About
I am Marco. I do this work in Utrecht.
Your Anthesis is a one-person practice offering coaching and counselling to queer and international adults, in English and Italian. I built it around the kind of support I wanted and could not easily find: affirmative by default, honest about its limits, and priced so that people without money are not quietly excluded.
A stage, not a state.
Anthesis is the botanical term for the period when a flower is open and functioning. It is not the whole life of the plant and it does not last. Everything before it is preparation, and something comes after.
I named the practice after it because of what it implies about people. If you are struggling, you are not a failed version of something that should already be finished. You are at a stage, and stages depend on conditions: light, water, time, and not being moved every few weeks. Most of the work here is figuring out which conditions you are actually missing, and then arranging to get them.
Where I am, said plainly.
I would rather be clear about my qualifications than let a website imply more than is true.
- Currently: [your current qualifications and relevant experience, replace this line]
- In progress: the two-year programme at the Academy for Coaching and Counselling, which leads to registration with recognised Dutch professional associations for quality assurance and complaints handling
- Planned: a master's in sexology for healthcare professionals, to work with sexuality and gender at a properly certified level
- Not: a psychologist, psychotherapist or GZ-psycholoog. Those titles are legally protected in the Netherlands and I do not hold them
- Session languages: English and Italian. My Dutch is conversational, enough for daily life but not for sessions
Registered with the Kamer van Koophandel as Your Anthesis, KvK [number].
Four attitudes, in a predictable order.
The six coaching attitudes are a framework from Karen Walthuis for naming the register a coach works in. Mine sits in four of them, and it moves across a package: listening and asking early, teaching and planning later. You can decide in advance whether that suits you.
Listener
You finish your sentences. I do not fill silences or steer your story towards a conclusion I picked before you arrived.
Investigator
Specific questions from the beginning. Often the question you walk in with is not the one worth answering.
Teacher
When a model, a piece of research or someone else's experience would help, I hand it over rather than waiting for you to reach it alone.
Buddhist
What happens in the room is data. Attention to body, mood and what shifts mid-sentence, not only to the account you prepared.
Where this is going.
Right now Your Anthesis is one person. I would like it eventually to be a small group of practitioners who are genuinely affirmative rather than nominally inclusive, keeping the sliding scale as a permanent feature rather than a launch offer.
If you work in this field in Utrecht and that sounds like something you want to build, get in touch.
Thirty minutes, €[00], no obligation.
The intro call is the easiest way to find out whether we work well together.