Origin

I wasn't supposed to end up here…

TU Delft. Technische Bestuurskunde. The kind of degree that says:

I want to understand how systems work. How decisions get made. How the gap between vision and execution becomes the place where everything either breaks or builds.

I graduated. Went corporate.
Lidl. Bol.com. Zalando.

Big machines. Smart people.
Real complexity.

And I was good at it. I could walk into a room, read it in minutes, and see exactly where the friction was. Not the symptoms. The *actual* thing underneath.

But somewhere in those years between the spreadsheets and the strategy decks and the stakeholder meetings I started noticing something.

The people around me were running.

Fast, hard & efficiently.

Toward something none of them had actually chosen.

I recognized it because I was doing the same thing.

So I stopped.

Not dramatically. Not all at once. But I started asking the question that corporate doesn't have a framework for:

What do I actually want this to look like?

That question took me to Bali. To Spain. To retreats in the mountains and co-creation weekends on the coast.
To rooms full of people who had left their own versions of the machine to founders, healers, coaches, leaders all trying to build something real in this crazy digital world.

And I kept doing the same thing I'd always done.

I read the room. I saw the pattern.
I named the thing nobody had been able to say out loud yet.

"Jij zegt precies de dingen die ik niet wist hoe ik die moest zeggen."

“You say exactly the things i didn’t know how to say”

I heard that sentence so many times it stopped surprising me.

What surprised me was how much it mattered.

The problem is almost never strategy.

It's clarity.

Founders with brilliant ideas who can't see their own blind spot. Retreat leaders with real talent who don't know why their programs aren't filling.

Leaders with a vision so close they can almost touch it, stuck not because they lack the answers, but because nobody has ever helped them see what they already know.

That's the gap I live in.

Between where you are and where this is going. Between what you're saying and what you actually mean. Between the vision in your head and the first two steps you can actually take.

I don't simplify your world.

I make it navigable.

Here's what

I know now

that I didn't know then.

I work from Bali. From the Netherlands. From Spain. From wherever the work is good and the light is warm.

I work with founders who are done guessing.
With retreat leaders and retreat locations who are serious about building something sustainable.

With leaders in transition who need someone who can see ten steps ahead and translate it into the first two.

I don't take on everyone.

Not because I'm exclusive for the sake of it but because the work only works when the commitment is real on both sides.

If you're ready to see what's actually in the way

I'm here.

Big hug,

Maartje