I strive to be is a catalyst for self-expression: I strive to contribute to the lives of others so they can, in turn, contribute to the lives of others. In the age of limitless connection, happiness is a function of communication. Opportunities for misunderstanding and resentment emerge the more we withhold and close ourselves; possibilities for closeness and compassion grow the more we share ourselves without fear. Through rediscovering our “natural confidence” through shedding our learned doubt, we create our safety to share and to be heard.

Remember that kid who wasn’t necessarily the best with people his age, knew lots of assorted trivia, and was too smart for his own good? Add Italian and Lithuanian heritage and a multicultural upbringing in America, France and the UK, and that was me growing up.

I’m an only child. Throughout my childhood, this made me great with adults at the expense of being less cooperative with the kids around me.

“They’re so immature. Why can’t they be more like me?” you’d hear me complain.

It’s ironic that rather than conforming to fit in, I demanded that they “rise up” to my standards. Needless to say, this approach wasn’t very successful – you can’t persuade people to be like you by invalidating them. I was judgemental and frustrated, but I thought, “This is just how the world is.”

It changed for me when I was 16, when I flew to California for the summer to study coaching and change management, in the form of Neuro-Linguistic Programming. What I discovered was a world where learning wasn’t about memorisation, but about application; a place where having peers wasn’t about shared “date of manufacture,” but kinship; an environment where my judgement turned to curiosity.

I returned to California each year until 2016, when I was officially accredited as an NLP Master Trainer and Master Practitioner. Since then, I’ve taken my expertise to form my strategic communications company, Masters of Impact, and gone on to work in the capacity of an educational consultant at my university whilst still being an undergraduate.

I carry my mission to teach, to inspire and to awaken as how I choose to honour what I’ve learned and what’s been given to me by giving back to others for what I’ve been honoured to learn.

What? Did you think I was only just about personal development and professional writing?

I’m an avid videogamer with a love for meaningful, engaging story. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Undertale are among my most beloved titles. The worlds they weave, the stories they tell and the experience that has me returning for hundreds of hours, again and again.

I’m a linguist with a passion for languages. Italian, Swedish, Hungarian, Greek and Japanese are among my favourites, even when they can be cruel to an English-speaker. The greatest irony? My greatest passion used to be my greatest nemesis; I hated languages for 12 years and suffered through 7 years of French and 5 years of Spanish before spontaneously growing the desire to learn the world’s voices when I was 17. Currently, I have an ongoing 1,630+ day learning streak on the language app Duolingo. I also love learning writing systems on the side: from alphabets to runic scripts to syllabaries, I am fluent in 10, with my favourites being the Georgian alphabet and the Japanese katakana syllabary.

My love of videogames and linguistics further combine with my curiosity for culture, history and architecture to inspire the development of my own world and its own language. As a world-builder, I like to take what I learn and reinvent it in cool and exciting ways. Curious to know more? Stay tuned!