Alex Cenem
Psychologist • Author • Creator of the DNA Programme™
The Experience Behind
the DNA Programme™
My Journey
My life has been a real adventure—full of challenges, changes, discoveries and more than a few unexpected turns. Through it all, two parts of me have kept reappearing: the playful, curious “Little Alex”, who wants to explore and ask questions, and the older, pragmatic Alex, who wants to understand how things work and what we can actually do with what we discover.
That tension between curiosity and pragmatism still drives my work. Three questions, in particular, continue to follow me:
How does awareness become conscious action?
What can we do with what we understand?
And what is human energy, really?
I grew up in Brazil and have called London home since 1990. Today, I am a psychologist, author, independent researcher in human development, consultant, and creator of the Dynamic Natural Assessment Programme™ (DNA Programme™).
My work explores how thoughts, feelings, previous experiences and the conditions around us interact to shape how we respond, behave and participate in life—and how becoming more aware of those interactions can influence what happens next.
But the DNA Programme™ did not begin with a theory.
It began when I lost contact with both Little Alex and the pragmatic Alex—and had to find them again.
My
Professional Journey
I started working at 14 as an office boy in my father’s accounting business. By 18, I had created my own events business in Brazil. I didn’t know then where any of this would lead—I was curious, ambitious and interested in making things happen.
That early experience eventually took me into the corporate world, including marketing at American Express in Brazil. After moving to London, however, I had to start again. I entered hospitality as a part-time catering assistant and progressed quickly into management, eventually taking responsibility for major restaurants, venues, events and large teams.
That period became one of my most important experiences of working with people. I managed operations at venues including the Barbican Centre and Kensington Palace, where I was catering manager at the Orangery and worked on major events for hundreds of guests, sometimes leading teams of more than 100 people. My work also took me to the English National Opera, the British Museum, the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum, and the Houses of Parliament.
But the prestigious venues and events were not what mattered most. What mattered most was the extraordinary range of people I encountered there. I worked with people of different ages, cultures, backgrounds and socioeconomic circumstances—from colleagues taking their first steps into employment to experienced professionals, celebrities, political figures and members of royal families. I had to learn to communicate, lead, and work with very different people while adapting to changing environments, expectations, and pressures.
That experience continued when I became involved in Starbucks' early expansion in the UK, working across people, training and operations as the business grew. While I was managing the Villiers Street store, it hosted a highly publicised visit by Prime Minister Tony Blair and Chancellor Gordon Brown following the Chancellor's Pre-Budget Report. They met the team as Starbucks' employee partnership and share-ownership model became part of the wider discussion around employee participation. It was one particularly visible moment within a much larger experience of building teams and learning what enables people and organisations to perform well.
My journey later took me through recruitment, consultancy, education and social enterprise. At Crisis UK, I developed and managed the Skylight Café employability programme, working with people experiencing homelessness and other significant barriers to employment. This was a very different environment—and one that challenged many assumptions about what training, motivation, opportunity, and development actually mean in people's lives.
Across all these environments, something kept becoming clearer:
The same approach did not produce the same response in different people.
A procedure could make perfect sense and still fail. Someone could understand what they needed to do and still be unable to do it. A person who struggled in one environment could become remarkably capable in another. Previous experience, relationships, confidence, pressure, opportunity, and the conditions around us all seemed to shape what happened next.
I was not consciously developing the DNA Programme™ at this point. I was working, experimenting, making mistakes, solving problems and constantly adapting myself as much as the systems and people around me.
But I was beginning to recognise the question behind much of my work: why do people respond so differently to apparently similar situations?
What Working with People Taught Me
Working with so many different people taught me that understanding someone requires more than looking at what they can or cannot do. I needed to understand what was happening around them, what they brought into that situation, what interested them, and how those elements interacted.
Someone could be highly capable and still struggle under particular conditions. Another person might initially appear to lack confidence, knowledge or experience, yet develop remarkably when given the right responsibility or opportunity. What worked brilliantly with one person could do little for another.
I became particularly interested in what people wanted to learn or explore—even when it wasn't directly related to the job they were employed to do. Hospitality provided an unexpectedly rich environment for this. Someone interested in business could learn about finance, marketing or management. Others could develop skills in technology, training, operations or health and safety. People showing leadership potential could gradually take on supervisory and management responsibilities.
Sometimes the connection was less obvious. For example, when I discovered that several members of a café team were musicians and performers, I helped create a weekly evening where, after an audition and approval process, they could perform for customers and keep what they earned. Their personal interests became an opportunity for their own development while bringing something new to the business.
This shaped how I understood my responsibility as a manager. I did not see my role as keeping good people in their existing jobs. If someone wanted to progress, change direction, or pursue an opportunity elsewhere, I wanted to help them prepare. Some people I supported went on to management positions, different professional careers and, in some cases, businesses of their own.
But supporting people did not mean avoiding difficult decisions. I also learned to recognise when someone’s participation negatively affected the team or the organisation's needs. When support, clear expectations and appropriate opportunities for improvement did not resolve the problem, I was prepared to act.
My experience across recruitment, human resources, training, and management taught me to approach those situations carefully: observe performance and behaviour, document concerns, follow appropriate employment procedures, and give people a fair opportunity to understand and respond. Sometimes the responsible conclusion was simply that the individual and that particular environment were not a good match.
This taught me that development requires both opportunity and boundaries.
Supporting an individual cannot mean ignoring the impact of their participation on everyone else.
Over time, I learned to look beyond qualifications and existing skills and pay closer attention to interest, potential, participation and direction. My role was to recognise what someone could contribute now, explore what they might develop next, and look for opportunities within the possibilities available to us.
But this also required something from me. I had to question my own assumptions, recognise when my approach wasn't working, adapt to the person and circumstances in front of me, and stay aware of how my decisions and behaviour shaped what happened next, or even whether I was the best option for that job.
