Attend or host Sue’s highly-acclaimed immersive workshop for women over 50: “A Call to Further Becoming: Exploring Paths and Possibilities for Your Promising Life Ahead”
A 6-session interactive workshop for you to lean in, learn about, and apply 10 practices that deliver purpose, joy, and freshness to your continuing life. High-achieving women over age 50 need a map to navigate the wilderness of this new stage of life — and this workshop provides it! Based on Sue’s groundbreaking research on women over 50.
NOW AVAILABLE FOR LICENSING TO OTHER COACHES, TRAINERS, and FACILITATORS. Email Sue for information!
Do you have a circle of experienced women like yourself who are poised to consider next steps in their lives? New professional paths, creative opportunities, deeper relationships, and a desire to seize the moment of reinvention that used to be called “the retirement years“?
In this deeply immersive workshop, hear the new declarations women are pioneering based on Sue’s research about women at this promising stage of life. Follow well-tested prompts to craft the worklife path you want. Join small-group discussions with questions that stimulate you and allow time for vulnerable sharing and reflection. Watch the videos. Enjoy quiet journaling times. Do the homework.
In other words, explore this moment in your life and what might be calling you. And, invite your group members to do the same, right alongside you.
You and every participant will shape your path forward with prompts from Sue and lessons from the 100 women she interviewed. In small groups you’ll share what’s emerging during our six sessions. You’ll get guidance, support, affirmation, and insights from Sue and from the other women attending! And you’ll end up with your Declarations … and a Plan.
Typical workshop rollout *customized* for each group
Mix of consecutive and staggered Fridays.
2.5-hour sessions.
Zoom platform.
Times that work well:
11-1:30am PT (US)
12-2:30 pm MT (US)
1-3:30 pm CT (US)
2-4:30 pm ET (US)
Workshop description
This interactive series is centered around 10 promising themes that emerged from Sue’s interviews with 100 women in their 50s, 60s, and 70s. These themes or “declarations” blast the old narrative out of the water about disengagement, decline, and disappearing at a time formerly known as retirement.
In reality, the new blueprint for women includes exciting new expressions of work, the wonderful freedom of experimentation, bursts of personal creativity, and fulfillment of what’s been unfulfilled thus far. We’re not only redefining what we’re doing but also ways of being including the pursuit of spiritual growth, deeper friendships, and seeking out natural and cultural beauty.
We will engage these themes in each session. You will not only reflect on what they mean in your life, but begin envisioning and planning what you want.
Each session includes:
- Sue’s presentation of key findings from 100 women’s interviews
- Small group discussions: how are you experiencing these in your own life?
- Exercises that invite you to explore 3 tried-and-true paths women take to find the career/work they want at 50+.
- Offloading what you’re Done With! ~ a key step to create room for what’s next.
- Homework and group sharing about what you want in relationships, lifestyle, and home.
- How to overcome common barriers and honor your feminine intuition and wise inner compass.
- Creation of your personal Declarations and Plan, shared with the group in a closing celebration!
What’s in each session?
Session 1 – The Promising Big Picture
* Demographic realities of women over 50: why it’s called “the age of active wisdom.”
* What does it mean to navigate this undefined territory and pioneer forward?
* The universal wilderness: identity and purpose issues ~ and why we have them.
* 10 new themes. Hospicing the old paradigm.
* Small group breakouts.
* Your 3 goals for this workshop.
Session 2 – The Big “What Now?” (Work & Purpose)
* Major transition question at career-completion crossroads: what now?
* Retiring “retirement”: how boring!
* The continuum of feminine intuition: How do we listen to it? Honor it? Where are you on the spectrum and how can you develop this powerful gift?
* The importance of knowing your Done With Its. Exercise.
* 3 helpful ways women navigate the big “what now?”
* Small group breakout discussions
* Capturing your early hits for the next stage.
Session 3 – Exploring the Way Forward (Work & Purpose con'd)
* Firsts: what you’re finding attractive. Honoring their surprising emergence.
