For a life abroad that truly feels like home.
The person behind the program
Simon Faust
Coach en Communication
I didn't start out as a coach. For nearly twenty years, I've worked with people — many of them young people — helping them move toward their goals and feel more at ease in how they interact with others. That path eventually led me to lead a school, where I saw up close how much communication shapes everything: a team, a relationship, a career, a life abroad.
Over the years, I trained and certified in several complementary fields to understand this at a deeper level: cognitive neuroscience, non-verbal communication, and executive coaching through IMD Business School. Different lenses, one goal understanding what's really happening beneath the surface of a conversation, a new environment, or an unfamiliar culture.
I also grew up right here, in this region. Lausanne and its surroundings aren't just where I work they're home. That's part of what Swiss Coaching Buddy is really about: not just teaching cultural codes from a book, but sharing a place I know intimately, the way a local would.
Today, I bring that same experience twenty years of helping people move forward and feel comfortable in who they are to students and families navigating the transition to a new country.
20+ Years Of Experience In
Coaching
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Training
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Mentoring
Arriving in a new culture is never easy — no matter how prepared you think you are. Schools do their best: orientation days, welcome packs, practical guides. But there's always a gap between that and actually living somewhere.
I started Swiss Coaching Buddy after spending time showing people from Asia, the Middle East, and elsewhere around this region — not as a formal program at first, just as someone happy to share the place I call home. What I noticed was how different their experience became once they saw Switzerland this way. Not through a guidebook, but through real, everyday moments — the kind that show you what a culture is actually like, not just what it looks like from the outside.
What made the biggest difference wasn't the places we visited — it was having someone there to ask. A friend, not a service: someone to explain why people communicate the way they do here, what a certain silence or directness actually means, why a neighborhood feels the way it feels. The kind of questions you'd never think to ask a school, but would happily ask a friend.
That's what convinced me this was worth building properly. Because the students and professionals who get that kind of experience don't just adapt faster — they carry that ease with them, long after their first few months are behind them.