Milica Krstic: The Psychologist Turning Empathy Into a Performance Strategy

Milica Krstic is a Serbian-born psychologist, integrative body psychotherapist, and Performance & Leadership Coach based in Bratislava, working with founders, executives, and teams on resilience and decision-making under pressure. She founded Safe Space, a free multilingual therapy platform that has helped thousands across the Balkans, and later organized the region’s first free mental health conference. Her work earned her a spot on the Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe list in 2023. She’s also the author of It’s Not a Big Deal and co-founder of SoulFit, an emotional-literacy program for schools, and FeelSafeHub, a workplace stress-monitoring tool. Her coaching blends HeartMath training, body psychotherapy, and nervous system science, grounded in the premise that empathy, not harshness, sustains high performance. 

Who Is Milica Krstic?

Milica Krstic is a psychologist and practitioner of integrative body psychotherapy who works with leaders and companies on performance, decision-making, and resilience under pressure. Originally from Serbia, she is also a body-oriented psychotherapist under supervision and a Ph.D. student at UCAM University in Spain. Her professional identity sits somewhere between clinical psychology, executive coaching, and public advocacy for mental health, a combination that has made her an unusual figure in the wellness and leadership space.

Krstic is based in Bratislava, though she divides her time between Bratislava, Vienna, Lisbon, and Belgrade, working with clients both in person and online. That geographic spread mirrors the scope of her work: a practice built for founders and executives who operate across borders and time Zones, and whose stress rarely respects any single one of them.

Milica Krstic: From Personal Loss to a Public Mission

The origin story behind Krstic’s most recognized project, Safe Space (known in Serbian as Siguran Prostor), is a difficult one. After several of her friends attempted suicide, she created a platform where psychotherapists could provide free psychotherapy sessions to people who could not afford to pay for therapy. It’s the kind of founding story that could easily read as a marketing narrative, except that the numbers behind it are concrete: within nine months of launching, Safe Space had helped more than 7,500 people and had grown to offer sessions in ten languages through a network of seventy-five psychotherapists.

Safe Space operated from 2022 to 2025, and its mission was straightforward but ambitious for the region it served: make real psychotherapy accessible, reduce anxiety, depression, and suicide risk, and chip away at the stigma that still surrounds asking for psychological help across the Balkans. Mental health infrastructure in much of Southeast Europe has historically lagged behind Western Europe, and a free, multilingual therapy network addressed a gap that public health systems in the region had largely left open.

The project’s most visible public moment came in February 2025, when Krstic organized what has been described as the first free mental health conference in the Balkans. Held at the Regent Porto Montenegro in Tivat under the title Koraci ka sigurnijem Balkanu (Steps Toward a Safer Balkans), the event brought together roughly eighty attendees for a single day dedicated to making mental health conversations public rather than private. For a region where therapy is still sometimes treated as a taboo subject, even a modestly siZed public gathering carries symbolic weight.

Milica Krstic’s Recognition: Forbes 30 Under 30 and Beyond

Krstic’s work with Safe Space earned her a place on the Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe list in 2023, in the Social Impact category, a recognition that also opened doors to a much larger stage. She has since appeared at multiple Forbes 30/50 Summit events in Abu Dhabi, appeared at the World Economic Forum in Davos, and spoken at the MISK Global Forum in Riyadh, an event associated with Saudi Arabia’s Misk Foundation. She was also recognized in Serbia with a special award tied to Zena Zmaja (Woman of the Dragon) in 2023, an honor associated with prominent Serbian women.

These aren’t small engagements. Sharing a stage, or a green room, with Forbes’ own chief content officer, or speaking at a summit that draws government ministers and global business leaders, suggests a level of institutional credibility that goes beyond a typical wellness-industry influencer. It also signals how much international appetite there currently is for speakers who can talk about mental health and burnout in the specific language executives and founders respond to: productivity, decision-making, and organiZational risk, rather than purely clinical terms.

Milica Krstic’s Book: It’s Not a Big Deal

Krstic is also the author of a book titled It’s Not a Big Deal, available through Amazon. While detailed public information about its contents is limited, its themes align closely with the philosophy she has built her coaching practice around: the idea that emotional struggles, self-criticism, and the pressure many high achievers put on themselves are often disproportionate to the way people privately experience them, and that naming that gap is itself a form of relief.

Milica Krstic’s Philosophy: Nervous System Science Over Willpower

What distinguishes Krstic’s current work from more generic executive coaching is her emphasis on physiology rather than mindset alone. Her professional pitch rests on a specific, almost contrarian claim: that the harshness so many high performers direct at themselves- the belief that pressure requires self-punishment to be productive- is actually counterproductive. Empathy, in her framing, isn’t the opposite of high standards; it’s the thing that makes high standards sustainable over time.

This isn’t presented as a purely feel-good argument. Krstic grounds it in nervous system physiology, citing research on heart-rate variability (HRV) and its link to executive function and self-regulation under stress. She is a certified HeartMath practitioner, meaning her coaching incorporates HRV training as a literal, measurable tool, not just a metaphor, for building the physical capacity to stay clear-headed when the pressure is real. Her broader argument is that most executive coaching stops at the cognitive level (goals, mindset, accountability) while skipping the nervous system entirely, even though the body typically reacts to stress before the mind has any chance to reframe the situation.

Her methodology draws on three main pillars:

• Nervous system regulation, through HeartMath heart-rate-variability training aimed at building physiological steadiness under pressure.
• Integrative body psychotherapy, an EABP-accredited discipline she trained in for four years, which links physical signals to behavioral and decision-making patterns.
• Systemic Constellations, a method associated with the Hellinger approach, used to surface underlying dynamics repeating within a family, team, or organiZation.

