Our colleague Kim Giolo, Data Analyst in our Internal Audit department, has found a great way of combining his long-standing commitment to volunteering for children’s welfare with a hobby that brings joy to him as well as others: he performs magic tricks for kids in hospital.
Magic is like theatre, it’s not just a matter of technical skills, but also, and in fact more, about the emotions you convey,
says Kim, who got into conjuring a decade ago as a way to make new and interesting encounters.
Yet successfully performing a magic trick also calls for a meticulous and empirical approach, and with his background in scientific research, he finds this appealing. ‘I think science and magic are very similar even though the first tries to pierce the mystery to get to the basic principles and the second uses the basic principles to create the mystery,’ he quips.
A couple of years ago, a fellow magician retiring from volunteering at the Geneva University Hospital after more than 20 years asked Kim to take over performing magic for sick children. Volunteering in activities with vulnerable and underprivileged children is something Kim has been doing for as long as he can remember, so he was delighted to be able to carry forward this magician’s legacy.
For Kim the most rewarding part is the contact he is able to establish with these children. He likes to exchange with them and is happy if he can offer them a moment’s amazement and relief at the same time.
He also finds that the conjuring gives him a number of skills he can also use at work, for example listening to people, understanding them, and communicating with them.
He firmly believes that having both an artistic side and a more analytical side is important for a person to be well rounded. And as it happens, we have plenty of colleagues at UBP with pastimes that give them excellent soft skills to complement their hard expertise at the Bank, he adds.
As well as our video, be sure to watch the one made about him by the Swiss national television in May last year!
