About Mark Tigchelaar
Leadership for a New World
Transformation from Within
Mark guides CEOs, directors, and young leaders through profound personal and organizational transformation. His unique approach combines extensive business experience with spiritual wisdom to help leaders fundamentally change systems rather than simply winning within them.
"I want to work with those leaders who want to change our system instead of wanting to win within it"
Business Experience
McKinsey & Company
As a consultant, Mark learned the language of business and worked globally with major organizations. He developed his own facilitation style focused on humanity, emotion, and meaningful contribution rather than pure profit maximization. After four years of bringing this approach into corporate transformation, he took three months of complete silence to explore his inner mission – a period that fundamentally shifted not just what he knew, but who he was as a facilitator.
Foundation for Natural Leadership
Co-founder of this Dutch foundation focused on natural leadership development.
Partnership with McKinsey
Years of collaborative work that contributed to what later became Aberkyn.
International Expertise
Worldwide experience with large organizations, teams, and individual leaders in leadership transformation.
Unique Qualifications
- Vision Quest Leader – Certified by Canadian Indigenous Chief Dexter
- Ocean sailor and team leader – Years of experience transcending limits and unlocking team potential
- Systems thinker – Deep understanding of dominant narratives and how to transform them
Learning Journey with Wisdom Teachers
Mark has worked intensively with renowned experts:
- Gita Bellin – Personal transformation and working from love
- Joseph Jaworski – Leadership and synchronicity
- Chief Dexter – Wilderness, wisdom, and Vision Quest methodology
Two Foundations of Transformation
Mark’s work rests on two foundations that together create the conditions for profound change.
The first is technical mastery. Over decades, Mark has studied with the world’s leading practitioners of transformation – formal training as a certified coach, deep immersion in systems thinking, and continuous learning from those making breakthroughs in consciousness and leadership. He understands the architecture of change: how to design programs, when to intervene, how to hold space for emergence. This knowledge comes from rigorous training and relentless curiosity about how transformation actually works.
The second foundation is more subtle but immediately felt by those who work with him. Mark’s own journey through darkness into light – his three months of silence, his wrestle with corporate windmills, his direct encounters with what is really real – has shaped not just what he knows but who he is.
Participants consistently describe something that happens simply through his presence: teams find themselves accessing capacities they didn’t know they had, individuals feel permission to go deeper than they thought possible, breakthrough moments emerge not from technique but from the quality of space he holds.
This isn’t magic, though it can feel magical. It’s what happens when technical knowledge meets embodied wisdom – when someone who deeply understands the maps has also walked the territory themselves.
Concrete Results
Participants in Mark’s programs experience:
- Profound personal breakthroughs – From fear to connection with inner strength
- Clearer decision-making – Making decisions from calm rather than stress
- Improved relationships – Better communication and understanding of others
- Increased self-confidence – Trust to face challenges independently
- Clarity of purpose – Clear understanding of personal mission and impact
The power of connection I experienced was enormous, yet I also felt very small
I've become more loving toward myself and gained more confidence
From Understanding Systems to Transforming Systems
Mark’s journey toward systemic transformation began in childhood at his grandfather’s lakeside hut, where he spontaneously started fishing plastic from the water. This wasn’t activism – it was instinct. The water was his world, his bedding, and he naturally wanted to keep it clean. In caring for his environment, he was caring for himself.
At 18, this calling deepened during an ocean crossing on a small sailing yacht, followed by a solo journey through South America where he lived for weeks with Indigenous people in the Amazon rainforest. These encounters with both the vastness of nature and ancient wisdom traditions planted seeds that would later bloom into his life’s work.
Through economics studies and later lessons in systems thinking, Mark sought to understand the dominant narratives that shape our human-made world. His years of competitive sailing revealed the magic possible when amateur teams transcend perceived limits through authentic collaboration and shared purpose.
The pivotal moment came during his McKinsey years. After four years of fighting “like Don Quixote against windmills” to bring humanity, passion, emotion, and meaningful contribution into corporate transformation, Mark took three months of complete silence to explore his inner mission.
This period of stillness revealed a fundamental truth: real change doesn’t come from working harder within existing systems, but by fundamentally transforming the systems themselves from a new level of consciousness. Upon returning, he resigned and was rehired on his own terms, now operating from an entirely different awareness. His life shifted toward the positive, and he experienced firsthand the power of authentic, inner-driven transformation.
Facilitation from Love
Mark’s approach to leadership development flows from what he calls “great love for everything that is” – a profound acceptance and care that encompasses all aspects of human experience, including struggle, resistance, and breakthrough.
This isn’t sentimental love, but the fierce compassion that can hold space for deep transformation. Those who work with Mark describe something palpable: when he enters a room, people sense that transformation becomes more possible. Not because of what he says, but because of who he is in the space.
This presence comes from his own passage through what he asks of others. Having walked through three months of silence, having faced his own fears and shadows, having learned to draw power not from dominance but from connection to what is really real – Mark brings the embodied knowing of someone who has made the journey.
He describes his work as “teaching is dancing” – allowing energies to resonate with the frequencies of love, assisting others to fall into themselves and surrender to rhythms that are already present. There’s no destination other than this life in all its magnificence.
This approach means Mark works intuitively rather than following prescribed methodologies. What emerges in each session, each Vision Quest, each organizational intervention is responsive to the living reality of the moment rather than imposed from external concepts. Teams often report accessing capacities they didn’t know existed. Individuals find themselves going deeper than they thought possible. The shift happens not through technique alone, but through the quality of presence Mark brings.
As I embrace my soul-centric self, divine grace flows through me assisting leaders calling forth a new world
For Whom
- Are stuck in old stories of power and profit but long for meaningful transformation
- Want to create systemic change rather than just success within current systems
- Are ready for deep inner work that leads to external impact
- Want to develop contributive leadership focused on the wellbeing of all