BusinessDay
Chisom Michael
May 23, 2026
Ahmet Bozer is a globally respected business leader, leadership thinker, and former President of The Coca-Cola Company International, with more than three decades of experience leading operations across global markets. Drawing from his extensive career in strategic leadership and human development, he authored Soulgery, a transformative book released in 2025 that explores an actionable framework for unlocking human potential through purpose, growth, and lived experiences. Beyond corporate leadership, Bozer has served on several international business and philanthropic boards, shaping conversations around leadership and global impact. In this interview with CHISOM MICHAEL, he discusses how his decades of global leadership shaped the philosophy behind Soulgery, the importance of purpose-driven growth, the role of self-awareness and resilience in personal development, and how individuals can transform pressure, adversity, and everyday experiences into opportunities for meaningful growth, impact, and leadership.
How did your global leadership career shape the ideas you present in Soulgery?
My global leadership career was like a living laboratory that produced many of the insights shared in Soulgery.
Being in a leadership role offers one of the best opportunities to understand people and human potential—beginning with yourself. How you define your responsibilities as a leader and the approach you bring to leadership influence how much of that opportunity you capture.
Over the years, I came to define five fundamental responsibilities of leadership: leading with a sense of meaning, focusing on value creation for all stakeholders, forging deep human connections, building resilience, and fostering continuous growth. As for my leadership approach, I have always believed the best approach is one that is effective for the situation you are in and aligned with who you are.
This perspective on leadership meant I had to cultivate an inner self that would help me fulfil those responsibilities. As I engaged in that inner work, I realised that the fundamentals of leadership are also fundamentals for becoming a fuller human being. The difference is one of context: in business leadership, you apply them in service of the enterprise; in growing as a human being, you apply them across the whole of life.
From that realisation, my focus shifted entirely toward the question of what it means to grow as a human being, and that became the beginning of Soulgery.
What is the central purpose of the Soulgery model?
The purpose of Soulgery is simply to support people in their lifelong growth journey.
The fundamentals I spoke about earlier can be encouraged, but they cannot be imparted to us. They’re built through how we engage with life, and too often their development is left to chance.
I believe everyone has the capacity to do this work, but how to do it is not always clear. That is exactly why I created Soulgery: to serve as a guide for doing that deeper work. It is a practical, non-dogmatic model, allowing readers to adapt it to their own circumstances and apply it in a sequence and at a pace that works for them.
Can you explain the role of the Self Map within your framework?
The Self Map is a simple idea with profound utility. It emerged from the belief that, if we aim to grow as human beings, we first need a clear understanding of what a human being is and how they work. The Self Map articulates a view of the self, laying the groundwork for the entire model.
It is a holistic map of the human experience, helping us see ourselves as beings with physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual dimensions that interact with one another.
Using these dimensions, we develop what I call human equities qualities, such as love, wisdom, and character. We also build skills: the capabilities needed in our professions, as well as the core skills we need in our daily lives. These human equities and skills are then expressed in how we engage with the outside world.
All of this development is animated by our willpower, guided by our conscience—if we choose to listen to it—and influenced, often in subtle ways, by our sense of self. That interplay is central to understanding how growth actually happens.
Ultimately, the Self Map helps you understand yourself and develop a vision of your better self, acting as both a mirror and a compass.
What do you mean by “Find Your Direction” and “Aim for Impact” in the Acts of Growth?
Find Your Direction—Act 1—is grounded in my belief that when we find inspiration in life itself, our capacity for growth increases and our runway extends across our entire lives. Having said that, inspiration isn’t something we can simply chase; it finds us. So, the best we can do is prepare ourselves to receive it.
That preparation begins by opening our hearts to love and harvesting wisdom from our lived experiences. Becoming ever wiser and more open-hearted paves the way for exploring life’s existential questions more deeply. One of these questions is the why of our existence—the meaning of our lives. The search for that answer can itself become an inner source of guidance and inspiration, helping us self-direct our lives with greater clarity.
Aim for Impact—Act 2—builds on that direction. It is grounded in the idea that our growth accelerates when we focus first on the impact we can have on others. This does not mean ignoring our own needs. Rather, it suggests that an impact orientation is often a more sustainable way to pursue our goals.
We cultivate this impact orientation by embracing what Soulgery calls a legacy mindset—being intentional about what we leave behind in others. That may be something built over years, or the thoughts and emotions we inspire in everyday moments.
A legacy mindset drives what we do. Our impact is also defined by how we engage with others, and the roots of that lie in our character. Here, Soulgery speaks to cultivating traits that help us connect more deeply with others—qualities such as integrity, fairness, courage, and care—and amplify our impact.
So, in simple terms, Find Your Direction helps us clarify what calls us forward. Aim for Impact helps ensure that what moves us forward adds value beyond ourselves.
How does “Perform with Excellence” move from intention to action in practice?
Perform with Excellence is where intention becomes lived practice. This happens through several everyday disciplines: personal planning, time management, preparation, and disciplined management of our well-being.
The model focuses on the underlying factors that make us more effective in each. For example, in time management, Soulgery looks at our ability to simplify, to evaluate how we operate across the different roles we play, and to build steadfast intentionality. In personal planning, the emphasis is on self-reflection, creating space to reground ourselves and reposition ourselves on what matters.
As for preparation, the focus is on our psychological state at the time of performance, because how we show up internally has a real effect on what we can deliver externally. The same is true for well-being. Excellence is hard to sustain if we treat our well-being as an afterthought. We need the discipline to manage our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual energy in ways that support the level of contribution we want to make.
