• Born in the countryside of the Netherlands.
• Founder of Voyage Beyond, started my first business in 1998.
• Co-founder of Foundation Anders Bekeken (board member 2015-2023).
• Author of A pilgrimage to Santiago.
• Co-author of Walking in the Rain.
• My unique talent is to empower people in a very natural way, unlocking teams, and asking the right questions to connect people.

The world is my oyster

After my study of Communication Science (1991), I made a choice for long and winding paths to unknown destinations, instead of a fixed career path. I traveled for 8 months in Asia in the pre-internet era (1991), in China, Thailand, Malaysia and India. On returning home in the Netherlands I longed for the wider world again and I accepted a job in Uganda (Africa). I lived here for 2,5 years working in freight forwarding, parcel post and managing the Netherlands Consulate-General. After my life in Africa I became a tourist guide and I returned back to Asia. For 2 years I travelled with Dutch tourists in China, Nepal, India and Pakistan.

It is a serious world

In one of my last groups in Nepal a participant proposed me to set up a business together in the Netherlands. And around the millennium I was owner/partner of a management consultancy. It is how I got into change management, leadership and team development and coaching people taking ownership. I worked for mayor hospitals (Jeroen Bosch Ziekenhuis), municipalities (gemeente Deventer), corporate organizations (IKEA, Siemens), the government (department of Justice).

Into the wild

The wide world kept calling me back and after 5 years I left the consultancy for a wilderness guide course in Canada. It brought me literally back to basics, as we had to carry everything on our back and we were flown out into the wild to find our way back to civilization. These 3 months in the wilderness made a lasting impression on me and laid the fundament of the current Xpeditions and Back to Basics programs. It brought me on a detour in Spain, where I failed to set up a new business, but learned about the good Spanish life and beautiful language and ended up walking the Camino to Santiago from the Pyrenees to Finesterra. After getting back to basics, the Camino would teach me in the years to come to reflect on my life and being my true authentic self.

Soul searching and reinventing myself

I was 40 years old, had no job, no place to stay, no relationship and I moved back to the Netherlands where I set up basecamp at the family farm. It became a period of soul searching and more change. After working for Holiday on Ice in winter I followed a Journalism course at the University of Tilburg and Photography course at the Photo Academy, now I was ready to start working as a (photo)journalist. Starting small again with local papers and magazines, it got me to writing travel stories and doing my photography traveling in Europe. This brought me back to the Camino, as I walked again from the Pyrenees to Santiago collecting stories of pilgrims. After a solo winter Camino 3 months later on the same path I could write my book A pilgrimage to Santiago. The next years I gave talks about the Camino and had photo exhibitions.

The student becomes a teacher

It all brought me back to the consultancy and I incorporated my life experience in my programs. I had learned to listen to my intuition, being flexible, making contact on deeper levels, dealing with setbacks, keeping things simple, not giving up and living with passion. Until the Covid years, I worked as a coach, taking professionals, juveniles and families walking on the Camino. I gave workshops (Being the director of your life) and masterclasses (Creating a new vision) in Europe, assisting students to make choices what to do next. In 2015 I co-founded Foundation Anders Bekeken. This foundation organizes and supports activities and projects for people with disabilities, to increase self-knowledge, self-confidence and self-acceptance as to get more direction over their own life. For 5 years I was organizing Camino Walking Blind, a pilgrimage to Santiago with people who are visually impaired.

Living and working from the heart

With Covid in 2020, my working life came to a standstill and I became a full time carer for my parents overnight. After my mother passed away in February 2021, I lived with my father looking after him. A few months before he passed away (October 2022) I found work with the Red Cross, coordinating a refugee center. It was part time and perfectly to combine with the care for my father. A new world opened to me as I  experienced a world in turmoil at my feet. I got a fulltime employment with the Red Cross and became responsible for all refugee centers in the district and opening new centers. In 2024 I was managing 10 refugee centers with 45 people working in it. After the Red Cross I worked independently managing refugee centers until the end of 2025.

The logo of Voyage Beyond is based on Ensõ, a sacred symbol in the Zen school of Buddhism. According to Audrey Yoshiko Seo, author of Ensõ: Zen Circles of Enlightenment, "Zen circles, ensõ, are symbols of teaching, reality, enlightenment, and a myriad of things in between. Seemingly perfect in their continuity, balance, and sense of completeness, and yet often irregular in execution, ensõ are at once the most fundamentally simple and the most complex shape."

Ensõ refers to the beginning and end of all things, the circle of life and the connectedness of existence. It can symbolize emptiness or fullness, presence or absence. All things might be contained within, or, conversely, excluded by its boundaries.