Your Liberating

Journey

THE FOUNDER

Hi, I'm 

Kristel

THE PULL

THE WORK

THE PROGRAMS

My Story

WHERE IT STARTS

I studied international studies and migration policy, and somewhere early in it I noticed something about the way my mind works. Give me a complicated challenge and I can hold it up and turn it, looking at it from a lot of angles at the same time. Global, societal, and deeply personal, all at once.

That skill was never really about policy. It was about people. It let me meet very different kinds of people where they actually were, and connect past the small talk, on the level that matters. And underneath all of it, one question kept driving me. Why. Why does this system hold. Why is this person stuck. Why do I do what I do.

I grew up in Rotterdam, chasing the why behind everything

I spent years helping other people find their why. Then I went looking for my own.  

ABOUT US

THE WORK THAT PULLED ME IN

People at the centre. the real question on the table.

That question pulled me straight into leadership development. For the first three years of my working life, that is where I lived, sitting with people while they found the why underneath how they lead. Alongside it I did change management for mission-driven companies, the kind of organizations actually trying to build something that means something.

I loved it. Humans at the core, the honest question in the room, my full attention on what was really going on underneath the brief.

And then, quietly, I outgrew it.

OUTGROWING THE CONTAINER

I moved into change and project management and started leading my own projects for different clients. I built my own way of working, my own way of making sense of what people were really wrestling with under the surface of whatever problem they had hired me to solve. Those years taught me my craft, and they taught me myself.

Because working that closely on everyone else's why, I slowly started to hear my own. A restlessness I had been filing under someday. A sense of adventure I kept talking myself out of. I was good at the work, appreciated, secure. And still, quietly, it wasn't quite the life.

I got good at the work. It still wasn't the life.

So I did the thing I had been circling for a long time.

THE STEP I ALMOST TALKED MYSELF OUT OF

I quit, and moved across countries, on purpose

I left my job and moved to build a different way of living. To step out of the comfort I had earned, deliberately, into the unknown. Rationally it looked reckless. It was also the clearest thing I had ever done.

It is still the best decision I have made. Not because the fear wasn't real, it was. Because on the far side of it I feel more balanced, more holistically aligned, more like the whole of who I am and not only the part that performs well at work.

Which is exactly why I built this.

WHY IS STARTED YOUR LIBERATING JOURNEY

The millennial professional who has made it by every external measure and still feels the pull toward something more deliberate. Good at the job, appreciated, secure, and quietly certain that this is a very comfortable waiting room, and not yet the life.

I built it for the person I used to be

If any of that sounds like you, you already know the pull.

I believe you're allowed to want more than a life that already looks successful.

I'm not standing at some finish line telling you it's easy. I'm a step or two down the same road, turning around to tell you it's real, and that you're allowed to want it now, while you're still in the middle of the work. That's the whole reason Your Liberating Journey exists: to help professionals like us stop organizing an entire life around work, and start building a fuller one where career finally takes its proper place. 

WHERE TO START

You don't have to decide anything today

The honest next step isn't a leap. It's just seeing what the work actually is, at your own pace, and deciding for yourself from there.