This corporate trainer’s icebreaker of choice is literal juggling

🤹💼 Ali El Sebai was 17 years old when, on a seemingly random stroll through Cairo’s City Stars mall, he saw a Virgin Megastore employee attempt to juggle balls and fail. It was a two-second encounter, but it would come to shape his career. El Sebai (Instagram) would go home, open his fridge, pick up three lemons, and try his hand at juggling. He failed, forgot about it for two years, and then tried again and again until he mastered the craft. Today, many years later, El Sebai teaches boardrooms filled with executives, seniors, and juniors how to juggle to teach something deeper.

For El Sebai, juggling hasn’t been just physical. He studied communication engineering, then took an IT internship in India — where he spent as much time hiking and socializing with the local community as he did on the actual internship. Back in Cairo, he pivoted away from tech entirely, spending three years working in the independent arts scene: first as a visual arts programmer, then running a fundraising initiative that offered pro bono tickets and transport to marginalized communities for art performances. From there, the résumé kept zigzagging into digital marketing, account management, and more.

Juggling remained a constant, through which he met several other flow art practitioners — jugglers, hoop artists, fire spinners. “I’m not an entertainer; I’m more of an educator,” El Sebai tells EnterpriseAM. “I like to open people’s minds, explain the patterns from a different perspective — dig into the physics of it,” he adds. What started as a hobby at 17 eventually turned into a “very niche” corporate training program, centered around juggling-based workshops for management teams and staff alike, framing the practice not as circus entertainment but as a lesson in resilience, delegation, and collaboration.

Naturally, it was a hard sell. “It was really difficult to make it happen; when I started pitching it, nobody was interested at all.” He spent time doing casual workshops at festivals and towns along the North Coast before a corporate window presented itself: an executive at a well-known Egyptian company learned of him and asked if he’d run sessions for her management team. “I began conveying certain values through the workshop. It was insightful, and still fun.” What began as one workshop turned into four, running weekly.

The lessons weren’t really about the balls. Three ideas anchor every session, he tells us:

• Nobody starts with three objects. You start with posture, then one object, then build. “The first valuable lesson: when working on a big project in business, you need to cascade it down to actual bite-sized goals.”
• Failure as a mechanism: Everyone drops. Repeatedly. The workshop reframes that as the expected cost of learning rather than a setback. “It’s okay to fail. The important thing is to pick up the ball, stand up, and keep going.”
• Investing in the weaker hand: Juggling three balls requires a non-dominant hand that can keep up with the dominant one — so the workshop carves out dedicated practice time for it. He draws a direct parallel to skills gaps in the workplace: “If there’s a skill you’re not good at, it’s okay to spend time and effort to strengthen it, just like we strengthen the weaker hand.”

The most interesting exercise, though, is the one that splits a person in two. Paired participants stand shoulder to shoulder — one using only their right hand, the other only their left — and pass objects between them as if they were a single juggler sharing the load. It forces real-time communication in a setting most executives have never had to navigate together. El Sebai also includes juggling competitions in these workshops, including the cleverly named “Game of Throws.”

💡 FUN FACT- The earliest known depiction of juggling was recorded in none other than Om el Donia in Egypt’s Beni Hassan cemetery complex over 4,000 years ago.

Why it matters: Corporate demand for unconventional team-building is rising as more and more companies move away from standard HR-led workshops imbued with merely verbal motivation. “People are tired of that,” he tells us. “They need other creative ways to do this.” According to an April 2026 Data Insights report, the corporate team-building activities market lands at a projected value of nearly USD 12.9 bn, with an estimated CAGR of 9.1% through 2034 as companies show a growing preference for experience-based activities and gamified programs.

What’s next for El Sebai: He’s currently balancing — or juggling, if we may — a full-time job with the ambition of scaling the workshop business, which includes a juggling equipment store down the line, born from the memory of learning on lemons. “I have a lot of ideas, but I’m waiting for the right investor,” he tells us. “I always wonder, if on that day I had looked the other way and hadn’t seen the [Virgin Megastore employee], or if I had been two seconds late, what my life would have been like,” he says.