Soul ID Wants A Piece Of The $113 Billion Leadership Market

By Maria Bregman is Editor-in-Chief of Creativity’s UK. Maria Bregman works at the intersection of art, technology and global business.

Christine Koetsier spent two decades placing executives and ten years testing a method to read what assessments miss. Now she wants the corporate door.

The global management-consulting industry has reached a scale that is difficult to picture. Depending on how analysts draw its boundaries, the market was worth somewhere between $360 and $510 billion in 2025, with the broadest definitions of advisory work pushing far higher. The United States alone accounts for roughly $370 billion of that spending. Inside this vast machine, a tectonic shift is under way. Budgets are moving from pure operational efficiency toward human capital, and the segment built around leadership development and executive coaching has become one of the fastest-growing niches in the industry: analysts estimate it at roughly $113 billion globally in 2026, expanding at close to ten per cent a year.

Hundreds of billions of dollars are spent, in other words, on hiring the right people and making them work effectively. And yet boards keep running into leadership crises at the very top: founders who cannot leave, executives promoted into roles that consume them, teams that function on paper and erode in practice. This is precisely the gap into which assessment tools move – from clinical questionnaires tested over decades to newer systems that try to map motivation rather than behaviour.

Any pragmatic executive who encounters a new method of assessing people – Soul ID, for example, a system that has begun to circulate in impact-investing and family-office circles – will ask a fair question. Why discuss something new when the corporate budget already covers MBTI, Hogan, DISC or the Enneagram?

The answer lies in positioning. The newer motivational approaches do not belong to the category of hard HR profiling at all. Their creators hold to a strict line: this is not diagnostics in the clinical sense, and it should be judged as a language of description rather than as a system of rigid metrics. The main value of this approach lies not in ready-made answers but in better questions. Am I acting from fear or from real strength? Which part of my work is movement forward, and which is merely the repetition of an old protective mechanism?

The problem it is trying to price

I came across this question not in a textbook but in rooms where the stakes are visible. In March, at CC Forum London, some three hundred delegates from more than forty countries moved from the House of Lords through Mayfair to Dartmouth House to discuss how money moves when the planet is running out of time. Alongside the forum, as its trusted partner event, stood Fem Capital Salon – an independent gathering for private wealth, future-fit leadership and stewardship, founded and financed by Christine Koetsier, who also sits on the forum’s organising committee. She described the shift without ornament: capital is treated less and less as a purely financial instrument and more and more as a directional force shaping systems, leadership and long-term outcomes. The formal agenda in those rooms is the movement of money. The conversation keeps drifting somewhere more difficult: whether the people making those allocations are equipped, inwardly as much as professionally, for the roles they occupy.

She made the same argument to me earlier this summer, when the subject was energy rather than capital. At the Energy Tech Summit that opened London Climate Action Week, the transition was being discussed less as a technology problem than as a leadership one, and Koetsier put the point directly: “Technology can enable the energy transition, but leadership determines its speed, scale, and success. Future-fit leaders create impact by bringing together innovation, affordability, and the human-centred principles needed to turn ambition into lasting change.” Soul ID is, in one reading, her answer to the question that sentence leaves open – what actually makes a leader “future-fit”.

Christine Koetsier is based in Amsterdam. She spent more than a decade at Amrop, one of the world’s largest executive-search firms, and now works across GEM Partners, Fem Capital, BoardWise and Arcken AI Studio. For nearly two decades, through GEM Partners in Amsterdam and San Francisco, she has been finding leaders who can take companies through the transition from extractive to regenerative business models. She is also the author of something that does not sit easily on a business card. The method is called Soul Language, its central instrument is the Soul ID, and for more than ten years she has been building it quietly. She is now preparing it for investment and scale.

“Most people have access to more information about the world than they do about themselves.” The sentence is Koetsier’s, and it is the cleanest formulation of the commercial problem. Impact capital, family offices and regenerative strategy all assume a leader who can hold a long horizon. They rarely test whether that person can name their own range under pressure – the difference between steadiness and stubbornness, between authority and the need to occupy the chair.

A misaligned leader rarely shows up in the accounts as one large mistake. The cost appears in smaller places that companies usually attribute to operational noise: decisions that stall without a reason, strong managers burning out without visible overload, teams that deliver the plan and still lose people. That drag is not only fatigue – it is information. A person working against their own grain spends faster than they recover, and anxiety, burnout and a shortened horizon become, on that reading, operating costs.

Christine Powers, a certified Soul ID practitioner who represents the method in the United States, works almost entirely with people for whom that gap has already become expensive. “I consistently work with highly educated, highly successful people, often founders or people in the upper echelons of organisations,” she said. “Many have reached a stage of life and career where external achievement is no longer enough to answer the deeper questions.” Then, more bluntly: “I consistently see very successful people who, not too far underneath the surface, don’t really know exactly who they are.”

