Leading Through The Load
Workshops for female leaders navigating high-stakes leadership and the biological, psychological, and structural shifts of midlife, all at once
With over 45+ years of combined experience working across Geneva's corporate, pharma, finance, and creative sectors, we have repeatedly seen the same pattern: organisations losing experienced female leaders in their 40s and 50s, at exactly the moment their talent is most valuable.
Three shifts that collide:
Biological
Hormonal changes affecting sleep, cognition, and the nervous system's stress response.
Psychological
A pull toward meaning and legacy, not just achievement.
Structural
The demanding job itself, often carrying family and caregiving alongside it, often alone and largely unspoken.
We built this workshop series to name these shifts, and to give women in leadership a space to discover, share, and learn together, run by a psychotherapeutic counsellor and a menopause expert who understand the pressures of female leadership from the inside.
Some of our workshops
The Invisible Load
The nervous system, brain, and hormonal shifts behind burnout, and the caregiving and mental load most carry alongside it
For female leaders navigating high-stakes decisions at work alongside the biological, psychological, and structural shifts of this life stage. A half day working through what's actually happening in the body, what's shifting in meaning and legacy, and how it collides with the demands of the job, closing with concrete changes to put into action.
The Hidden Pension Gap
What Menopause Really Costs Your Retirement, and How to Protect It
Why so many women end up with a much lower retirement income because of the years they cut back or stepped away from work, and what can be done now to guard against it.
Why We're Losing Our Best Leaders Between 40 and 45
And How to Change That
What pushes so many women to leave leadership roles during this stage, and how to better support them, useful whether you're in that stage yourself or you manage a team.
Decision Fatigue at the Top
The Nervous-System Cost of Leading Under Pressure
Why senior women under chronic stress make slower, more reactive decisions and burn out faster than the organisation can replace them. Positions nervous-system regulation as a performance-protection tool for your most senior women, not self-care.
1
Half-Day Reset
For organisations that want to start the conversation. Naming the load.
One topic, one room, one half day. Giving a senior-women cohort shared language for what's actually happening, and a first, real space to say it out loud together. An entry point into wider conversations.
Single half-day
Up to 20 participants, in-person
2
Weekly Global
For distributed teams who need this to reach everyone. Consistency over intensity.
A recurring hour, once a week for a month, gradually deepening understanding of self, situation, and others, as we work topic by topic. Light enough to sustain across a whole organisation, wherever people are.
1h weekly online sessions
Series of 4 in one month
3
Full Programme
For organisations ready to change the culture, not just mark a day. Retention, made visible.
The deepest format: a half-day, once a month, with the same cohort, building across four topics. This is where the pattern really shifts, and it's the format that speaks directly to what retention costs when this goes unaddressed.
4 half days, 1 per trimester
Up to 20 participants, in-person
Workshop Packages
Who's behind this
Fleur Jaworski-Richards
ICF-certified Executive Coach.
Registered Psychotherapeutic Counsellor.
I work with leaders across Geneva and internationally who are navigating high-pressure roles and want to understand what's driving their behaviour under stress. I help them see the patterns underneath their performance, whether biological, in the nervous system's stress response, psychological, in what's pulling at their sense of meaning and legacy, or structural, in the sheer weight of the job itself.
That understanding comes from 25 years in senior creative and UX leadership across Geneva's digital agencies and consultancies, including as a senior manager at Accenture, where I learned firsthand what it takes to be a senior woman in demanding international environments, and where my questions about what actually drives people under pressure began.
Those questions took me back to training, completing an MSc in Transactional Analysis (TA) Psychotherapy. TA is the model most widely used in organisational and coaching contexts for understanding how people behave under pressure and how they change. I work holistically across coaching and psychotherapy, using both mind and body. My approach is relational and trauma-informed, working with the nervous system as well as the mind, and I stay in continuous personal development in both psychology and somatic practice.
Sandrine Desmares
Founder of Second Bloom.
Menopause Coach.
I support women through perimenopause and menopause, and help organisations understand what these transitions really mean for their people. My path here wasn't a straight line. Over 20+ years I worked across pharma, luxury, sports, finance, banking, insurance, and creative agencies, including Haleon, GSK, Richemont, Lloyd's of London, Novartis, and Merck, and I saw the same pattern everywhere: midlife transitions misunderstood, barely discussed, quietly costing women their careers and companies their best talent.
Along the way: humanitarian work with NGOs, training in art therapy, a menopause certification, and a menopause-at-work webinar I designed and delivered for the ILO, rolled out across 25 local offices with a focus on SMEs. I'm also a trained #IamRemarkable facilitator, part of a global coalition aligned with UNFPA standards, and I'm building a network of medical and paramedical partners so my work stays complementary to medical care, never a substitute for it.
We've Worked With
