After having worked at one of the major top-academic umbrella organisations as Head of Department for over a decade, building bridges between high-ranking universities across Europe and top-universities in Southeast Asia, within a politically sensitive context of large-scale EU funded projects involving the European Commission and comparable bodies in Southeast Asia, I was forced by circumstances to rethink my career as a senior academic employee.

Claartje has been of tremendous help in this intricate process. One of her main assets, I find, is that she doesn’t have any predetermined and necessarily limited set of cut-and-dried answers to puzzling questions, but rather that she is remarkably apt in asking the appropriate questions. Questions to which she allows you to formulate your own answers, gently directing you to thoughts lurking in unexpected corners. The actual outcome of her approach is that you find yourself in a positive frame of mind in which to  move beyond your problems and find a constructive way to move forward. 

Her academic background in ancient Greek philosophy no doubt helps her in finding and formulating  these questions, and provides her with the means to guide you in the process of finding your own answers. Her basically Socratic approach to problem solving, refraining from providing facile and set solutions, precludes any misgivings one may have about her ability to coach older persons more heavily tainted by experience than she herself is.

During this whole process Claartje as a coach proved to be sensitive to the difficulties and emotional turmoil that such a re-orientation inevitably entails. A soft approach indeed, but with clear and tangible results.