Inspired Advisory is the work of Loes Fokker: clinical health psychologist, systems family therapist and transformational facilitator.
I was six or seven when I first knew what I was here for. I would watch people pass on the street and wonder what would happen if we truly connected, if each of us, a column of light, stopped walking past the other.
I grew up in a house where that question was allowed. My father’s shelves were full of books about the soul, generations of my family had been searching before me, and I served at the altar in the little chapel he built in our garage. I was a shy child then, one who felt she had no voice, so I made up stories for my brother at night instead.
My name means light, and for a long time I only looked toward it. I was, honestly, a little afraid of the dark. The work of my life has been learning to turn around: there is light in the dark, and dark in the light.
That childhood question took me into psychology. One of my first jobs was cooking with a man who had lived through psychosis, and walking beside a young woman who had survived what no one should. I became a clinical health psychologist and a systems family therapist, and in 2008 I started Inspired Advisory. Since 2013 I have facilitated YPO Forums, and together with Stefan I built the Argonauts.
I have done my own share of the work, from therapy to plant medicine to mystery schools, and I am still working on it. Life is messy, and I wouldn’t want to have missed any part of it.
Once you see the light, it’s unstoppable.
Whoever calls me, a Forum moderator or a CEO, has usually seen the credentials already. They know I’m a clinical health psychologist with years of training and practice behind me, and if they want to hear more about that, I’m happy to share it.
I live and breathe Forum. For thirteen years I have sat in Forum myself, as a YPO partner, and for just as long I have facilitated Forum retreats, now as a Certified Forum Facilitator. I bring Forum into companies, as a Forum for Business expert, and into families: a Forum for your own family, with your own kids. Through the Argonauts, I have helped carry the Forum way of meeting beyond YPO, into circles in 56 countries. I’m a clinical person, and I also bring other modalities into the work, plant medicine among them.
As a facilitator, I’m known as the intense one. Some people call me the cry maker. I think it comes from a natural trust. I try to live loving humankind, the shadow and the light, so I truly don’t judge, and there is a calmness in me that people can feel. And I always go first: I bring my full story into the room before I ask anyone for theirs. When they trust it, it becomes easier to go into the heart, and there is a lot in our hearts: healing, and the things we normally keep to ourselves. To let your guard down in front of the others is beautiful when it happens. It is part of the beauty of what a Forum can do.
So I go deeper, to where the work becomes transformative, if the group is open for it, and I bring it lightly, with play, so the work goes deep and the room still laughs. What grows from that is a different kind of connection: new tools, more trust in yourself, the courage to show yourself, whether a Forum or a team has been together for five years or fifteen. The missing conversations finally happen, and that depth carries the group through the rest of the year.
Deep work, brought as light.
What I create, in every room, is the same thing: a space where the unconscious gets smaller, and you get larger. The method is the same everywhere: the Four Passages of Depth, Trust, Transformation and Belonging. In YPO Forums, I help a well-run Forum become a transformational one. In leadership teams, I change how a company works by changing the conversations its people have. And in our Lighthouse journeys, we bring mysticism into the daily life of today’s leaders, deep, grounded and professionally held.
In five lines
Who
Clinical health psychologist and systems family therapist; twenty-five years of practice; thirteen years as a YPO Forum facilitator; based in Amsterdam. Married and a mother of two teenagers.
What I do
Take accomplished leaders beneath the surface, to face and integrate the shadow, and up the next mountain: aliveness.
The method
The Four Passages: Depth (meeting what’s underneath), Trust (becoming fully seen), Transformation (light and shadow, without shame), Belonging (from I to we). Adapted to Forum, to leadership and to journeys.
The bridge
Change how a company works by changing the conversations, joining the inner world to outer strategy and results.
The frontier
Bringing psychology, leadership and the mystical together.
If something here names what you have been carrying, the sense that the next step is not another achievement, but a different way of being, I would welcome the conversation.
Begin the conversation →