A half-day retreat for women carrying more than anyone can see, including you. Executive-level thinking, applied to a personal capacity.

What's Actually Yours

You are still standing. Still showing up, still delivering, still holding the household, the job, the people who need you. Nobody has ever sat you down and mapped what that's actually costing you, because nobody maps that. In a transformation programme, someone tracks the load. In a life, no one does it for you.

This half-day does that.

Who this is for

Women who are functioning. Succeeding, even. And who know, privately, that something in the load doesn't add up.

You're the one people bring things to. You've got a reputation for being able to hold it. You're not in crisis and you're not looking for permission to rest — you want to understand why the maths stopped working, and what to do about it.

The shape of the morning

Arrive, tea, and a stack of cards — you empty your head onto them before we do anything else

A yang to yin yoga class: strong and physical to start, then long held floor postures, then complete stillness. No experience needed, everything adapts

We stop and share a drink together: ceremonial cacao or herbal tea, your choice. A pause, not a ceremony

The Load Audit — the centre of the morning, below

We close the circle: what you're taking, what you're leaving

The Load Audit

Four questions, and every card you wrote that morning.

You sort them into what got handed to you because someone assumed you'd carry it, what you absorbed without ever agreeing to, and what you actually chose. Most women have never separated those three. The gap between them is where the exhaustion lives — and it's the first time most people see, in their own handwriting, how little of the load was ever a personal failing.

You do part of it with one other woman, and you hand something over out loud, in your own words, to someone who is listening.

I'm in the room the whole time, coaching. Not lecturing from the front. If you get stuck on a card, or you write something down and it stops you, I'll work with you on it there and then. That's the part that doesn't fit on an agenda, and it's usually the part women tell me mattered.

What you leave with

A sorted picture of your own load, on paper, that you can look at again in three months when you've forgotten this feeling.

The language to tell the difference between a demand that came with the job and one you took on because nobody else would. That distinction is the whole thing. You can't renegotiate a load you can't name, and you can't stop absorbing what you've never noticed you're absorbing.

One thing you've put down, out loud, in front of a witness.

And the evidence that the problem was never your capacity. Your own handwriting is harder to argue with than anything I could tell you.

What it isn't

Not therapy. Not a wellness day. Not another thing telling you to rest more, and not a workshop that ends with a worksheet. You go home with your own cards, sorted, in your own handwriting.

Who I am

I'm Jess West. ICF-credentialed coach, 500-hour yoga teacher, qualified burnout coach, and host of the Successful AF podcast. I also still run large-scale change and transformation programmes inside organisations at Director level — this session takes the way we track load in a transformation programme and turns it on the load you're actually carrying.

I've been the woman still functioning. This is the session I wanted and couldn't find.

Description supplied by the event organiser.