She described, without names, the founder and chief executive of a start-up worth roughly forty million dollars, preoccupied with succession, with the sale of the company and with the legacy of everything she had built. “This was on a practical level, but also at an existential level.” The client sold the company and stepped away, and Powers accompanied her through it. The observation the whole piece turns on is this: eventually the business question and the identity question become the same question. It begins with what happens to the company. Underneath it sits another one – who am I when I am no longer the person running this.

Asked what changes first for a new client, Powers did not say purpose. She said decisions, and then boundaries. “Boundaries tend to shift first, because they now understand where they begin and where they end. You can only set a boundary when you understand that about yourself.” It is a small, unromantic claim. In a family office, at a founder’s exit or in a board transition, it is also a due-diligence claim.

What Soul Language is

The mechanics are unglamorous, which I mean as praise. You answer a questionnaire, alone, in about twenty minutes. What comes back is a document called your Soul ID: one dominant energy, two supporting wings, usually two collaborative ones, mapped across seven aspects of a person – Role, Goal, Fear, Approach, Mindset, Adaptation and Phase. The claim behind it is not that a person is a random bundle of traits, but that there is a readable structure: a role, a fear, a goal, a way of acting, a way of thinking, a way of adapting, a phase of development.

At that level it looks simple. Powers believes the simplicity is a useful disguise. “The top layer of Soul Language may look simplistic, but once you dive into the nuances of how your chart puzzles it together, it can take years of work to really understand.” This is why Koetsier calls it a feedback system rather than a personality test. A test tells you what you are. A feedback system tells you where on your own range you are currently standing – a question you can answer differently tomorrow.

Every characteristic is treated as a bandwidth rather than a fixed point. It has an elevated pole and a lowered one: the same trait moves between protection and openness, fear and trust, narrowing and expansion, reaction and a chosen act. People do not live in one state; they move. The method’s useful claim is that the movement has a pattern, and that a pattern, once visible, can be worked with rather than merely endured or moralised. Fear, one of the seven aspects, is not treated as a defect to be suppressed but as an old protection – a setting the psyche and the body learned in order to survive. Many reactions that look like present-tense choices are traces of that setting. The work therefore begins not with the slogan “become better” but with a more precise gesture: seeing how you were assembled, and what in that assembly is asking to be updated.

Neuroscience, stripped of poetry, speaks in a similar register. The brain is a prediction machine: it compares, discards and holds what looks viable, and it is built to conserve safety rather than to deliver happiness on request. That is why familiar patterns persist even after a person has understood, in principle, that they want something else. Inner change, in that light, is not a better decision but a gradual retuning.

Koetsier is precise about authorship, and precision here is a compliment. She did not invent the seven archetypes around which the energies are described – the Helper, the Artist, the Warrior, the Scholar, the Sage, the Priest and the King. She encountered a body of archetypal material, trained in it, studied under the leading consultant working with it and under his trainers, and tested it quietly for years on candidates and clients before she trusted it. Her husband was the first person she put through it. What she built is everything around it: the assessment, which had not existed; the instrument that turns the assessment into a readable personal document; the decision, on a partner’s advice, to position the material as a language rather than a system; and fifteen years spent translating dense metaphysical language into something a chief executive could read on a plane.

That last part is the actual work. Anyone who has tried to move a body of ideas from one register into another knows that the translation is where value is created or lost. The older demand has not gone away – measure, self-knowledge, a centre that holds under pressure. It has been waiting for a language a board can stand to hear.

Her own route to the material runs through a hospital, and for a business reader it can be told in one sentence. A serious accident cost her the use of her right arm and five years of her life. The question in her head, she says, was never whether it would end; it was when. Executive search came afterwards, and with it a professional obsession with human systems: how organisations actually distribute power, how masculine and feminine energies balance or fail to balance in a boardroom, why some very capable people never land in the right seat. Then a weekend workshop in the Netherlands, to which she dates everything that followed. The rest is implementation.

“Ten years ago the world was not ready,” she said to me. “Now the world is ready.”

What corporations already buy

The assessment industry has reached a firm consensus about which tool serves which task.

Hogan is the heavy artillery of the corporate world. It is what companies purchase when a chief-executive hire or a succession plan is at stake. The instrument is normative – a candidate is compared with a working population – and it explicitly predicts how a leader behaves under stress, focusing on the dark side of character and potential derailers. It is expensive and clinically grounded, and newer systems such as Soul ID do not compete with it and should not pretend to.

DISC is the accessible behavioural inventory – Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, Conscientiousness. It is a cheap shared vocabulary that helps a negotiating table function, and it works well in team sessions. Its depth is limited by design: DISC describes observable behaviour and leaves hidden motives untouched.

