Manou van Eerten is an entrepreneur and coaching expert for millennials. She coaches people in their twenties and thirties as well as their managers.

Manou is married and mother of two young daughters. She spends as much time as possible with her family

Who is Manou and what drives her?

Kindergarten teacher or riding instructor. That’s what Manou wanted to become as a young girl. In high school she was no longer sure about this. After her final exams, Manou went to France and Israel for a year to volunteer. In Israel, she became fascinated by how people from diverse backgrounds view the same facts differently.

“My Israeli friends told me to watch out for the Bedouins who lived near the kibbutz. Later, however, when I went to work for a Christian-Palestinian restaurant, they said I had to watch out for the Israelis. I was less independent in my thinking than I thought’’.

That was an eye-opener and turned out to be the basis for her further career.

From a Master in Social and Cultural Anthropology to coach training

When she returned to the Netherlands, Manou moved from a village near Groningen to Amsterdam. At VU Amsterdam, she studied Social and Cultural Anthropology. After her Master’s, she started working as a lecturer in Interventionology and a thesis supervisor at VU Amsterdam. Fascinated by the practice of organizational change, Manou made the switch to an organizational consultancy firm, wrote a book about the introduction of the Social Support Act (Wmo) and subsequently became an organizational consultant.

Still, it wasn’t what she was looking for: ‘’What I found really interesting within organizations was what was (and wasn’t) said between people.”

Manou began to doubt whether she really wanted to be an organizational consultant and decided to do more with her interest in people. She followed a coaching course and specialized in millennials:

‘’People in their twenties and thirties are at the beginning of their careers and have to deal with big life-deciding decisions, such as choice of partner, the desire to have children, living situation and
workplace. The current generation of 20/30ers has a lot of knowledge and possibilities, but at the same time they find it difficult to choose what they really want. That vulnerability appeals to me. I want to empower people in making choices from the heart. I try to get someone to do just a little bit more than they actually dare to do every time and I’ll them discover that it’s exciting and also fun to take a first step outside your comfort zone.”