Stefaan van Hooydonk

Session Description:

Unlock your curiosity for personal & professional success

While curiosity is often associated with children as their natural way to explore and make sense of the world, curiosity is also the driver for success for adults and is the gel that creates positive connections between people. Equally, curiosity is the spark which drives innovation for companies and as a result keeps them ahead of competition. Everyone is born with a healthy dose of curiosity, but when we go through life, some of this curiosity becomes dormant for various reasons. A lack of curiosity deprives individuals, organizations and societies from becoming a better version of themselves.

Now, like with all habits, with the right motivation and external support, we all possess the power to change and regain control of our natural capacity of curiosity – during the session we will focus on finding our way back to looking at the world and asking, ‘why?’ and ‘how?’ and ‘what’s possible?' to help us unlock our curiosity. In preparation for the session, we encourage you to take the short survey to assess your current level of curiosity and get an individual report - globalcuriosityinstitute.com/diagnostics

Personal Information:

Stefaan started his career in investment consulting in China. From there he moved to set up the executive education arm of a major business school in Shanghai, China Europe International Business School (CEIBS), which he ran for 5 years. Subsequently, he moved to the corporate side and set up global learning teams and innovative corporate universities for Nokia (China/Finland), Agfa Healthcare (Belgium), Philips (the Netherlands), Flipkart (India), Saudi Aramco (Saudi Arabia) and Cognizant (UK). His last role was that of Chief Learning Officer for Cognizant, where he overlooked the learning and development for over 300k associates across the globe. He has been globally recognized for his innovative approach to learning, people and technology.

Stefaan has a Master’s degree in Economics and in Chinese, together with postgraduate degrees in Marxist Economics from China, Cross Cultural Management from France and an Executive MBA from Rutgers University. He is a certified ACS and NLP coach. A Belgian national, Stefaan has been married for 25 years to Jeltje Peletier: a successful psychotherapist, coach and yoga teacher. Together they have 4 children: Rik, Femke, Koen and Menko. He practices meditation daily, is a marathon runner and is currently pursuing a masters degree in philosophy.