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Author and speaker shares insights on living a full life with a disability

Niek van den Adel

travels from Netherlands

Niek van den Adel believes his disability has taught him much about life. After a cord injury, he's focused on sharing the insights he's learned during personal development and recovery.

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5 out of 5 stars

"Niek is able to make his unique experience relevant for everyone, personally and professionally. He challenges his audience to think about what really matters in life – and actually do something about it! Niek has energized and challenged the Coloplast Netherlands and UK teams – and we keep coming back to him for more."

Annemarie van Neck, CEO, Coloplast UK See all references

Why you should book Niek van den Adel for your next event

  • Audiences are captivated by Niek’s inspirational story about overcoming one of his biggest life challenges to find love, happiness, and fulfillment.
  • His presentation inspires audience members to overcome adversity, encourage leadership, and remain customer-focused. Niek’s breakout presentations inspire standing ovations.
  • Niek’s book, Crash, sold more than 20,000 copies and is still selling after it has been translated to English. It’s his story of strength in love and a decision to continue living life to the fullest even in the face of disability.
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About Niek

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Every year he speaks with international audiences about his life on the global stage. After becoming a consultant and achieving most of his dreams, a serious injury caused him to rebuild everything. Along the journey, Niek found out that he still had a lot to learn about people. Niek immersed himself in personal development and psychology literature, as well as visiting gurus for guidance. In the midst of this journey, he realized the answers he sought were within. Niek shares an extraordinary journey with people across the globe.

Why you should book Niek van den Adel for your next event

  • Audiences are captivated by Niek’s inspirational story about overcoming one of his biggest life challenges to find love, happiness, and fulfillment.
  • His presentation inspires audience members to overcome adversity, encourage leadership, and remain customer-focused. Niek’s breakout presentations inspire standing ovations.
  • Niek’s book, Crash, sold more than 20,000 copies and is still selling after it has been translated to English. It’s his story of strength in love and a decision to continue living life to the fullest even in the face of disability.

Niek van den Adel suffered a painful spinal injury, which disabled him. His near-death experience caused him to focus on living his best life. In the midst of the pain and challenges, he fell in love with his occupational therapist, who he later married. The couple have three beautiful children. Niek’s life is totally transformed by focusing on the value of people.

After immersing himself in personal development, he realized his life purpose. His book Crash has sold more than 20,000 copies. He’s a speaker, trainer, and coach who travels the world inspiring others to live a full life of purpose. His keynotes focus on leadership, effectively handling change, customer service, and following purpose. Niek inspires audiences with his story, and he is an in-demand speaker and coach.

He leads listeners back to remembering their inner guidance with his belief that inspiration comes from within. Niek has been featured on television, podcasts, YouTube, and other media. He is the founder of a group called Unhindered Hospitable. With 25 colleagues, he helps to make the world accessible and customer-focused for others. By sharing his uplifting story, Niek inspires audiences across the globe to move past challenges to living a fuller life.

See keynotes with Niek van den Adel
Keynote by Niek van den Adel

Ledership

What is an ‘Inspirational Leader’? Are leaders just there to make employees happy? Can’t employees do that themselves? As a leadership speaker, Niek likes to take your organization along a new path to leadership. Fewer managers and more leaders!

The term ‘inspirational leadership’ seems to indicate that a leader is meant to inspire individual employees. A noble pursuit perhaps, but is that the only added value of a leader? And why can’t employees inspire themselves? How do you properly fulfill your role as an inspiring leader?

A great leader must firstly be a member.

Niek is happy to take you and your organization along in the new way of leadership. How do you keep yourself and your employees on track with your mission? How do you ensure self-managing teams, in which you act as an inspiration and booster? So what better to do and what’s not to do? What works for the new generation (generation Y) that was not yet applicable to the previous (generation X)? What does all this require of you as a leader?

Keynote by Niek van den Adel

Customer focus

Sure… we can talk about how we create an organization with customer excellence, hostmanship, the 9+ NPS experience…. We can make it as complicated as we want. But let’s start with the basics. Being nice to each other, to our visitors and to our customers, it doesn’t have to be more difficult than that. As a customer-oriented speaker, Niek will take you on board.

Customer focus, also known as hospitality, is extremely important for any organization. It doesn’t even matter in which industry you are active. At a bank, in a supermarket, in education, or in healthcare: we simply don’t know how to treat each other, our customers, and our visitors. It applies to situations throughout our lives. When you hear someone say “good morning” out loud on the train, you know it can only be the conductor, right? Everyone else present is silent and prefers to avoid contact.

Is that bad? No, that’s pretty funny. It is sometimes good to discuss with each other what we consider to be normal customer-oriented and hospitable behaviour.

When you start working, do you only pour coffee for yourself? Do you sit behind your computer or do you first stop by all the offices to say hello?

CUSTOMER FOCUS IN PRACTICE

Niek can draw on 15 years of hospitality experience. From dishwasher to cook, from waiter to host, from café to restaurant, from cleaner to owner. In his role as an inspirer and keynote speaker, he likes to tell stories about what we can learn from the hospitality industry. What is service – and is it still relevant today? The speech is more than suitable if you:

  • want more happy employees and customers
  • want to go back to the essence of your field
  • want to work on future skills
  • want to get the intrinsic motivation and a power boost
  • want a keynote speaker that people will be talking about for months

As a motivational speaker, Niek likes to go undercover in your organization first. He then confronts your organization in an in-company presentation about what he experienced during the mystery visit – with a smile and the occasional tear. Time and again, this turns out to lead to special findings and useful conclusions that are immediately applicable. Because as I said, let’s not make it too complicated. Something for your organization?

