Gentle Giants — Ways of Working Together
Confidential conversations, leadership sessions, workshops and keynote speaking
The scale of an assignment may vary enormously.
Sometimes one carefully held conversation is enough to illuminate a situation that has remained hidden for months.
Sometimes a leadership team needs an afternoon in which people can finally step outside their habitual roles, speak more honestly, and rediscover the intelligence already present within the group.
And sometimes an idea needs to enter a much larger room: a conference, congress or gathering where hundreds of people are ready to reconsider what leadership, sensitivity, responsibility and organisational life might become.
Gentle Giants can therefore take several forms.
What remains consistent is the quality of attention:
psychological depth, independence, discretion, curiosity, humour, clarity, and a willingness to listen beneath the visible problem.
Private online leadership consultation
A private online consultation offers an entirely independent space for executives, founders, directors, senior professionals and others carrying substantial responsibility.
This may concern:
a sensitive leadership dilemma;
conflict within a management team or board;
questions involving integrity, boundaries or organisational culture;
fear of failure or loss of authority;
loneliness at the top;
difficulty making a decision that may affect many others;
or the simple but important sense that something is wrong, even when it is not yet clear what that something is.
A consultation is not an investigation, performance review or abstract coaching exercise.
It is a confidential conversation in which the personal, relational and organisational dimensions of a situation can be considered together.
Because meaningful conversations need room to unfold, these consultations normally last 90 minutes.
Private online leadership consultation
From €495, excluding VAT
Confidential consultation in Amsterdam
Meetings can also take place in my quiet Amsterdam practice, looking out across the water toward historic Prinseneiland.
The physical setting can make a difference.
Leaving the office may allow someone to step temporarily outside hierarchy, expectation and organisational identity.
It creates a space in which there is no boardroom table to defend, no internal role to perform, and no colleague listening through the wall.
Here, the person behind the position can enter the room.
Confidential 90-minute consultation in Amsterdam
From €595, excluding VAT
Longer consultations can be arranged when a situation requires more time.
Leadership consultation on location
I can also come to an organisation for a private consultation, a board-level conversation,
a meeting with several leaders,
or a carefully defined confidential assignment.
This may be especially valuable when the issue cannot be understood in isolation from the environment in which it is taking place.
Being present on location may reveal things that remain invisible in a formal report:
the atmosphere of a room, the movement of authority, the quality of attention, what is spoken freely, what is avoided, and where intelligence has stopped circulating.
Leadership consultation on location
From €1,250, excluding VAT and travel
Travel outside Amsterdam, extensive preparation and longer assignments are quoted separately.
Interactive half-day leadership session
A half-day session, for example from 13:00 until 17:00, can be developed for a leadership team, department or wider group of colleagues.
This is not a standard training package delivered identically to every company.
The session is shaped around the organisation, the people involved, and the questions that are genuinely alive within the group.
A half-day may include:
a preparatory conversation;
a short presentation or central theme;
guided dialogue;
questions and responses;
reflection on leadership patterns;
exploration of trust, responsibility and psychological safety;
attention to sensitivity and neurodivergent intelligence;
and practical consideration of what needs to change.
Possible themes include:
Leading without hardening
How can authority remain clear without becoming domination?
How can leaders stay open without losing their capacity to decide?
Carrying responsibility without carrying everything
Many highly responsible people gradually become the emotional and organisational container for everyone around them.
What happens when leadership turns into chronic over-responsibility?
Trust is not soft management
Trust is not the absence of structure, accountability or difficult conversation.
It is the condition in which initiative, honesty, intelligence and responsibility can begin to circulate again.
Neurodivergent intelligence in leadership
Sensitivity, dyslexia, ADHD, autism, nonlinear thinking and unusual pattern recognition may bring difficulty in rigid environments.
They may also be among the most valuable forms of intelligence available to an organisation navigating complexity, ethical uncertainty and rapid change.
Connecting workplaces back to life
An organisation is not merely a machine made of separate functions.
It is a living field of relationships, histories, perceptions, fears, ambitions, loyalties, talents and possibilities.
When these connections become rigid, the organisation may remain productive while losing vitality.
A Gentle Giants session helps people notice where life has gone missing—
and where it is already trying to return.
Interactive half-day leadership session
From €3,500, excluding VAT
More complex or extensively tailored sessions may range from €4,500 to €6,500, depending on preparation, group size, subject matter and organisational sensitivity.
Keynotes and congress appearances
Some ideas belong in a larger room.
Gentle Giants keynotes bring together psychology, leadership, neurodivergence, consciousness, trust, organisational life and the changing relationship between humanity and artificial intelligence.
The aim is not to provide another sequence of corporate slogans.
It is to offer an intelligent, surprising and emotionally recognisable perspective that allows an audience to see the workplace—and perhaps themselves—differently.
A keynote may stand alone or be followed by questions, dialogue, a panel conversation or a more intimate leadership session.
Possible keynote themes include:
The Giants Are Awakening—But Gently
Why the next form of strength may no longer need aggression, emotional distance or domination.
Connecting Workplaces Back to Life
How organisations lose contact with their living intelligence—and how trust, curiosity, relationship and responsibility can begin to restore it.
High Sensitivity as an Executive Intelligence
Why the people who notice too much may also notice what everyone else has missed.
The Neuro-Noosphere
How neurodivergent minds may function as the sensory receptors of an organisation, detecting cultural, ethical and systemic changes before they appear in conventional metrics.
Consciousness over Connectivity
We have built technologies that connect almost everyone, while many people feel increasingly disconnected from themselves and one another.
What would a truly conscious workplace require?
Human Intelligence in the Age of AI
My specialty
As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly capable of linear analysis, what becomes more valuable in human beings?
Intuition, humour, moral imagination, embodied intelligence, sensitivity, relational awareness and the nonlinear leap
may become not less important, but more.
Keynote, approximately 30–60 minutes
From €5,500, excluding VAT and travel
Keynote followed by audience dialogue or Q&A
From €7,500, excluding VAT and travel
Half-day congress engagement
Including a keynote, dialogue, panel participation or additional interaction
From €7,500, excluding VAT and travel
Keynote combined with a tailored leadership programme
From €10,000, excluding VAT and travel
Larger international assignments, major congress appearances and fully customised programmes are quoted individually.
Why these are not ordinary hourly rates
The value of this work does not lie only in the number of minutes spent in a room.
A consultation or appearance may draw upon decades of therapeutic experience, professional training, work across very different social and professional worlds, and the ability to recognise what lies beneath the official version of a problem.
It may require preparation, discretion, emotional precision, intellectual synthesis and the capacity to speak into a complex environment without making it more defensive.
At leadership level, one conversation may influence not only one person, but the atmosphere, decisions and future direction of an entire organisation.
The responsibility—and the potential value—therefore extends beyond the visible duration of the meeting.
A natural click still matters
However large or prestigious the organisation, the beginning remains human.
There must be enough openness, curiosity and mutual recognition to make meaningful work possible.
You are therefore welcome to make initial contact and briefly explain what is happening, what you are considering, and what kind of meeting or intervention may be helpful.
Sometimes the right form becomes immediately clear.
Sometimes the first conversation is simply the beginning of discovering what the real question is.
Gentle Giants
Strength without aggression.
Authority without domination.
Scale without losing tenderness.
Connecting workplaces back to life.
For enquiries:
Jovanna Vriend
Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Telephone: +31 6 48750093
Email: jovannavriend@gmail.com
Explore consultations, leadership sessions, keynote speaking and fees.