The founder
Ilja T. Gull
Founder of Leverage by FOCUS, creator of the FOCUS method and the Quiet Weight Index. Based in Switzerland.
- 25+ years in sales, business development and leadership in technology and B2B software, with SAP, IBM, Microsoft and iLovePDF.
- Since 2009 studying human behaviour, identity and how people actually make the decisions that shape their lives.
- Commercial, not clinical: a sounding board for entrepreneurs, business owners and senior executives.
For more than 25 years I sold, negotiated and built business in technology and B2B software, working directly as an employee and as a freelancer with SAP, IBM, Microsoft and iLovePDF, to name a few. Brand-name companies. Great income. I know the golden cage from the inside out: the status and security that were supposed to feel like arrival.
They didn’t.
Working like a maniac for years, I built exactly the career the playbook told me to want, using a playbook that turned out to be outdated. On top of that, I was running on an operating system that was never designed for me. I don’t know what your biggest goal has been. Mine was landing a job at SAP and climbing the ladder there, which was beyond anything I’d anticipated, especially having started out as a chef and having nearly dropped out of school to begin with.
Not long after I reached it, I noticed the quiet thing nobody warns you about, and few people talk about: hitting the goal didn’t deliver what I’d been working towards for all those years. The drive that got me there kept running, but the target it was pointed at had gone hollow. Nothing was wrong. And yet something was clearly off. Devoting years to a single target, then realising it doesn’t bring the peace and satisfaction you’d banked on, is a hard thing to sit with. “What’s next?” was the question that haunted me for years.
A lot of people read that as ingratitude, a phase, or a problem to be fixed. I didn’t buy it. My instinct said the restlessness was a signal, not a defect, and that the real issue wasn’t a lack of ambition but a strategy that had quietly gone out of date. The map that got me here would not get me further.
That question, why achievement without alignment produces emptiness, and how you rebuild drive on something that is genuinely yours, became the work. It started in 2012 as a first beta I called the Mindset Index. In 2013 it became the Mental Weight Index, and in 2025 I renamed it Quiet Weight, because “quiet” pokes the ego less than “mental”. A set of simple yet powerful questions that convert the unknown into the known, and make the invisible weight visible: the outdated beliefs and inherited definitions of success that keep high-capacity people pointing enormous drive at empty targets. Again and again.
Quiet Weight is the foundation of FOCUS. Everyone carries some of it. Most of the time you do not see what needs to change, or that anything needs to change at all, to get better and bigger results faster. That is where I come in as your co-pilot. Once it becomes visible, you can bundle, concentrate and focus your activities with the FOCUS method, above the waterline, where the peak of the logo sits.
And if, after a while, you keep getting in your own way although you know exactly what needs doing (distraction, not acting, the next shiny object, goals that are more someone else’s than your own), that points to more quiet weight than you would like. It increasingly gets in the way of choosing the right goal and of reaching it. Then we go below the surface, into what is less conscious, to identify, qualify and resolve the limiting beliefs and negative emotions underneath.
Since 2009, alongside my commercial career, I have studied human behaviour, excellence, identity and how people actually make the decisions that shape their lives. I have trained in various fields, including the Lefkoe Method, Dr John Demartini’s Breakthrough Experience, Byron Katie’s The Work, and the work of Richard Bandler and John Grinder, the co-creators of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), among others.
Studying the patterns people form throughout their personal history became my new obsession, because I wanted to understand what really shapes an individual’s decisions. That is why my own drive was redirected into understanding what silently shapes someone’s choices, drive and sense of meaning, typically formed at moments they have long forgotten.
So if you have devoted years of your most precious asset, your time, to a personal or career goal and still feel that something is missing, this might be for you. If the summit turned out to be flatter than expected, and you are now determined not to spend the next years repeating the same misdirected effort, a conversation will not hurt. This is about understanding the underlying mechanics of your ambition, so that you can redirect that drive at a target actually worth pointing it at.
My background is commercial, not clinical. I’m not here to fix you, because nothing is broken. I’m here to help you see clearly what you already half-sense, and to name it precisely enough that you can act on it.
If that’s where you are, let’s talk.
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