Keynote by Niek van den Adel

Inspirational webinar

We live in a special time. Our health is no longer self-evident, there is uncertainty and we all work from home. This is pre-eminently a time when we have to look for inspiration and new forms of connection with each other. Organize a digital event! Niek is happy to take your organization along in an interactive Webinar about resilience and agility. In an inspiring 45 minutes during lunch or at 4 o’clock with a glass of wine, everything is possible. He shares his story and gives practical tips and skills on how we humans deal with adversity and how we remain agile in this time. Why does one seem to dance in life and the other sits down with the suits? Why are some companies thriving now and others going under? How do you actually develop resilience?

Normally he is on stage internationally about 120 times a year to talk about these subjects. Now it’s time for the online version of this. It works on all platforms from MS Teams to hangouts, to Zoom to all webinar platforms. With an interactive Prezi, he shows that webinars can also be inspiring! Let yourself and your employees be inspired and share these stories with each other so that you stay connected. Reward them for the hard work and innovative thinking of the past few weeks. References from Kramp, ING, Rabobank, Young Colfield, and blue media are available.

INSPIRATION SPEAKER

A spinal cord injury and a syrinx: you wouldn’t wish those two on anyone. But Nick thinks otherwise. According to him, this is the ideal combination for real die-hards. His idea: as long as we can live with it, we should do that. And good. So, eight years after his accident, he married his occupational therapist, was a father of three beautiful daughters, had a nice low-energy house built, speaks as an inspirational speaker, internationally to thousands of people (100+ keynotes per year ), he teaches people that the key to happiness may be in embracing pain, and his blogs are read 200,000 times. His motto: happiness is not in your legs. Happiness is a choice. The following topics are covered:

  • Cope with change
  • Resilience is the key to success
  • Don’t motivate but inspire
Keynote by Niek van den Adel

Speaker care

If there is one concept that Niek feels completely at home in, it is as a Care Speaker

No one has started working in healthcare for the rules and protocols. People who want to mean something to others, work in healthcare, and that is where the potential profit lies. It actually sounds very logical, right? Niek always works from the patient-therapist-family triangle, in which all three must be in balance. But how do you balance a triangle? How do we manage, despite all the changes? How do we get that nice atmosphere back in the department and ensure that patients continue to choose your healthcare institution? How do we involve the environment and the family in the care process?

YOU ALWAYS RECOGNIZE A HEALTHY DEPARTMENT BY THE SELF-BAKED CAKE ON THE BIRTHDAYS, FOR THE EMPLOYEE… AND THE PATIENT

Niek always combines his background in hospitable care with positive Health (Institute of Positive Health): Health as the ability to adapt and take control, in the light of the social, physical, and emotional challenges of life.

Niek likes to combine his personal experiences with positive health. Can you use the elaboration of this definition to start a different conversation? What does this require of the patient and the care provider? Want to know more about Positive Health, told by a man who knows everything about the combination of health and positivity?

Keynote by Niek van den Adel

Speaker change: Resilience

“Reorganization, new technology, new employees, or an increasing workload. The fact is that the world is changing around us. And fast too!”

And that is not bad at all. In an inspiring speech, Niek explains how everything changed for him at the age of 28. How do you shape your new reality in which everything, really everything, is different? Niek remembers being very angry and sad, rebelling against everything and everyone, wanting to go back in time where nothing had changed.

But that strategy did not bring Niek much. Just more anger and grief. But how did Niek -and many others- succeed? Why do some people and some organizations go through changes as if it was nothing?

Niek shares his 5 success factors, so you can start your own change management right away. Imagine you are embracing all the change because you know it will bring you pleasure. Imagine that you are turning every setback into an opportunity, and you do not longer know resistance because you understand that it is not the company and not the change that determines your happiness; it is you and you alone!

Watch Niek van den Adel in action

Niek Van Den Adel - Painfully Happy

Watch Niek van den Adel in action

My roadmap to success | Niek van den Adel | TEDxStendenUniversity

See keynotes with Niek van den Adel

References

"As COO of Equipe healthcare companies, I asked Niek to contribute to a national culture program. And here too Niek shows that speaking in front of groups is his passion. In smaller training courses he creates a safe atmosphere but is very clear, confrontational and always looking for change, which makes him a great added value to our company culture."

Jaco Donselaar

COO Equipe Healthcare companies

The book wouldn't let go of me from the first page. You read it in one breath. It is inspiring for everyone who works in healthcare because it shows you from a very personal point of view how you can really make a positive difference in healthcare, but also how you can sometimes completely miss the point (however well-intentioned). Truly a great inspiration for everyone!

Mirjam van Veldhuizen

Executive Board UMC Utrecht
Non-binding request for Niek van den Adel

Send a simple request. You’ll get a quick reply with fees and availability

  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.
Niek van den Adel
Niek van den Adel

5 out of 5 stars

"Niek is able to make his unique experience relevant for everyone, personally and professionally. He challenges his audience to think about what really matters in life – and actually do something about it! Niek has energized and challenged the Coloplast Netherlands and UK teams – and we keep coming back to him for more."

Annemarie van Neck, CEO, Coloplast UK See all references

Keynote topics with Niek van den Adel