I started out as a manager at D-reizen, a large call centre. As soon as I had set up the new department and everything was running smoothly, I noticed something: I didn't actually find all that managing particularly interesting. What I did love was onboarding new colleagues, delivering trainings, watching people learn. So I handed in my notice. I did nothing for a while, took a good hard look at myself, and made a wish list. What do I really want?
Not long after, I got a call from a headhunter. Would I be interested in speaking with someone who wanted to set up a training agency specifically focused on call centres. That didn't exist yet, which sounds strange now but was genuinely true at the time. The conversation clicked immediately, and three days later the three of us had started: Tele'Train. I focused on communication and management training, completed my NLP training to master practitioner level, and eventually became head of all the trainers.
After three years, things began to chafe. Training people toward what a manager deems desirable simply didn't fit with my vision of coaching. I wanted to go out on my own, but then the director left. He wanted to appoint his brother — someone I didn't rate particularly highly — as his replacement. I decided to stay and run the whole thing myself.
I made a complete mess of it, became miserable, and eventually decided to hand in my notice anyway — which wasn't accepted. I was completely stuck. And then the universe intervened: a car accident. My way out, but certainly not a pleasant one. What followed was a long period of recovery; what was first diagnosed as whiplash kept its grip on me for years, I became overstimulated, and ended up on disability benefits.
Meanwhile, life was changing colour on the personal front. I entered a relationship, became pregnant, and moved to Boston. There I focused on our daughter and coached the people around me where needed. After two years we came back to the Netherlands. Some years later our children moved to a democratic school where I started out as a volunteer and fairly quickly became a mentor as well. I guided the pupils in finding their passion, their path in life.
But the overstimulation kept coming back, time and again those burnout symptoms. Until I came across Bessel van der Kolk's book, The Body Keeps the Score. That was a revelation. What had seemed like whiplash turned out to be PTSD. After a number of EMDR sessions I was finally able to walk down the street again without earplugs.
I went to work in a health food shop, purely to be among people again. Then corona arrived, and my body went straight back into freeze. My contract was not renewed. Understandable at the time, but it pulled the ground from under my feet. What it did give me was space — space to paint. And painting gave me insights that went deeper than I had already gone with EMDR and body-oriented therapy. Everything I did became more body-oriented: body stress release and Embodied Learning workshops.
That whole journey, all those layers, eventually brought me to Maastricht University. There I have now been coaching and training master's students within the Premium project for three years.
Are you ready for a next step? Book a coaching conversation, and together we will discover what is possible.
