About the Author
Berend-Jan Hilberts is an independent leadership coach, author and lecturer. For many years, he was the Dean of THNK, School of Creative Leadership.
He considers himself a reluctant economist, an eclectic Zen buddhist and a closet poet. A relatively late convert to the topic of leadership, he spent the first 20+ years of his career in a suit and tie climbing the corporate ladder; making all the mistakes in the book, being confronted by his own reactive patterns more than he cared for.
He joined THNK in its earliest days a decade ago, initially focused on his area of expertise at the time: bringing new ideas into the world. Gradually his focus shifted from growing ideas to growing the people behind these ideas, noticing how real creativity, innovation or systems change came from people who had liberated themselves from the unhelpful self-built prisons they had been living in prior. He revels in witnessing and supporting leaders reaching their fullest potential. As Dean of THNK, he redesigned the program with more emphasis on and depth in the all important inner journey of the participants towards their experienced transformation.
Now he brings the learnings and experience of having guided the inner and outer journeys of more than 600 participants in THNK’s executive leadership program and having guided hundreds more in other programs, coaching journeys or leadership encounters to this book.
And not just from the sidelines. The author has gone through a transformational journey himself more recently, brought about by four big life events in three years time. During each of the periods following these events, he would do his inner work as well as burry himself in heaps of books and articles to understand the theory behind what he was experiencing. It’s all distilled in this book, which rests on a mix of guiding and witnessing transformation in others, lived personal experience and literature study.