Founding cohort · September 2026 to June 2027
Step fully into your leadership
A ten month programme for women who want to expand their influence and make a meaningful impact, while continuing to nurture their health, their relationships and their sense of self.
Strategy, Identity and Vitality, developed together over a year, so you can lead at a bigger level in the role you already hold or step into the one you want next.
Apply for the founding cohort Or arrange a conversation with me first
Both, rather than either
Influence and health.
A bigger role and a life outside it.
Ambition and the people you love.
Progress and peace.
Johanna helped me to recognise my strengths, trust my judgement and grow my sense of agency. I am a more confident, self-assured and effective leader as a result of working with her.
What the year is for
What expansive leadership looks like
- You know exactly what you want to build. You can say it in a sentence, and your team can repeat it back to you.
- You make decisions at the speed the role requires, and you stop revisiting them at 3am.
- You hold the difficult conversation in the week it needs to happen, and the relationship comes out stronger than it went in.
- You take up the space your role gives you at the senior table, and you sound like yourself while you do it.
- You have the skills, confidence and authority to lead your dream team, create a bigger impact or apply for that promoted position.
- You leave at a reasonable hour most days, and the work still gets done, because you have built something that does not depend on you being present for all of it.
- You have the energy for the people you love when you get home.
- You have time for the things that enrich your life and bring you joy, and you stop feeling guilty for taking it.
A bigger version of your leadership, rather than a bigger version of your workload.
September 2026 to June 2027. Places close Friday 18 September.
What usually gets in the way
You can be capable, experienced and ambitious, and still find yourself getting in your own way
Perhaps some of this feels familiar.
You can see what needs to change. Getting people behind it takes the right conversations at the right time, and enough of your vision shared that people can see what you see. When it does not move, you push the idea harder, or do the work yourself because that is faster, or it stalls completely and falls off the list.
You know what you think, and you do not always say it. You wait to see where the room is going, soften your view so it is easier to hear, or decide this is probably not the moment. Over time you become less visible than your ability warrants.
You make a decision and then lie awake at 3am going back over it. What did you miss. What will they think. Should you have handled it differently. The evidence says you are capable. Something in you has not accepted it yet.
You want people to be happy with you, so decisions that should be simple become complicated. You explain too much, consult for too long, or put off making the call because somebody will not like it.
You are carrying work that should belong to someone else. Handing it over means watching it done differently, or less well at first, and that feels harder than doing it yourself.
There is a conversation you have been putting off for weeks. You know what you need to say. You have rehearsed it more than once. It is the person you are avoiding, not the content.
You keep working. There is always another email, another problem, another thing that would make tomorrow easier if you finished it tonight. Work took the space that used to hold relationships, exercise, friends, reading, thinking and you.
Eventually your energy starts to tell the story. You have less patience, less headspace and less capacity for the very things leadership asks of you.
These are rarely separate problems. Usually they are the same few patterns showing up in different places. The ways you have learned to protect yourself. The approval you are still working to earn. The leadership skills nobody gave you time to build. The energy you have left to draw on.
Trying harder does not touch any of that. Learning to lead differently does.
What makes this different
Three things, developed together
Expansive leadership sits where three things meet. Strategy is how you lead. Identity is who you are in the role. Vitality is what you are running on. Develop all three and each one makes the other two easier. That is the whole design of the year.
Strategy
How you lead
Developing the skills you need to lead well. Setting a direction people can follow. Building a team that performs without you holding every part of it. Having the conversation that unlocks everything else, making the unpopular call when it is right, and influencing beyond your own team, upwards and across.
Identity
Who you are in the role
You trust your own judgement enough to act on it. You grow into the role rather than proving you belong in it, and you understand the responses that show up under pressure well enough to choose something different in the moment. Few leadership programmes go near this, and it is the part that changes how you lead everything else.
Vitality
What you are running on
You have the energy, focus and health to lead and live well on a hard week, not only on a good one. Sleep, recovery, what you eat, and the load your mind carries when you are responsible for other people. A body changes across a career, through years of long weeks, through pregnancy, through midlife.