MBTI gave corporations sixteen personality types and a terminology that has colonised the corporate offsite. As a tool for forecasting how a top manager will actually perform, it is frankly weak. Both MBTI and the newer identification systems are, above all, languages of communication rather than predictive models of productivity.

The Enneagram is the closest relative of the deep-motivation systems. It maps core fears and arrived in business through executive coaching. It rarely survives the strict filter of a hiring committee, largely because of its semi-spiritual heritage.

CliftonStrengths, from Gallup, shows what energises people at work while politely passing over the shadow side of those strengths and the conflicts they can generate. The newer generation of tools is built precisely on that omission: the analysis of both the elevated and the lowered expression of the same trait.

What it does to a career – and what it did to a team

Powers is an unusual advocate for anything. She is trained across several modalities, has walked the business and spiritual worlds in parallel her whole life, and with her husband owns Asa Adirondack, a boutique retreat centre in the mountains of upstate New York. When she received her own Soul ID profile she cried, which she explains without embarrassment. What actually landed was more specific.

Her Soul ID profile contains significant King energy – leadership, direction, authority. She had spent a career being placed in leadership positions and had never felt right in any of them. “What I learned is, as a Sage, I’m not the King. I’m the King Whisperer.”

The relief in that sentence is the reason the method has any purchase in a professional setting. Here was a capable woman repeatedly promoted into a shape that did not fit, who had always preferred the second chair, right behind the chief executive, and who had quietly assumed that this preference was a deficiency. The language described it as a design rather than a failure. “I’m not the Queen. I’m the Queen whisperer,” she now tells clients, and says the line is almost universally intriguing. It was the first thing I wrote down.

The language also survives ordinary life, which is a better test than a retreat. Everyone in Powers’s family has done Soul Language. “Oh gosh, you’re such a Scholar today,” she quoted, and then, in the voice of one of her children: “Yeah, I get it, Mom. You’re a Sage. I get it. I get it.” A language you can be teased in is a language that is actually being spoken.

Nicolette Koeman is the organisational case, and therefore the one that matters to anyone trying to take this into a company. She met Koetsier in a hair-and-makeup room in Prague, at a fundraising gala, in the pandemic years. Koeman is Dutch, holds a law degree and a degree in Spanish language and culture, and moved to Mexico at twenty-five. She works for an international disaster-relief organisation founded after the Indian Ocean tsunami, which she joined as a volunteer and where she built the Mexican office from nothing. After the 2017 earthquake the office moved from surviving to thriving – and that, she says, is also where she got stuck. “I was really feeling that my journey within Mexico had been consolidated, that I had hit my ceiling.”

Koetsier’s response, in Koeman’s telling, was that she still had a great many mountains ahead. Koeman did the assessment without fully understanding what she had agreed to, opened the document, and found – in her words – something like coming home: not a mood but a vocabulary, with words suddenly available for how she described her strength, her weaknesses and her opportunities.

That was five years ago, and nothing cinematic happened next. She returned to the document every year, and says the same words meant different things depending on the year. She applied for a role at headquarters in the United States and got it, took over marketing, and when the organisation’s chief development officer retired, argued for merging fundraising and marketing communications into one function and for leading both. She has been doing that for three years.

Then she did the thing the method’s commercial future depends on: she used it on her team. Her direct reports are multicultural and fully distributed, and her formulation of the problem is the best line anyone gave me about organisational communication. “Even when we all are very much comfortable in speaking English, we speak different soul languages.”

Everyone received their own Soul ID profile. Some were nervous; some were delighted. The gain she describes was not motivational. “We started to respect that everybody has positive energies and negative energies, and we were able to further identify when people were acting from different energies.” The process also produced departures, which she names rather than hides: some people read their profile and concluded they were in the wrong seat, and the organisation had what she calls honest conversations about separating. The team that remained, she says, became genuinely collaborative rather than competitive, and the last two financial years have produced the strongest revenue results in the organisation’s history.

She is careful about causality, and so am I. A merged department, a new chief executive who she says speaks her language, and five years of her own hard work all sit inside that result alongside the method. What is not in dispute is that she used it deliberately, as a management instrument, and would do it again. There is a further honesty worth recording. “This is not a magical solution, a magical formula,” she said. “You need to do your own work on the sideline. It is a tool that can support you with opening up your eyes, making you more conscious, but it does require a deep level of reflection and interpretation.” And then the sentence that should probably be printed on the assessment itself: “It doesn’t come on a silver tray. You need to work hard for it.”

For years in Mexico she had been, in her own phrase, the slightly odd very tall foreigner who was complimented on her Spanish. She did not believe anyone was seeing what she calls, beautifully and untranslatably, the true Nicoletness. That is a leader’s human sentence – and it is also a management sentence, about the fact that a shared English is not the same as a shared language of decisions.

