#53: Leading with heart in a world built on head!
An open conversation with Jamila van de Voort, founder of ChangewithJamila, whose journey moves from early survival into a grounded vision for a more human way of working. After more than a decade in change and transformation roles she saw how strategy fails when people feel unseen. Her own life taught her what fear instability and hypervigilance do to a child and how resilience becomes a way of navigating the world.
All of that shaped The Love Strategy: a framework built on empathy openness resilience and collaboration.
Jamila grew up between cultures and homes, often carrying responsibilities far beyond her age. That sensitivity became both her burden and her gift: the ability to walk into a room and sense exactly what is happening beneath the surface. Later she walked the long path of infertility and IVF, found her own way through it, and became a mother of two daughters she now sees as her greatest joy. Her work is not theoretical. It is lived experience translated into a way of leading that honours emotion, truth and human connection.
Deep dive talking points:
👉🏾 The Love Strategy: a human-centred way of working built on empathy openness resilience and collaboration;
👉🏾 Survival and sensitivity: how instability shaped her ability to read people and patterns;
👉🏾 Infertility and resilience: reclaiming her path after years of IVF;
👉🏾 Turning wounds into leadership: transforming hypervigilance into grounded presence;
👉🏾 Heart-to-heart conversations: why safe connection is the real catalyst for change;
Nuggets of empowerment:
🙌🏾 You can rise from survival into creation when you learn to listen to your body
🙌🏾 Hardship shapes you, but your response is where your power begins
🙌🏾 Empathy is not soft, it is courageous and transformative
Jamila’s empowering quote:
🙌🏾 “If our world had even one percent more empathy, we could create a whole new planet”
Books mentioned;
📚 Bob de Wit: New ideas about strategy: context for meaningful strategy;
📚 Frederic Laloux: Reinventing Organizations: human-centred ways of working;
Where in your work or life are you still leading from the head and what might open if the heart was allowed in?
Connect with Jamila:
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamila-van-de-voort-77996a2/
Company website: https://www.changewithjamila.nl
A word from our sponsor:
Great strategies don’t fail because of process they fail when behavior doesn’t align. Neotopia helps teams turn awareness into lasting change through behavior that moves people forward: https://neotopia.nl