Strategy on its own gives you a good plan and no capacity to deliver it. Vitality on its own leaves you well rested and still smaller than you should be in the room that matters. Identity on its own gives you self-knowledge without the practical skill to use it. Together, they compound.
How the year works
Three programmes, one year
Each one asks a different question about who you are as a leader. You arrive at the end having answered all three.
Onboarding
Before the first programme begins, you complete an onboarding package. You set your own leadership agenda for the year, complete the Expansive Leadership Profile as your starting picture across the three pillars, and arrive with the shared language the cohort works from.
One
Lead with Self-Trust
Trust your own judgement enough to act on it, and say what you think in the room when it counts.
- Knowing yourself as a leader. Your style, your strengths, your values, and the patterns that drive how you behave under pressure.
- Confidence and self-trust. Building credibility, making your voice heard, and backing your own judgement.
- Thinking clearly under pressure. Decision making, managing cognitive load, and what stress does to your thinking.
Two
Lead with Impact
Build a team that delivers to your standards, and stop carrying work that should no longer sit with you.
- Your role and your team. Where your influence really sits, building culture, performance conversations, motivation, and meetings that work.
- Delegation and letting go. Building capability, holding accountability, and what holding on too tightly costs you and your team.
- Difficult conversations. Feedback, conflict handled well, and staying grounded when it gets tense.
Three
Lead with Authority
Take up the space your role gives you, expand your influence, and step towards your next level without becoming someone you are not.
- Managing up and sideways. Influencing across the organisation and building relationships at every level.
- Leading through change. Communicating through transition, managing resistance, and staying rooted when the ground is moving.
- The leader you are becoming. Your own leadership philosophy, and planning the step after this one.
Vitality runs through all three. Energy, focus, sleep and the load you carry are not saved for one month of the year. We return to it whenever the work asks more of you, in the live sessions and the content, rather than setting it aside.
The rhythm. Three weeks of pre-recorded content that you can access at a time that suits you, and one week of integration to reflect and embed your learning. Around an hour a week of your own time, plus a fortnightly live session with me and the cohort. Integration weeks ask nothing new of you, which is what makes a ten month programme workable alongside a senior role.
Founding cohort, £1,495 for the year, or £149.50 a month.
You know a course is truly worthwhile when you don’t even question whether you can fit it in each Sunday. You simply plan your day around it because you know it’s going to be insightful.
Why this is not another leadership course
Knowledge was never the thing stopping you
Most leadership development gives you frameworks. That knowledge matters, but it only takes you so far.
What it rarely touches is the person carrying it. How you feel on the morning of a difficult conversation. What happens to your thinking when you are exhausted. How the patterns you formed long before you led anyone are still running underneath.
This programme holds three things together: the skills, the person, and the physical reality of doing the job, because all three affect your ability to live and lead well.
I have held ultimate accountability myself, and I hold qualifications in women’s health, nutrition and wellbeing alongside my leadership ones. Ten months of live support as you go through your own real year is a very different thing from a book, a short course, or even a leadership qualification. You are not learning about leadership. You are being coached through leading, live, as the real challenges and the everyday situations arise.
Places for the founding cohort close on Friday 18 September.
See what is included and applyWhat you get
Included in the year
- The Expansive Leadership Profile, your measured picture across Strategy, Identity and Vitality, taken at the start and repeated as the year progresses so you can see what has actually changed
- Three full programmes, each with taught content, frameworks and practical tools you keep and use
- Fortnightly live sessions with me and your cohort, across the ten months
- Your own leadership agenda, set at the outset and reviewed through the year, so the work stays anchored in your real situation rather than in theory
- A private cohort space, to raise questions, share wins or challenges and gain support from your peers and me in between
- An onboarding package to set you up before the first programme begins
Pay in full before midnight on Thursday 10 September for the three private coaching calls.
I liked that it was a safe, non-judgmental space that really challenged me to do inner work. It wasn’t just a lecture and workbook you did for four weeks. It forced you to be reflective, honest, and believe in change.
