TL;DR: Marc Engel runs The Third Space out of Bangkok, where he helps founders and creative leaders find the sweet spot between performance and relationships. We got into the day his old career stopped meaning anything to him, which happened while he was sitting in front of a Bloomberg terminal after a breakup and realized he didn’t care about any of it. We also got into the line he now builds his whole practice on, “many things that show up as a strategy problem are a chemistry problem in disguise,” and the two assessments he built to measure the part of a team you can’t see. Worth the watch if you run a business and you can feel that the thing slowing you down sits underneath the process you keep trying to fix.
🎥 Watch the full conversation above. Subscribe to catch every episode.
Outline
(01:09) – Marc names what he actually does, and it isn’t what his clients think they’re hiring him for
(02:14) – The appreciation game with a 170-person team in China, and the woman who ended up in tears
(04:56) – “Stop carrying the system and start to catalyze it.” The one line he’d put the whole practice on
(05:36) – The three levels a team moves through: the individual, the team, the organization
(10:06) – A leader begged him for another process workshop. He spent the morning on something else entirely
(12:13) – Why he says a strategy problem is often a chemistry problem wearing a disguise
(22:42) – The breakup, the Bloomberg terminal, and the day the old career stopped mattering
(25:16) – “Corporate with heart.” The three words a studio manager used that named his whole gift
(36:20) – Tarzan. The visibility exercise he was mortified by, and the moment a facilitator said “there you are”
(43:45) – The two tools he built to put language and numbers on the part of a team you can’t see
(52:50) – The bigger vision, and why Bangkok is the small version of it
My takeaways
The problem people bring him is almost never the problem. A leader came to Marc at the start of the year worn down. She’d been running workshops on her team’s broken process for over a year, bringing in facilitators, booking sessions, and nothing moved. She wanted one more process workshop. Marc said let’s try something else first, spent the morning on connection instead, and got people to say the thing they’d been sitting on. Then he left. The next day he asked what happened.
“Within two hours in the afternoon, we were able to resolve that issue.”
A year stuck on a process that sorted itself out in two hours once the room could talk to each other.
Marc works mostly with founders who are performance people, ambitious and driven and good at what they do. That preference takes them a long way, and then it hits a ceiling. What he’s learned to look for underneath the ceiling is the part nobody wrote on the whiteboard.
“Many things that show up as a strategy problem are a chemistry problem in disguise. Just look a level deeper.”
We talk about this constantly at Sacred Business Flow, just aimed at one person instead of a whole company. The Substack that won’t grow. The offer that won’t launch. The surface problem is rarely the real one, and the real one is usually a level down, in the part you’ve been avoiding.
The work started with a breakup and a Bloomberg terminal. Marc had a good career in asset management, with good people and good money, the structured path a Swiss upbringing sets you on. Then a personal relationship ended and knocked him sideways, and he remembers the day like it was yesterday. He was sitting in front of the financial charts, looking at the numbers.
“I was looking at it and I was like, wow, I couldn’t care less. That feels so empty. That feels so meaningless in that moment.”
He called the pain a mirror, a clear judge of what’s worth paying attention to and what isn’t. I know that room. For me it was a health scare instead of a breakup, and it was snowing, and I was asking him the same question he was asking himself: why am I doing this. Different situation, same question. And once you open that one, what do I actually want, there’s almost no going back.
Security turned out to be mostly a story he was telling himself. Growing up in Switzerland, Marc said, everything is set up for you. Follow the classic path, get educated, and things generally turn out fine. That comes with a promised safety on every level, financial and otherwise, so walking away from it meant walking away from the thing he’d been taught would keep him safe. In his third year a huge client dropped inside two weeks and the old fear came right back up. And still, this is what he found.
“It was also interesting to notice how much of that on some level is an illusion. I actually don’t need that much of it.”
Carolina and I both felt this one. We put our safety in the job, the apartment, the country, the next number. When you go your own way, that sense of safety has to start coming from you instead of from the setup around you. Marc said it lands as less risky than the mind claims, because once you’re honest about what you want, it starts to feel like the only path you can walk anyway.
Even the confident ones are still learning to be seen. I asked Marc about visibility and he laughed and said he’s always loved the spotlight, no issue there. Then he told the Tarzan story. In an early coach training, a colleague handed him the quality of Tarzan to embody, loud and jumping around, and half of him was mortified while the other half knew it was exactly what he needed. He played with it. It was terrible at first. Then, in the debrief, he was the first to speak, interrupting, going all in.
“One of the facilitators, she said, oh, Marc, hey, there you are. Suddenly, I was there.”
There you are. He’s five and a half years in, running workshops and publishing frameworks on Substack, and he still calls being seen a path he’s on. That’s the honest version of visibility, and it’s the one worth trusting.
One question to sit with
Marc works on the part of a company nobody measures, how the people in it actually connect, and he says it’s often the highest leverage point in the business and the last place anyone looks. So here’s the question to sit with. The thing that’s slowing you down right now, the one you keep trying to fix at the surface, what would you find if you looked one level underneath it?
Watch the full conversation above. If Marc’s way of seeing teams lands for you, his Substack, The Space Between, is where he writes it all out, and he built two short assessments to show you where you stand. Both are linked below.
About Marc Engel
Marc Engel is the founder of The Third Space, where he helps founders and creative leaders find the sweet spot between performance and relationships, what he calls team chemistry. Originally from Switzerland and now based in Bangkok, he spent his early career leading a team in asset management before a turning point moved him into coaching and leadership development. He writes a Substack newsletter called The Space Between about his frameworks and the stories behind them. He’s also built two assessments: the Team Chemistry Map, which scores nine dimensions of a team’s chemistry, and an individual leader assessment built around three “games,” the inner game, the relational game, and the cultural game. You can find both, and everything else he does, through his Substack.
This essay was originally published on sacredbusiness.com on July 24, 2026. You can find the canonical version, along with related essays on sacred business and nervous system work, there.