As readers experiment with these ideas in their own way, they begin to settle into what I call a rhythm of excellence, a practical way of living and working that helps them bring out their best in whatever they do.
Could you share an example from your own career that illustrates this rhythm of excellence?
I stay disciplined about weekly reflection because it helps me enter each new week with the confidence that comes from being prepared. It gives me a way to convert mistakes into learning before they harden into regret, strengthen intentionality in how I pursue my priorities, and preserve perspective under pressure.
Over time, this practice builds the mental muscles to keep checking in with yourself, and, in turn, you become ever more effective in how you think, decide, and act.
You use the phrase “hacking your growth” in the book. What does this mean in everyday life?
All of us have what I call a default mode. It is the collection of thoughts, emotions, mindsets, and patterns that tend to take over almost automatically when we face pressure or adversity. We develop this default mode over the years, and in many ways it can be helpful. But the deeper question is: does it also help us grow?
Every challenge tests us in new ways and offers an opportunity to move toward our next better version. Hacking your growth means intentionally capturing that opportunity and accelerating your growth as you work through the challenge. It involves becoming more aware of your default mode, understanding how it shapes your responses, and actively adopting a growth-minded approach.
As we hack our default mode, we shift from reacting to adversity toward learning from it, growing through it, and becoming stronger because of it. Over time, we can turn our default mode into what I would call a growth mode, where growth through adversity becomes our natural response.
What motivated you to write Soulgery at this stage of your journey?
I believe we have a basic human need to express what we have come to understand about ourselves and about life. I felt that need as well.
After many years in global leadership, I began to see that my professional experience and personal background had given me a particular lens on personal growth. I had the opportunity to lead across many cultures and to live and work in both individualistic and collectivist societies. That combination gave me a unique angle from which to reflect on how we grow as human beings, how we find meaning, build resilience, connect with others, and contribute to the world around us.
The motivation to write Soulgery came from that place. It was not simply a desire to write a book; it was a need to share a perspective that had become deeply important to me. That motivation was strong enough to carry me through the eight years it took to complete it—years shaped by observation, self-inquiry, and synthesis.
How do you see the principles of Soulgery influencing relationships and communities?
I believe that when someone internalises Soulgery in their own way, positive change begins from within. The grounding, clarity, and self-awareness that come from this work naturally begin to reflect in everyday life—in how we relate, how we listen, how we respond, and how we show up for others.
That inner shift can create a meaningful impact on the lives we touch. It may be through greater patience in a relationship, greater fairness in a decision, greater courage in a difficult conversation, or greater care in how we lead and support others. These may seem like small moments, but they shape the human environment around us. From there, the effect can ripple outward. We cannot fully estimate how far those ripples may go, but we can reasonably say they move things in a better direction.
The more people embrace this way of thinking about themselves and life, the more positive the development can become—both individually and collectively. In that sense, Soulgery goes beyond personal growth; it can contribute to healthier communities and a stronger human fabric.
In what ways can Soulgery contribute to leadership on a global scale?
On a global scale, I believe Soulgery matters deeply because it invites us to think of leadership not simply as a role, but as a way of being.
Imagine a world where leadership is shaped more consistently by the fundamentals we discussed earlier, and where those qualities are embraced more broadly across institutions, whatever one’s level of responsibility may be. Imagine households, workplaces, and communities where relationships are shaped by the human qualities that connect us deeply.
This may sound like a distant vision, and perhaps it is. But even progress toward it can make the world a better place.
How does your approach help people thrive rather than simply cope with pressure?
Pressure can be something through which we grow. The question is how we respond to it. We touched on this when we discussed how to turn adversity into a source of growth. But thriving is not only about how we respond to pressure. It is also about how proactive we are about our own growth, and Soulgery is meant to guide that process as well.
The Four Acts of Growth translate into 19 Focus Areas and 19 core skills that we can continue to build throughout our lives. As progress in these areas accumulates over time, we position ourselves for what can feel like an exponential experience of growth.
So the aim is not simply to cope with life, but to accelerate our growth through it.
What makes Soulgery distinct from other books on personal growth?
Soulgery stands apart through its unique blend of breadth, depth, and practicality. Many approaches to personal growth focus on one particular dimension of life. Soulgery intentionally spans both the everyday realities of growth, such as overcoming adversity or improving performance, and the deeper dimensions of human experience, such as meaning, love, wisdom, and character.
But this breadth does not come at the expense of depth. Quite the contrary: each area is explored through a distinctive lens, understanding the role our sense of self plays in how we think, feel, relate, and decide. That is one of the central ideas of Soulgery: our sense of self can subtly shape almost every part of our lives, often without our noticing.
At the same time, Soulgery is highly pragmatic. The model is designed to be actionable in everyday life, through reflection on lived experience, and practical shifts in how we engage with our roles, relationships, challenges, and aspirations.
Finally, Soulgery is designed to meet people where they are. Readers do not have to follow it in a rigid sequence. They can begin with any area that feels most relevant to their lives, adopt the framework in any sequence, engage with one or several focus areas at a time, and move at their own pace.
That combination—breadth across life, depth through the sense of self, and practicality for everyday use—is what makes Soulgery distinct.
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Chisom Michael is a data analyst (audience engagement) and writer at BusinessDay, with diverse experience in the media industry. He holds a BSc in Industrial Physics from Imo State University and an MEng in Computer Science and Technology from Liaoning Univerisity of Technology China. He specialises in listicle writing, profiles and leveraging his skills in audience engagement analysis and data-driven insights to create compelling content that resonates with readers.
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