Looking back, this became one of the foundations of how I understand development today: people need opportunities to grow, but growth also involves responsibility, impact and boundaries. Development happens through our participation with other people and the conditions around us—not in isolation.
What Living with CPTSD Taught Me
For more than 20 years, I have lived with a formal diagnosis of complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD). It changed the direction of my life and confronted me with something my professional experience had not prepared me for: understanding what was happening did not necessarily mean I could change what was happening.
I could understand a reaction intellectually and still experience it. I could know what I wanted to do and find myself unable to do it. Thoughts, emotions and physical responses did not always wait for conscious reasoning. At times, the distance between knowing, wanting and being able to act could be enormous.
Over time, I learned to pay closer attention to what was actually happening within me—thoughts, emotions, sensations, physical responses and changes in my capacity to remain present. I also became increasingly aware that these experiences did not happen independently of the world around me.
Environment, relationships, circumstances, pressure, support and time could all affect what I was able to manage in a particular moment.
This taught me something important about capacity, capability and ability. They are not fixed qualities that we either possess or lack. My capacity to remain present, my capability to organise and adapt, and my ability to translate that into action could change considerably from one situation—or one day—to another.
Learning to live with CPTSD has therefore not been a journey towards becoming permanently positive or eliminating every difficult response. It has involved patience, navigating professional and personal relationships, learning that support is not always experienced as supportive, establishing boundaries, adapting to changing circumstances, and accepting responsibility for what I can influence—without pretending that I control everything that happens within or around me.
Perhaps the most difficult lesson was learning to distinguish between acceptance and resignation. Accepting what I could or could not manage in a particular moment did not mean giving up. It meant starting from what was actually happening, not what I thought should be happening. From there, I could begin to assess what support, adjustment, time or action might realistically be possible next.
My professional life had already taught me that the same approach does not work for everyone. Living with CPTSD taught me that the same approach does not necessarily work for the same person under different conditions.
The questions became much more personal:
What is happening within me?
What is happening around me?
How are the two interacting?
And, given what is possible right now, what can I do next?
Those questions eventually became part of my search for a clearer way of observing human experience—and an important foundation for what would become the Dynamic Natural Assessment Programme™.
Why I Created the DNA Programme™
I wanted to understand how our thoughts, sensations and emotions interact with our experiences—and how we can work with what is happening within and around us.
My background in psychology gave me useful ways of understanding human development, but my professional and personal experiences showed me that no single perspective explains everything. I began exploring ideas across science, philosophy, culture and other ways of understanding human experience, curious about what each could contribute—and where its explanations stopped.
Living with CPTSD made that search deeply personal. I needed more than explanations or theories. I needed a practical way to observe what was happening within me, recognise what was happening around me and understand how I was participating in that interaction.
That search gradually developed into three connected perspectives: Dynamic—observing what is moving, changing and influencing experience; Natural—recognising and integrating what is present here and now; and Assessment—examining how these conditions interact, what possibilities exist and what we might consciously do next.
I initially developed these ideas to help me understand my own reactions and find direction when much of life felt beyond my control. Over time, I began to recognise how the same structure could offer others a way to explore their own experiences—without assuming my answers should become theirs.
That became the Dynamic Natural Assessment Programme™ (DNA Programme™).
It does not promise control, provide universal answers or tell people what they should think, feel or believe. It offers a structure for becoming more aware of what is happening, recognising our participation and exploring what we can consciously do next.
Because if there is one thing this journey has taught me, it is this:
Life is dynamic.
My Work
Today
Today, my focus is on taking the DNA Programme™ from an independently developed framework into its next stage of development, application and research.
I continue to develop and share the work through books, educational resources, developmental consultancy, workshops and presentations. I also use film, music, storytelling and observations from everyday life to explore complex ideas about human development in ways that are accessible without reducing them to motivational slogans or simple answers.
But the work is still evolving. I want to test its concepts more systematically, document how they work in practice, develop research partnerships and explore applications across personal, professional and social development. This means bringing together people from different disciplines, experiences and perspectives who are willing to question the ideas as much as contribute to them.
After developing the project independently for many years, I am now looking for collaborators, researchers, organisations and supporters who can help me take it beyond what I can develop alone.
The DNA Programme™ remains educational and developmental. It does not claim to diagnose or treat mental health conditions and is not a substitute for psychotherapy, clinical assessment, medical treatment or specialist mental-health support.
But that distinction does not limit where the ideas might contribute. What began as a way of understanding my own experience could offer individuals a practical structure for developing greater awareness of their participation in everyday life, while also giving professionals another perspective to explore alongside their existing knowledge, methods and practice.
Whether, where and how the DNA Programme™ can make those contributions needs to be explored, tested and developed with others.
That is why my journey with this project does not stop here.
The Journey Continues
I began this journey with questions, and I still have many more questions than answers. That is a good place to be.
The curious “Little Alex” is still exploring, while the pragmatic Alex continues to question, test and look for ways of turning ideas into something useful. The DNA Programme™ is part of that continuing process—not a finished answer, but a framework I intend to keep developing, challenging, and refining through experience, collaboration, and research.
Where it can genuinely contribute, where it needs to change, and where its limitations lie should not be decided by my belief in it alone. Those questions require other people, different disciplines, practical application, critical examination and, where appropriate, formal research.
So my invitation is not to believe in the DNA Programme™ or accept it as another answer to how we should live. It is much simpler:
Stay curious. Observe what is happening. Question what you think you know. Recognise your participation. And explore what you can consciously and responsibly do next.
My journey continues—and perhaps something I have discovered along the way can contribute to yours.
Life is dynamic. Find your rhythm. Develop your contribution.