Born and raised in the Netherlands, he began his career as a physiotherapist, helping people recover from serious physical trauma. That work taught him something he has relied on ever since: how to hold scientific method and human empathy in the same moment, and how rarely either one is enough on its own.
Then he switched trails. He spent the next two decades leading experience design teams at global technology companies, designing products used by millions of people. Different craft, same discipline. Observe closely. Notice what people actually do rather than what they say they do. Trust that the real problem usually sits beneath the one you were handed.
Walking mentorship, for Mark, is that same attention without a screen in the way. He treats nature as a co-mentor rather than as scenery, because a pattern noticed in a landscape has a way of arriving, a few steps later, as a thought about your own life. He is a graduate of the Walking Mentorship Foundation Program, and it suits him that something this unhurried is grounded in real research into walking, nature, and mentoring.
He now lives in Southern California and walks the range it puts within reach: coastal bluffs, shaded canyons, mountain ridgelines, and a vast desert. He is still working his way through the rest of the world, on foot and underwater, drawn by the sights but even more by what people elsewhere have figured out about being human.
Mark is more interested in the question that opens something up than the advice that closes it down. So: what is the question you have been walking around?
