I was born in the Netherlands, into a warm and devout family. The combination of love, hard work, discipline and passion for truth and righteousness has shaped my life in a way I am forever grateful. My parents were born around World War II and the pioneering no-nonsense way of life was evident. I was blessed to be born into an entrepreneurial family that feared God and not men. The sense that God is the ultimate authority to which we are accountable was a healthy one and I still live by that code. Not to become arrogant toward men or to have a license to tread on people, but to evaluate my thinking, speaking and acting in the light of a higher authority. This has always been my motto: do what you do as unto God! He created me, and ultimately I am accountable to Him. I even apply this in the way I run the business that God has entrusted to me. He is the CEO, I am the COO! Obviously God plays a very important role in every minute of my every day! I believe there is a God; I believe Jesus Christ is the purest personification of God and living a life under His authority has been an incredible journey.

I have traveled the world, learned five languages, lived in five countries and have worked in over 40 countries, but never have I found a religious way of life that would ask the same thing as what Christ is asking us: "To lay down your will and your ability to do it yourself." This is a stumbling block for the way of Jesus. "If you want to be free and grow, you need to first admit that you can't do it yourself." At first sight, a contradiction in terms. For people who have never walked the road of total surrender, it absolutely doesn't make sense. For the ones who do, they find incredible freedom to grow and BE!

For me, following the path of Jesus has been a journey of finding my highest potential without being hindered by "what people might think of me." The other significant aspect about following Jesus is the fact that he hates religion. You might think that is a strong word, but the Gospel is very clear about it. He came to establish a non-religious faith. His calling was to establish a faith based on relationship; relationship with God! He said: "I am the way, the truth and the life, no one comes to the Father except through me!" Submit to the way, allow His truth to fill every corner of your being and you will find life… I know it first hand!

In my business, I have the privilege to work with people in helping them develop their heart, mind and skill set. I love to talk about all three. The heart-set has to do with passion! Without passion we are nowhere, we need to discover our passion. I have found an endless source of energy in making it my passion to worship God in everything I do, say and think! Amazing what it does to us when the source of our pursuit is outside ourselves!

Our mind-set has to do with our attitude. My attitude will flow from the place where my passion lies. Jesus used to say: "Where your treasure is that is where your heart is also." In other words, show me your wallet and where you spend your money and I will know where your heart, your passion lies. Attitudes are contagious, is your attitude worth catching?

And finally there is the skill-set. Most people focus on the hard skills, but my passion is to focus on the soft skills. In the way of Jesus everything is about relationships. It starts with a relationship with the living God. Whatever I learn through that relationship flows into the ways I relate to people around me. And the ways I relate to people around me results in positive or negative influence in society. I am convinced that my impact in society would be far less if I had not first learned what is means to live in relationship with the living God and allow Him to be my coach and mentor in life!

In the world of ‘self-help’ books, talk about positive energy and "you can do it" thinking, we are more confused than ever before! God's codes for living are very clear. We need to realise that if we try to do it our way we will not get any further than a mild improvement. I call it the pursuit of "conditioned behaviour". So many people have pursued self-improvement through the multi-billion dollar industry of self-help techniques and gurus that has mushroomed in the last decade. But in the end it leaves most people more dissatisfied and more depressed than when they started. The sober reality is that God didn't design us to do the self-help thing!

God did not design us to go through a process of conditioning our thoughts, words and actions. He designed us for a transformation process. This same pattern is embedded in nature. A caterpillar becomes a butterfly. A seed becomes a new plant. Something has to die before life, that is more than what existed before, can come forth! This is the way God is calling us to walk - to come to the point of admitting that we can't do it, and to say to God that we need Him to transform our life. Only then will the miracle of the caterpillar becoming a butterfly take place! The word used for this in Greek is metamorphos, which is the origin of the word we use today, metamorphosis.

I am excited about life. I have big dreams for my family of one wife and three children and believe God has called me to bring transformational change, not just the conditioning form of change, to the world around me. My calling in life, to encourage, equip and release people and to take them places where they wouldn't have gone on their own, became clear as I practiced a relationship with the living God. I do this with the humble reality that I can only do it through God who gives me strength and at the same time I do it with the passion and fearlessness of a lion because God gives me strength. What a great life to live!