* Using feminine tools for exploring possible paths and Firsts: experimentation, curiosity, glimpses
* Capturing and sharing your scenario hits using 3 navigational paths from session two.
* Small group breakouts. Homework.
Session 4 – Taking Care of Yourself and What Matters (Emotional, Physical, Spiritual Choices)
* The role of solitude/quiet time for women over 50
* What we know about melancholy, hopelessness, fear for women over 50.
* The physical “vessel”: old myths, new norms
* Top 3 top self-care practices from 100 women
* Beauty and its important new definition
* Choosing and practicing hope and joy: what we can do to thwart the old narrative of fragility and disengagment? (aka: what do art, music, gardening, and writing have to do with it?)
* Connecting with Something Larger (Spiritual, Soul, Nature, Higher Power, God) and how it plays into this stage of life and further becoming
* Small group breakouts
* Capturing what you want on paper.
Session 5 – Building and Culling Relationships for the Future (Social/ Relationship Choices)
* Relationship characteristics: what are you done with?
* Endothermic vs exothermic relationships
* Blue Zones of the world and what they tell us
* Building life-sustaining relationships: partnerships, romance, friends
* Sisterhood and allyship
* Small group breakout: Are most of your relationships endothermic or exothermic? Where do you want to create deeper relationships in your life?
* Capturing what you want in writing.
Session 6 – Crafting Your Personal Declarations and Plan
* From the detailed prompts in the homework guide for this session, you will present to the workshop group:
— Your “Being of Benefit” statement: where are you needed in the world?
— Your Declarations for your Next Now in each of the 10 categories important to women over 50
— The headline on your Plan
— Initial steps you would like us to witness and provide support
* Feedback from the circle of women and Sue
* Closing celebration
“I needed this workshop! It’s been transformational for me. I feel like I’m part of a big collective of awesome women. You helped me see over 60 is actually a new beginning.”
~ Mary, Jan 2022
“I bought a house and started writing again as a result of this workshop. It’s like I came alive again.”
~ Rebecca, 2022
“When I said out loud what I was done with in my small group it was like a weight was lifted. That permission opened up a whole new space to consider the business my partner and I have want to do. We just bought our new business name! Thank you Sue.”
~ Gayle
Sue Brightman
Researcher, Author, Coach and Retreat Leader for Women Over 50
Founder & Managing Director, Brightman Glover International Consulting
Sue Brightman is author of the #1 best-selling book A Call to Further Becoming: The New Declaration from Women Over 50. Its groundbreaking themes emerged from Sue’s three years’ research interviewing 100 women with a wide range of backgrounds from around the world. After 30 years as a Conscious Business consultant and leadership coach, she pivoted her work in 2016 to focus exclusively on women in their leadership journeys. Her current roles include serving as a Guide/Facilitator for executive women’s groups at Chief – the largest professional women’s leadership organization in the US; as a personal coach, Further Becoming workshop teacher, Retreat leader for women ready to compose their promising ‘next now’ using her Possibility ScenariosTM process; and an instructor for University of Denver’s OLLI Program. In every encounter, Sue brings three streams of expertise: mastery in Conscious Business principles and practices, a unique understanding of the role of women in today’s shifting environment, and experience as an interfaith chaplain whose volunteer efforts have brought exposure to and deepened compassion for the wide range of human conditions. Her former roles include Global OD consultant at Shell Oil, Director of Management Development at Pulitzer Newspapers, Senior Consultant at Covey Leadership Center Houston, and founder of Brightman Glover International in 2000 delivering programs across industries in the US, Canada, Germany, the UK, Hungary, Brazil, Malaysia, Singapore, and Australia. A certified spiritual intelligence (SQ21) coach through Deep Change and master trainer of Conscious Business, Sue builds on her BA in Corrections and Masters work in Human Resource Administration. Based in Boulder, Colorado, she welcomes virtual connecting that allows her working and teaching from anywhere in the world.