For a long time I thought my way of being was the problem.

The outside and the inside

The first chapter looks good on paper. Five years in corporate leadership. A business scaled to seven figures. A first five-figure client in 2018, then a consulting practice guiding organisations, from startups to public bodies of 1,500 people, through new ways of working. Hundreds of managers became better leaders in those rooms, and I believed most of what I taught them.

Underneath, in 2015, something had already given way. The version of me that appeared successful was running on override: a nervous system kept on alert for so long it had forgotten how to stand down. The burnout, when it came, wasn't a surprise. It was the body finally winning an argument the mind had been losing for years.

Rebuilding at my own pace

Recovery did not mean fixing the pace, the sensitivity or the intensity. It meant learning to inhabit them. Awareness, contemplation, intentional alignment. Slowly, the shape of a life that could be lived from the inside out, rather than performed from the outside in.

I stopped chasing. I started shaping. That shift is the whole of the work.

Along the way the contemplative frames that had been private practice became working tools: somatic work, which taught me that stress is a body event before it is a thought; Gene Keys and Human Design, which gave language to patterns I'd been fighting; the Enneagram and Hawkins' map of consciousness, which showed me where I actually was rather than where I claimed to be. None of them is a belief system I ask you to adopt. Each is a mirror I know how to hold.

Both feet in the world

I still lead. Today I head managed-operations teams in the IT sector and manage a large public-sector account with a team of around sixteen consultants. I coach a small number of founders and leaders alongside that, on purpose. The inner work has to survive contact with a budget, a client escalation and a Monday morning, or it isn't worth much.

I have been a certified professional coach since 2012 and hold the ICF Professional Certified Coach credential. My training runs through systems coaching (ORSC), Conversational Intelligence®, the Neurocognitive and Behavioural Approach, HeartMath®, Holacracy and authentic relating. Before this practice I ran Phusis, working with organisations such as Partena Professional, Enabel, Smart Cooperative and the Belgian federal public service.

What I'm here for

Humanist. Creative generalist. Someone who has learned, the slow way, that the trait you've been apologising for is usually the one the room needs. My clients tend to feel the same: trapped in systems that weren't built for them, unsure whether to shrink or to leave.

The third option is the one I work on. Not fitting in, not taking over. Leading from your own authority, with a body that can hold the course.

I write The Habit of Being, letters on Substack that are also the book taking shape, and lead entrepreneurship workshops for founders. Everything I make is organised around one question: how does a human being learn to truly inhabit themselves?