Who is in the room
Who this is for
Women in senior and middle leadership who are already good at what they do and already carrying real responsibility, and who want the next ten years to look different from the last ten.
That might be:
- More influence and a stronger voice in the role you already hold
- A larger, more visible piece of work you have been circling
- A promoted post you have not yet said out loud that you want
- The same job, led well, with real room in your life around it
This is probably not for you if you want content you can consume without changing anything, or you would like someone to confirm that you are already doing it all correctly. I will not do that, and you would resent paying for it.
On who is in the room. This group programme is written for women. Men who want this work are welcome to meet with me to discuss whether it might be a good fit.
Jo is phenomenal. She is excellent at listening and making you feel understood. She offers practical advice without being prescriptive. She really makes you think.
Who leads it
About Jo
I spent twelve years as a CEO and Principal, in Scotland and internationally, and over twenty five years in senior leadership. I raised two boys alongside it. People used to tell me that nothing seemed to shake me. What they could not see was what it cost to hold that together.
I now work with women in leadership to expand their impact, trust their judgement and lead in a way they can sustain.
140 women from Europe, North America, Asia, Africa and the Middle East joined the first run of Lead with Inner Calm, the free programme this work grew out of.
Chartered Fellow of the Chartered Management Institute · Masters in Leadership and Management · Level 7 Diploma in Strategic Leadership and Management · Certified Menopause Support Coach and Women’s Health and Wellness Coach
One of the most impactful takeaways for me was the realization that I’m not alone in my experiences. There’s power in the growing awareness that the stress and anxiety we often carry in leadership roles are actually shared by so many of our peers.
Early bird · closes midnight, Thursday 10 September
Three private coaching calls with me
Pay in full before the deadline and you also get three thirty minute one to one sessions with me, one for each programme in the year.
In your opening weeks, where we set your leadership agenda for the year together.
As Lead with Impact begins, on whatever your team is actually asking of you.
As Lead with Authority begins, on the step you are preparing to take.
Worth £900. For founding members who pay in full before midnight on Thursday 10 September.
Joining
The founding cohort
This is the first time the Academy runs in this form. The founding cohort is small, the price reflects that, and the women in it will shape how the year develops.
What the year is made of
Founding cohort
£1,495
Ten months, paid in full. Three private coaching calls included before 10 September.
Private coaching alongside the year, £3,995. A small number of women take the Academy with one to one coaching from me beside it, so the work goes deeper and moves faster on whatever they are actually carrying. Places are limited, and we always start with a conversation to check it is the right fit for you. Arrange one here.
Before you decide
Questions
When does it run?
The year begins on Sunday 20 September 2026 and finishes in June 2027. It runs live online with a small cohort. Places for the founding cohort close on Friday 18 September.
How much time does this take?
Around an hour a week for the content and your own reflection, plus a fortnightly live session. Integration weeks are for personal reflection and implementation.
Do I need to attend all the live calls?
No. Life gets in the way and it may not be possible to attend them all. You can submit questions in advance to the community and I will cover them either there or in the live call. I share the recording of each session afterwards, so you can watch it whenever suits you.
What happens if I fall behind?
Nothing. The content stays available to you for the full year, and the integration weeks exist so that a difficult month does not put you out of the programme.
Can my employer pay?
Yes, and many do. I can provide an invoice and a short summary you can pass to whoever signs it off. Ask me and I will send it.
Is this only for leaders in education?
No. The cohort includes leaders from business and other sectors. What women here share is the level of responsibility they carry, rather than the industry they carry it in.
What if I have already done Lead with Inner Calm?
You will recognise the ground this starts from, and it goes considerably further.
A next step
Two ways in
Join the founding cohort. Places close Friday 18 September, and the year begins on 20 September. Pay in full before midnight on Thursday 10 September and the three private coaching calls are included.
Or talk to me first. A short conversation, no pressure. Most women want to know whether this is the right year for them, and that is a better question to answer out loud than alone.
Or book a conversation