LIVE ONLINE
Transforming Leadership from Within™
PRACTICE CIRCLE | JANUARY – JUNE 2027
Lead from authenticity. Move with clarity.
An intimate, six-month live online Practice Circle for accomplished women senior leaders who want to lead, work and live in a way that is more spacious, sustainable and true.
Leadership is asking something new of you
You may be carrying far more than others see. How do you stay connected to yourself when the pressure, responsibility and expectations are relentless? How do you keep contributing at a high level without losing touch with what matters most?
Transforming Leadership from Within™ (TLW™) gives you a place to work with the professional and personal leadership challenges you are actually living, so you can hear yourself more clearly, see more of what is happening, and choose how you want to respond.
TLW™ is for senior leaders who are:
- carrying significant responsibility and consequential decisions
- accomplished, with careers built on expertise, commitment and drive
- sensing it’s time to lead, work and live in a more sustainable way
- wanting to lead in a way that feels more genuine
Cultivate what keeps you centered under pressure
TLW™️ Practice Circle is a developmental journey shaped by years of accompanying leaders in complexity. Over six months, the Circle gives you space to build your capacity to lead under pressure — without exhausting yourself.
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Make more space
Step out of the constant pressure of being productive and “always on” – to hear yourself again and reconnect with what really matters.
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Trust
yourself
Step out of automatic problem-solving. Reconnect with your judgment, intuition, creativity, and what is true.
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Deepen connection
Bring the questions you cannot easily bring elsewhere into a trusted Circle of peers who understand the weight of leadership, where you can think out loud and be met with honesty, warmth and challenge.
What begins to shift in how you lead
This work opens the way for your wisdom, courage, creativity, and discernment to lead – even when pressure makes them hard to access.
Greater clarity and discernment when there’s no obvious answer
A steadier connection to yourself when pressure rises
More honesty, courage and humanity in important relationships
Clear intention and greater authenticity when you lead
Greater awareness of when you are carrying too much
“The program gave me invaluable support in working through a real business challenge … It helped me find greater authenticity and clarity in how I lead.”
Malin Nilsson
Managing Partner, BDO Sweden
Nurture your true leadership capacities
TLW™️ starts with your current reality. What pressures and tensions are you facing? What patterns shape your decisions and actions? Over six months, you strengthen your ability to stay connected to yourself while making choices with greater creativity and discernment. The practices are designed to stay with you long after the Circle ends.
Awareness
Noticing what is happening within you, in others and in the wider system, before habit responds on your behalf.
Authenticity
Meeting others as you are rather than as a role, and staying connected to what feels true under pressure.
Discernment
Making sense of complexity and sensing what genuinely matters, rather than what merely feels urgent.
Intentionality
Acting from choice rather than reflex, and shaping how you lead rather than being carried by momentum.
Your TLW™ journey
Transforming Leadership from Within™ doesn’t teach you how to lead. It helps you evolve how you lead, drawing on your own experience and the wisdom already within you. The journey unfolds in four parts, each building on the last.
1. Sense the Context
See your world, and yourself in it, more clearly.
Step back from the urgency of everyday leadership to notice what is really happening around you and within you: the pressures, tensions and relationships shaping your experience. You discover how a simple pause creates room for choice, and how pressure can become leadership focus and potential. You name a live Leadership Challenge, a situation that genuinely matters to you now, and it anchors your work throughout the journey.
What Leadership Challenge do you choose to focus on?
2. Unlock Inner Resources
Reconnect with what gives you strength and energy.
Explore how your life experiences, and the stories you tell about them, shape the way you see and decide. Rediscover your Core Qualities, the inner sources of energy, clarity and aliveness that are already yours. They build the awareness and resilience to stay grounded and true to yourself when pressure rises.
What gives you energy, and what inner wisdom can you access?
3. Adapt for Relevance
Grow where your leadership is being stretched.
Turn toward the moments in your challenge where your usual ways of responding are no longer enough. Notice when you tend to listen and take in, and when you tend to act and shape. You build the flexibility to meet what each situation is really asking of you, responding with intention rather than reaction, without losing touch with who you are.
How do you drive your own change and development?
4. Transform with Agency
Lead with presence and carry the change forward.