Erik de Groot, a private client in the Netherlands who came to the method through Koetsier, did not send a dated case with a decision and an outcome. He sent, in writing, a working description of the same mechanism at individual scale. Soul ID, he wrote, gave him “the insights and tools to read other people,” so that it became easier to understand behaviour and respond to it, and a more reliable approach in conversation “both privately as well as in business.” He also reached for the register the method has not yet translated for a procurement committee – a mirror to the soul, a soul-link, an ongoing path toward becoming a better person. That is useful in its own way: it shows how the language sounds before Koetsier’s fifteen-year translation exercise.

The retention problem

The real commercial intrigue in a market of $113 billion is not whether Soul ID can push Hogan out of recruiting budgets. It is whether a system for reading motives can do useful work once a person is already in the seat: whether it can help set personal boundaries, lower friction in a team, or manage the risks that come with the exit of a key partner.

Powers, the method’s most articulate practitioner in the United States, has not been able to carry it into a corporate building. “One of the things that I’ve not quite cracked is how to introduce it into a corporate setting,” she said. Each business, in her view, has its own Soul ID, and so do the key people inside it, and the application seems obvious to her. She is emphatic that the limitation is one of perception rather than substance: “This is actually a very rigorous tool with a complete methodology behind it. Although it is deeply spiritual and existential, it is also very practical.”

Set that beside Koeman, and the shape of the commercial question comes into focus. The method did enter an organisation, ran across a distributed international team, survived contact with performance management, and produced results its leader is prepared to attribute to it in part. The difference may be sector – a mission-driven disaster-relief organisation is not a hedge fund. It may also be position. Powers arrives as an external consultant asking for permission. Koeman was already the person who decides.

This is the sustainable-business argument in practical form. If regenerative models, long-horizon capital and multicultural teams fail when leaders cannot name their own range, then a shared language of motive is infrastructure. The person who can hold that range is not simply the fastest adapter to new conditions; they are the person already able to operate at the tempo of a more durable system – more exact about motive, more careful with energy, less at war with the seat they occupy. Koetsier has spent thirty years in exactly the rooms where permission for such tools is granted or withheld.

What is now being built on top of the Soul Language method will decide whether it remains a practice or becomes a company. The architecture, as Koetsier sets it out, has the methodology as the foundation and the applications as the business model. At the centre sits the Soul ID Avatar – a persistent identity layer that travels with a person across an ecosystem of applications in education, human development, mental health and longevity. Around it, intelligent feedback agents are being built to help translate what the profile says into what a person actually does on a Tuesday.

Christine Koetsier is careful about one distinction: the Soul Language Method, in her telling, is not artificial intelligence. It is a human framework, and the software is being assembled around it rather than in place of it. In a world where algorithms try to anticipate every business step, a personal, self-authored map of a leader’s identity and motivation becomes precisely the missing context. The human brain is already modelling possible futures; the only question is which version of the future your top manager is carrying, and whether the company has any access to that understanding.

The success of any new instrument will also depend on the register it chooses. A coordinate system that speaks the dry language of HR metrics will find a very different buyer from one that works as an honest mirror for a leader’s real motives.

When Koetsier wrote to me this month, she made a point of the timing. “After more than ten years, we are not starting to imagine what Soul Language could become. The foundation, the experience and the applications are already there.” And she made a point about herself: “I see myself much more as the voice of the founder than as a preacher of Soul Language. I don’t stand outside the method explaining it to others; I live my own Soul ID and use it as a feedback system in how I make decisions, create, relate and navigate the world.” Her own profile is Sage with King energy. Read against Powers, who found relief in discovering she was the King Whisperer rather than the King, that is a quietly interesting fact about who ends up building things.

One place to watch whether the corporate door opens is Koetsier’s next room. On 30 October the Fem Capital Salon brings its London edition to a rooftop above Soho – an afternoon soiree held under the principle of Sharing over Success. I will be there, as will Erik de Groot.

Powers found a sentence that reorganised a career. Koeman found a document she has been rereading for five years and a team she rebuilt around it. Both named the limits before they named the benefits, which is not how people talk about things they are selling.

Health, wealth and prosperity are only truly developed durably through joy, love and gratitude, Koetsier writes at the end of her book. It is not the sort of line that survives a due-diligence meeting. It may be the sort of line that outlasts one.

Disclosure: Christine Koetsier, Christine Powers, Erik de Groot and Nicolette Koeman gave interviews for this article; The publication retained full editorial control.

Maria Bregman is Editor-in-Chief of Creativity’s UK. Maria Bregman works at the intersection of art, technology and global business.