She frequently cites two statistics to make her case to a business audience: a Harvard study published in Science (Killingsworth & Gilbert, 2010) finding that people spend a substantial share of their waking hours thinking about something other than what’s happening in the present moment, with mind-wandering consistently linked to lower reported happiness; and a World Health Organization estimate that depression and anxiety cost the global economy roughly a trillion dollars a year in lost productivity. The pairing is deliberate; it reframes mental health support not as a soft benefit, but as a measurable business investment.

How Milica Krstic’s Coaching Practice Works

Krstic’s client work is structured in three main formats. Individual entrepreneurs and leaders work with her over a three-month, twelve-session engagement. Sessions are weekly and delivered individually, either online or in person, with a stated focus on faster decision-making under pressure and catching stress before it escalates into a health crisis. She takes both preventive and crisis-stage clients.

For companies and teams, she runs group sessions, workshops, training, and webinars, including formats built specifically for leadership and senior management. And for organiZations wanting something more comprehensive, she offers a custom wellbeing strategy engagement, typically spanning six to twelve months, built around one institution’s specific needs.

Notably, her practice draws a clear boundary around what it is and isn’t: it explicitly excludes clinical diagnosis or treatment of mental health conditions. Despite her clinical psychology and psychotherapy background, the coaching work is framed strictly as a performance and wellbeing service, not medical or psychotherapeutic treatment, and clients are expected to disclose any existing health conditions, with the practice placing responsibility on the client if that disclosure isn’t made in full. It’s a distinction worth noting for anyone evaluating this kind of executive coaching: the tools may be drawn from clinical training, but the engagement itself sits outside a clinical or medical relationship.

Client testimonials describe her approach as combining warmth with accountability. Multiple reviewers, including a founder of a synthetic biology industry organiZation and a Cloudflare AI transformation lead, describe her as caring but firm, and credit her with helping them build clearer emotional self-awareness alongside practical behavioral changes.

Beyond Individual Coaching: Milica Krstic’s SoulFit and FeelSafeHub

Krstic’s more recent projects extend her mental-health work into new populations and formats. SoulFit, co-founded with Dr. Maria Gren, is an emotional-literacy curriculum aimed at young people, an eight-book program, one per school year, designed to teach emotional vocabulary as a formal school subject rather than a one-off workshop. The program has reportedly been approved by Austria’s Directorate of Education and endorsed by the World Council for Psychotherapy, with a pilot launching in Vienna in September 2026. The idea reportedly originated from a meeting between Krstic and Dr. Gren at the World Congress for Psychotherapy in Vienna in July 2025.

FeelSafeHub, meanwhile, is aimed squarely at the corporate world: a brief daily protocol designed to help teams identify early signs of stress before they escalate into burnout, absenteeism, or attrition. It’s currently in beta testing with companies and represents Krstic’s attempt to scale her individual coaching philosophy- catching problems early, physiologically, before they become crises- into something usable across an entire organiZation rather than one executive at a time.

Together, these two projects suggest a deliberate expansion strategy: SoulFit targets prevention at the earliest possible stage (childhood education), while FeelSafeHub targets prevention at the organiZational level, bookending the one-on-one coaching work that remains her core practice.

Milica Krstic’s Public Speaking and Global Visibility

Few wellness coaches build the kind of speaking circuit Krstic has assembled in a relatively short span. Her known engagements include the MISK Global Forum in Riyadh (2023), where she spoke on sessions titled From Clutter to Clarity and on preventing workplace mental health issues; the World Congress for Psychotherapy in Vienna (2025), where she presented lessons from the Safe Space initiative; a public conversation in Belgrade on the impact of artificial intelligence on mental health; the Forbes 30/50 Summit in Abu Dhabi across 2024 and 2025; the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2025 and 2026, including an appearance at the Female Quotient Lounge; the 1 Billion Followers Summit in Dubai in January 2026; and the Forbes 30 Under 30 Summit Africa in Botswana in 2023.

This trajectory, from a locally run therapy platform in the Balkans to keynote slots at some of the highest-profile international economic and business forums, illustrates something broader about the current moment in corporate wellness. Institutions that once treated burnout as an HR footnote are now inviting psychotherapists onto main stages at Davos and Forbes summits, alongside CEOs and policymakers. Krstic’s rise is, in part, a symptom of that shift: a signal that boards and executive teams increasingly want mental health expertise delivered in the vocabulary of performance, resilience, and risk management, not just clinical care.

A Note on the Name

It’s worth repeating that Milica Krstic is not a unique identifier online. Searchers may also encounter references to an actress known for the Serbian television series Sapun, and to Milica Čolak-Antić Krstic (1887–1964), a pioneering Serbian architect who spent a twenty-six-year career in state service and reached the rank of inspector, the highest position available to her at the time, during a period when women’s access to public employment in Serbia was itself unusual. If you’ve arrived at this post looking for either of those women, their stories, while unrelated to the coach profiled here, are each worth their own separate research.

Conclusion

Whether or not one is drawn to the specific framework of HeartMath training or Systemic Constellations, Krstic’s broader argument- that sustainable high performance depends on regulating stress rather than suppressing it, and that self-criticism is a less effective long-term strategy than self-regulation- reflects a wider conversation happening across corporate leadership right now. Her path from a grief-driven nonprofit in the Balkans to international stages suggests that argument is landing with an audience that has historically been skeptical of soft mental health framing: founders, executives, and the institutions that employ them.

For a fuller picture of her current work, speaking availability, or the specifics of her coaching engagements, her own site (milicaKrstic.com) and the Safe Space and FeelSafeHub project pages remain the most current sources, as her practice, like the field she works in, continues to evolve.

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