I want people to get a fair read,
 not a quick label.

TRAINING & EXPERTISE

NON-VERBAL COMMUNICATION & MICRO-EXPRESSIONS
Trained at Center for Body Language · Lichaamstaal Training

ACTING & PERFORMANCE
Trained by Margie Haber · Josja Hamann · De Trap, among others

Alongside ongoing professional training in both fields.
View professional background on LinkedIn

From a young age, I was a storyteller.

Singing, dancing, playing, losing myself in fantasy stories. I sang along to English songs before I understood a single word, matching the sound, not the meaning.

There was another side too. I learned early how to come across strong. Over time, that became something I showed automatically, whether I meant to or not.

And people read it.

Judo taught me to look before someone moved.

Reading an opponent meant noticing what came before the action. Too late, and you hit the mat hard enough to lose your breath. My mother used to ask if I was dozing off on the sidelines. I wasn’t. That was my concentration face.

My opponents seemed to read me the same way. More than once, they never saw the throw coming. Black belt. Dutch youth champion. Back then, I didn’t know why people read me that way. Now I do.

On stage, I learned something different.

In singing and acting, intention matters.

My work as an actor and training actress taught me to notice what happens beyond the words.

As a vocalist, you can hit every note and still communicate more than the song. Working in entertainment, on stage, on set and in front of a camera, I learned what it takes to be read the way a role or moment calls for. But I also learned the opposite.

What I thought I was showing wasn’t always what other people saw. Sometimes something non-verbal changed before I even realized it. People picked it up.

They couldn’t always identify what they had seen. But they noticed that something didn’t quite add up.

Then I started seeing it at work.

My bachelor’s degree in business social work was followed by roles in medical sales, case management and quality advisory. Several of those were in the public sector. They put me in conversations where getting the full picture mattered.

What someone said was important. But it wasn’t always the whole story. I started noticing non-verbal signals that didn’t quite match the words or the information in front of me.

While I was still training in non-verbal communication, one case made that especially clear. The paperwork pointed one way. What I noticed in the conversation made me look closer.

In some cases, further investigation revealed fraud. In others, elder abuse. That didn’t teach me that non-verbal signals prove anything. They don’t.

It taught me where to look closer. What to question. And when not to assume.

That changed the way I looked at communication.

I trained further in body language, micro-expressions and non-verbal communication. And the more I learned, the more two sides of my own story came together.

What do I see in you?
And what do you see in me?

Because communication doesn’t happen on one side. What you show becomes part of what they read. What they show becomes part of what you read. And somewhere in between, the conversation changes.

Those two worlds now come together in my work.

I want people to get a fair read, not a quick label.

A first read is rarely the full read.

That is why the NDLIS logo has one open corner.

There is always more to see.

Why NDLIS

Because I know what it is like to be looked at and still not be seen.

And I know what it is like to look at someone and still miss what was there.

NOTICE MORE. ASSUME LESS.

Because you are part of the context.