Bring together what has shifted and ground it in your decisions, behaviours and presence. You name the development journey you want to stay attentive to, along with a few realistic next steps, so you keep leading from choice rather than reflex long after the journey ends.
How do you embody the transformation?
What happens in the Circle
Each session gives you protected space to work with what is alive in your leadership now. Learning happens through guided reflection, embodied and creative practice, honest dialogue, and the real challenges you are facing.
Step away from the noise
Create protected space to notice what gets lost in the urgency of everyday leadership.
Bring a live challenge
Work with a decision, relationship, transition, tension or question that genuinely matters to you now.
See with fresh eyes
Explore what may be shaping how you see the situation, and discover perspectives that are harder to reach when you are moving quickly.
Experiment in real life
Try something different between sessions: a new conversation, choice, boundary, practice or way of showing up.
Return, reflect, integrate
Come back to the Circle to make sense of what happened and decide what you want to carry forward.
A Practice Circle, shared over six months
This is not a course or a series of one-off sessions, but a live, experiential journey with the same small group over six months. You do not have to arrive with the answers. Bring your curiosity, your experience and what is genuinely alive in your leadership and life. As trust deepens, conversations become more honest.
You begin to recognize one another’s patterns, aspirations and edges, and to see more clearly how your experience, assumptions and roles shape the ways you lead and relate. The Circle itself becomes a source of perspective, challenge, encouragement and wisdom. At times another person’s question will illuminate something in your own experience. At times your listening will help someone else see what they could not see alone.
“This programme is the future of leadership development.”
Carla Barnett
Former Group Director, HR at Sanderson Design Group plc.
Why Companions for Leadership (CFL)
For more than 23 years, Companions for Leadership has accompanied leaders through personal and organizational transformation, in over 115 multinationals across 26 countries. Our Leadership Companions balance challenge with care and meet each leader where they are.
This Circle is facilitated by Robin and Elisa, who bring decades of experience supporting senior leaders through personal, leadership and organizational transformation. Together they create a learning environment that is bold, exploratory and deeply human, combining leadership development, reflective inquiry, embodied practice and real-world experimentation.
Robin Athey
Executive Coach & Leadership Advisor
Robin supports senior leaders to meet complexity with greater presence, clarity, and humanity. Her work helps leaders slow the pull of reactivity, see more of what is happening within and around them, and respond with discernment. She brings a practical, depth-oriented approach that links inner transformation with purposeful leadership choices.
Elisa French
Executive Coach & Leadership Advisor
Elisa partners with senior leaders navigating demanding roles, complex relationships, and consequential decisions. Her work helps leaders see the patterns shaping their leadership, access their own resources more fully, and develop the clarity, presence, and confidence to lead with authenticity and impact.
Our alumni lead top organizations
What senior leaders say
“It helped me reconnect to clarity and to inner wisdom, and find the life balance necessary to lead with authenticity.”
Maria Schultz
Deputy CEO and Conservation Director, WWF Sweden
“The workshop lives up to its name. TLW goes deep into what it means to lead, starting with yourself.”
Karin Hammar
CEO, Swedish American Chambers of Commerce USA Inc.
“A pause and reflection to fuel and anchor in my true self as a human and as a leader.”
HR Director
LoB Travel – Allianz Partners
“A rare chance to slow down, reflect, and truly connect – with myself and fellow participants.”
Zsófia Határ
Functional Lead and CoE Coordinator, Scania
Joining the Circle
A small Circle, carefully composed, meeting live online over six months.
When we meet
Every other Friday, for six months
13 two-hour live sessions
January 8 – June 25, 2027
10:00 AM–12:00 PM ET
7:00–9:00 AM PT
4:00–6:00 PM CET*
How the Circle works
The same small group, throughout
Between sessions, peer triads meet for around 60 minutes to continue the work. We ask participants to miss no more than two sessions, so trust and continuity can deepen.
How to join
Start with a short application
A brief conversation with Robin or Elisa follows, so each Circle brings together women leaders, at Director through Senior Vice President level, who can learn from, support and challenge one another throughout the journey.
TLW™ 2027 Program INVESTMENT
Organization-funded: $2,700
Self-funded: $1,800
