Welcome!
Personal One-on-One Retreats with Sue are open on a rolling basis.
I’m glad you’re here to learn more.
Personal Retreats for Women in Worklife Transitions
If you’re a woman facing the wilderness of your “what now?”
this one-on-one Retreat is for you.
You may be here because you’re feeling a strong hit about what you’re done with:
A long-standing career, a certain way of working, empty relationships.
You may be here because you’ve begun catching glimpses of the life you want in the Next Now.
And you may well be wondering if there’s something up ahead that can really fulfill your burning desire to live purposefully, creatively, joyously.
I’m here to tell you Yes!
If you’re a woman over 50, you may be catching glimpses of what you feel done with. You might be hearing whispers (if not outright shouts) of what the next chapter of your life is wanting to be.
I have learned that this is usually how the over-50 transformation starts: with intuitive glimpses asking for our attention.
The Personal Retreat I offer helps you navigate this process. It’s based on what I learned from my own wilderness experience and whole new happy trajectory of work/life after realizing my global work as a Conscious Business consultant felt complete. I just could not fathom what could come next .
I help you navigate this time into what you *really* want in your Next Now.
This is your time.
If these stirrings are familiar, I invite you to fill out the questionnaire below. We’ll then talk by phone about whatever is coming up in your over-50 “what now”? If you decide a personal Retreat is right for you, you’ll join many like-minded women I’ve worked with who have come out with a roadmap and Next Now vision that includes all the important aspects of your life that you want to enhance.
With my guidance, you will tap the inner knowing you already have. You’ll be invited to think about your purpose, how you want to shape it, and the lifestyle and relationships that will satisfy and deepen your life experience.
I use a four-step process comprised of:
1) mapping your career/life timeline,
2) exploring where you are in your life using the S-Curve of growth and change,
3) creating Possibility ScenariosTM that let you expand the possibilities for your life,
4) and composing a Map/Plan for your next now.
Over a 3-week period with customized dates to your schedule, we:
* Meet 6-7 times on zoom
* For one-two hours each session
* Engaging the four-step process
* With assignments and reflective writing in between
* Most importantly, we talk in-depth at each step to capture what you’re discovering.
* I use my Master-trained background in Conscious Business, years of women’s research, the S-curve framework of growth and change, and application of EQ/SQ practices to help you birth your Next Now; the life you want.
For 3 months following the Retreat we meet once/month to address challenges, new learnings, tweaks to your Plan, and for me to support your new ways of being/doing.
I’d love to support your Personal Retreat journey toward your Next Now.
This is the time to compose the life you want.
AFTER THE RETREAT …
You will have a refreshed sense of purpose, a plan to serve as your touchstone going forward, and my support.
LEADING THE RETREAT
Sue Brightman, Founder, For Women on the Journey of Their Lives
Looking back on 30 years of conscious business consulting, I’m humbled to have fallen in love with clients all over the globe. But even more important is the clarity I’ve gained since 2015. My calling has always been about listening to the lives other others and helping them create new possibilities. For three decades now, I’ve listened and “possibilitized” as a leadership development facilitator, teacher and coach.
My career path began taking a different turn at 55 as more women my age seemed to be looking for new inspiration and direction and coming to me for coaching during this transition. At a retreat I attended ten years ago, I caught a clear glimpse of what Love might lead me to create in the future. At that retreat as I did the exercises alongside all the women in attendance, I realized that this was what I most wanted someday: to host retreats and help midwife women into their own discoveries about what they truly want. Fast forward to when my work began a natural shift to working with women over 50. Having worked through my own passage from a successful career to something new and deeply fulfilling, I’ve loved witnessing the changes and breakthroughs many other women are making as they discover all that is possible in Adulthood II.
I launched research to interview 100 women between 50-70+ in 2016. From it, I’ve discovered 9 wise and wonderful principles about navigating life at this stage. My quest is to bring their voices into the world in a book filled with their words and insights — a blueprint for all of us as we “continue becoming” and following our highest callings.
I’m thrilled to rededicate my lifework to supporting you and courageous women everywhere who want to chart purposeful and fulfilling paths well beyond their 50s. I hope something on this page inspires you to join me and our Retreat tribe in the early springtime of Colorado to discover what you want for your life ahead. I am deeply privileged to be doing this with work you and creating a welcoming space and sturdy space where you can reflect, reorient, and re-purpose your life. Grand possibilities await you here.
Encouragement from Sue
I asked my photographer to take this picture near the rapids of the Colorado in 2019, close to the place where we held in-person Retreats before the pandemic.
Author William Bridges calls the territory between “what has been” and “what’s to be” the wilderness. For many of us, the Wilderness of a life transition can feel unsettling and disorienting, but it holds tremendous wisdom and gifts when we’re willing to slow down, listen, and consciously plan the path ahead. It also helps to have a guide!
Human nature often causes us to make an “end run” around the Wilderness period, but the cost of doing that can be high. This Retreat celebrates the transition we, as women over 50, are traversing in our individual lives — which is also a time of evolutionary change for the role of women in the world. It is a privilege for me to help women safely explore this transition period — using all I’ve learned and applied through decades of coaching and leadership development, but even moreso from my research about women over 50. The 100 interviews I metabolized and share in my book A Call to Further Becoming are a bedrock of wisdom I’ve embodied, and want to use for your benefit and life.
I encourage you to give yourself this Person Retreat as an investment in yourself: a time to identify what you’re done with and to let come the new beginning, whatever you want it to be. You are needed — to be who you uniquely are, and do what is uniquely yours to do.
What’s Included
- Customized retreat dates over a 3-week period.
- 7 virtual sessions on Zoom during the Retreat period that follow best practices for life-opening, life-changing results.
- Space between sessions to stave off zoom fatigue and allow critical reflection and writing time.
- Four (4) impactful guided exercises that layer upon each other for revealing needed during your Retreat.
- My coaching, coaxing, inquiry, and guidance at each step, allowing you to hear your own wisdom and wants
- Consciously addressing your fears in a realistic way, whether they are financially-related, identity-related, career-related, age-related, relationship-related.
- Practices learned in my research on women over 50 that give you concrete ideas and handrails to rely on
- Tailored focus on you: honoring what comes up for you during the Retreat process, always different from one woman to another.
- Examples of other women’s Next Now Plans/Maps to provide you creative ideas on how you may wish to capture your Plan.
- Room for you to engage your spiritual practices during the Retreat – journaling, meditation, prayer, inspired reading – in service to the listening you will do.
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Guarantee of a final Map/Plan that reflects exactly what you want for the Next Now!
AND ~
- 3 months of coaching to support your new way of being, help you navigate challenges and break old patterns, celebrate your successes with you, and help you sustain your promising new life.
What’s NOT Included
- You will need a stable wifi connection with a good camera and good audio so we can connect without distraction.
- You will need basic familiarity with zoom.
- This Retreat does not include therapy. If therapy is desired, you will want to contact a licensed therapist.
Why give yourself the gift of this Personal Retreat in 2024?
Because no one can caretake your life and your future better than you.
Because no one can hear your inner voice more clearly than you.
Because no one knows what you are done with more profoundly than you.
And because no one can hear the deserving celebration of the life you’ve lived so far, the call of this moment, and the opportunity to compose the life and work that’s right for you.
Join me.
“The retreat provided a wonderfully safe process to guide me to some inner thoughts that I actually suppressed under the weight of my working life. I’m involved in whole new work endeavors now, with new partners and a fabulous chamber choir that’s the caliber I find immensely fulfilling! I am deeply indebted to you for supporting me through the journey to this place.
— Fiona Henderson, Hanya Partners, United Kingdom