Last week I made the case for why complex transition can't be worked out on your own. This week I want to do the opposite, which is to be completely unromantic about what I'm actually offering.

If you're considering committing six months to something, you should know precisely what you're agreeing to before you agree to it. So no metaphors. Just what happens, why it's built this way, and what it costs.

What happens in a session

We meet every three weeks, online, for 90 minutes.

Every session has a structure, and the reason matters. Groups without structure become support groups. They're warm, everybody feels better afterwards, and nothing moves.

We start with what's actually shifted since last time. Not how everyone is feeling, what moved. That takes a few minutes per person and does more work than it sounds like, because saying out loud that nothing moved for three weeks is usually the most useful sentence in the room.

Then the bulk of the session goes to each woman, in depth. Her situation is the agenda item. The rest of the room asks questions rather than giving advice, which is a discipline and takes a session or two to learn, and I'm there to keep it honest and to name the thread when it appears.

We finish with what each woman is going to do before we meet again. Specific, and small enough to be true.

Why six months and not six weeks

This is the question I'm asked most, usually by women who'd prefer a shorter commitment.

Six weeks is enough to get clear. It isn't enough to find out whether you were right.

A woman decides something in month one. She's confident, it's a good decision, and I believe her. Then month three arrives, the decision meets reality, and something doesn't work the way she expected. That's the moment that matters, and it's the moment a six week programme has already finished and left her to handle alone.

Six months also makes performance impossible over time. You can hold a version of yourself together for six weeks. You cannot do it for six months in front of the same five women, which sounds uncomfortable and is exactly the point.

And there's a slower thing that only happens with time. Most of the women I work with are under pressure to have an answer quickly, usually for somebody else's benefit. Six months is long enough to stop performing urgency and let a decision actually form, which is a different thing from delaying it.

Who's actually in the room

Small, and deliberately so.

Senior women, mostly in their forties and fifties, spread across several countries and time zones. Some are still in the organisation and working out whether they stay. Some have already left and are building something. Some are between the two and can't yet say which way it goes.

What they have in common isn't a sector or a stage of career. It's that each of them is carrying something real that she hasn't been able to put down anywhere else.

This is why it's by conversation rather than a checkout button. The mix is the product. If I fill the room with whoever arrives first, I've sold you the thing without the part that makes it work.

What changed for one woman

She came in with a business aimed at three different audiences, finishing nothing for any of them. We spent a session on it, and she left without an answer and slightly frustrated, because she'd hoped to walk out with one.

The next morning she wrote in her notes that she'd focus on one market and had been spreading herself too thin. Within weeks she had a working website, a content system, and a business she could sustain.

Notice the timing. The session didn't hand her the answer. It set up the morning after, and that's what six months is really for, because that pattern needs to happen more than once.

What it costs and how you get in

USD 1,800 for the six months.

It's by application and conversation. You put your details in, we have a proper conversation about what you're navigating, and either it's right or it isn't. I've said no to women before and I'll do it again, because putting somebody in the wrong room helps nobody.

The first session is on 22 October, and applications close on Friday 16 October.

If you've been reading these for a while and thinking about it without doing anything, this is the week where thinking about it stops being an option and becomes a decision either way. Both are fine. Not deciding is the one that costs you.

Start a conversation here.