The long way here
wasn’t a straight line
Hello, I’m Astrid
Change has been my work for more than twenty years.
Curiosity has always been the thing underneath it.
I’m fascinated by what makes people move, what gives us energy, and what helps an idea become something real.
I learned early that there is more than one way to see the world.
I grew up in Algeria, a Dutch child in a world of languages, cultures and different ways of doing things. By the time I was nine, I spoke four languages.
When I returned to the Netherlands at ten, I was suddenly the outsider. Everyone else seemed to know the rules. The frames were already there.
I didn’t.
Perhaps that is where my fascination with people began: with the discovery that what feels obvious, normal or true depends very much on where you are standing.
“ IF THE JOB YOU WANT DOESN’T EXIST….
I didn’t set out to work in change.
I studied Arabic, spent time in Egypt and eventually came home to a series of jobs that, frankly, didn’t make me feel particularly alive.
Then a colleague asked me:
“If the job you want doesn’t exist, why don’t you create it?”
So I did.
Across cultures, people are remarkably different. And remarkably the same.
What began with translation became language training, cultural training and eventually a fascination with what makes people and teams move.
Someone noticed.
“You’re good with my team. We’re facing a big change. Will you help us think about it?”
That question became a career.
Across cultures (country and corporate cultures alike):
We want to feel safe. To belong. To be recognised.
To know who we are when things around us change.
And to believe we can succeed in whatever comes next.
That changed the story for me.
Because somewhere along the way, organisations became very good at acceleration.
Faster. Leaner. More efficient. Another transformation. Another optimisation. Another round of doing more with less.
And I became increasingly interested in what gets lost when the wheel keeps spinning.
The human being.
Energy. Curiosity. Craft. Connection. The pleasure of becoming good at something simply because it matters to us.
Those things were never new to me. Writing, photography, languages, flowers, poetry, making things with my hands — they had always been there. Life just became busy enough to push them towards the edges.
Now I’m bringing those worlds back together.
Not as an escape from serious work.
As part of it.
Because I believe organisations, teams and people do better work when there is room to notice, question, connect, make and occasionally breathe.
That is what Feel. Think. Change. Make. is about.
And perhaps it is what my work has always been about:
Creating enough space for people to see what could come alive next.
