About
Chilina Hills (pronounce Kilina)
Speaker, trainer, coach for over 35 years, I help leaders and professionals become influential communicators and inspiring speakers so they can get the results they really want.
Origins
I‘m a baby boomer and am the result of my English father meeting my French mother on a boat going to South Africa. However, I was born in Paris and brought up in Provence, on the Mediterranean (that was wonderful), and spent all my summers on the British Channel (I didn’t mind at all, my grandmother spoiled me silly!).
At age 13, my parents decided to move to Aix-en-Provence, a university town, in anticipation of my future studies…
… it didn’t work out :
I hated school, and dropped out at sixteen to be an actress…(no comments please) and ran away a couple of times to convince my parents I was serious about not going back to school.
And soon, I had to earn a living…
Necessity coupled with curiosity (and a little audacity) allowed me to explore a wide variety of activities between Paris, London, and even Los Angeles: perfume representative, advertising space sales person, model, secretary, radio presenter, real estate agent, bartender, legal translator (yes, with no diplomas!), interpreter, public relations officer, teacher of English, teacher of French…and I am probably missing a few. So I « surfed » from job to job from 1969 to 1984 when finally I met the field of activity that has been my passion for all these years.
Let me reassure you a little, I did get some training! I left Unesco where I had just secured an indeterminate contract (which many envied me), and went to Saskatchewan Canada (then the Canadian hub for behavioral sciences) to be trained in the art of communication and soft skills. On my return to France, I took my first steps at IBM delivering communication seminars (they did not know these were my first steps – thanks IBM !)
And of course, my curiosity and thirst for learning kept me abreast of the research and developments in the field (from transactional analysis to neuro-linguistic programming, neurosciences and quantum physics… ). Thanks to all those years of experience, of gratifying successes, and painful – but enriching – errors, I was finally able to make my own contributions!
I am very lucky: I love what I do because I love helping people grow and seeing them succeed. I’m even luckier: I love travelling and my work takes me all over the planet (well during this last year my travelling has been mainly virtual of course!)
Below are some of the organisations I have had the pleasure to work with :