THE HEROINE’S JOURNEY: NEW YORK

Rewrite Your Story. Transform Your Life & Business.

A private, five-day immersive coaching journey through New York for women leaders, entrepreneurs, and coaches, led by Peter de Kuster and inspired by The Power of Your Story.

Step away from the noise of daily operations and enter the deeper story shaping your life, your leadership, and the people you guide.

Over five unhurried days in New York, combine cultural discovery, executive coaching, meaningful conversation, and structured reflection to write your next defining chapter, through the lives of the women who wrote theirs here.

This is not a seminar. It is a journey through the architecture of a meaningful life: the story that gives you energy, the inner characters that shape your choices, the plot you are living, the conflict asking for your response, the ending you are creating, and the larger journey that turns insight into lasting impact.

A Journey, Not a Seminar

New York is a city made by people who arrived: through the harbour, by ferry and train, with a suitcase and a plan. And women have been among its most determined builders, even when the record was slow to say so.

It is the city of Annie Moore, the fifteen-year-old from Cork who was the first person processed at Ellis Island. Of Emma Lazarus, whose poem gave the Statue of Liberty its voice. Of Sojourner Truth, who won her son’s freedom in a New York court. Of Lillian Wald, who brought nursing into the tenements. Of Clara Lemlich, who called for a strike that brought out twenty thousand garment workers, and of Frances Perkins, who watched the Triangle fire and went on to reshape American labour law. Of Nellie Bly, who talked her way into an asylum and then raced around the world. Of Madam C.J. Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ella Fitzgerald, who made Harlem a stage for the world. Of Jane Jacobs, Marsha P. Johnson, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Emily Warren Roebling, who saw what needed to be done and did it.

From Battery Park and the Lower East Side to Harlem, from Greenwich Village to Central Park, from the United Nations to the Brooklyn Bridge, New York is a living theatre of women’s transformation.

The Heroine’s Journey: New York uses the personal stories of the city’s women (immigrants, reformers, writers, artists, performers, engineers, and the heroines of its literature, theatre, and film) as mirrors for your own story.

The heroine’s path is not always a straight line toward a summit. It moves through separation and achievement, through the cost of success, through descent and reckoning, toward reconnection and integration. You will examine the narrative that has brought you here and consciously create the one that will take you forward.

This is an exclusive, personally paced immersion centred on your ambitions, challenges, and future.

The Story You Live

What story are you currently living about who you are, what you can achieve, and what others expect from you?

Perhaps you have succeeded by being the capable one, the one who holds everything together. Perhaps you are entering a more senior role, scaling a business, navigating change, building a coaching practice, or asking: What comes after the chapter I have already mastered? Perhaps you have achieved what you set out to achieve and noticed that something essential was left behind on the way.

Across five structured phases, you will examine your inner narrative with honesty and precision.

The aim is not superficial positive thinking. It is a more truthful, energising, and purposeful story, supported by concrete decisions, behaviours, and action.

The central question:

Where can my current story no longer take me where I want to go?

Who This Is For

This journey is designed for women leaders and guides who want space to pause, challenge long-held assumptions, and align their work with a clearer purpose.

It is for:

• Executives and entrepreneurs navigating strategic pivots, growth, succession, or legacy transitions.
• Executive and team coaches developing a narrative-based approach to client transformation.
• Consultants and mentors guiding others through complex, high-stakes decisions.
• Women who have succeeded by the rules of someone else’s story and are ready to write their own.
• Leadership partners seeking deeper alignment around a shared vision.
• Private groups of colleagues, peers, or leadership teams seeking a meaningful strategic reset.

The programme is booked privately for an exclusive group of up to four participants.

What You Will Explore

The Power of Your Story

Discover the narratives that drain your energy and the ones that mobilise focus, courage, and purpose.

New York offers extraordinary examples of women who dared to rewrite their stories: Sojourner Truth, born enslaved in upstate New York, who walked away from slavery and into history; Madam C.J. Walker, orphaned at seven and a washerwoman in her youth, who built a hair-care business and became one of the first self-made women millionaires in America; Nellie Bly, who turned journalism into adventure; Eleanor Roosevelt, who turned a role into a mission; and Shirley Chisholm, the Brooklyn-born daughter of immigrants who became the first Black woman elected to Congress.

Their lives reveal different ways of responding to ambition, adversity, identity, and change.

You will identify the story you have been living, the story you have outgrown, and the story you are ready to write.

Your Twelve Inner Characters

Meet the recurring roles through which you lead, relate, decide, avoid, and grow.

Explore the twelve archetypal characters through the extraordinary women and stories of New York:

• The Innocent
• The Orphan
• The Warrior
• The Caregiver
• The Seeker
• The Lover
• The Destroyer
• The Creator
• The Ruler
• The Magician
• The Sage
• The Jester

New York provides fascinating mirrors for these characters:

• The Innocent in Francie Nolan, the heroine of Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, a girl from the Williamsburg tenements who believes in books and in her own future.
• The Orphan in Annie, the red-haired orphan of the comic strip and the Broadway stage, and in Madam C.J. Walker, orphaned at seven, who built her own family and her own fortune.
• The Warrior in Sojourner Truth, who went to court in New York to recover her son; in Elizabeth Jennings Graham, who in 1854 refused to leave a Manhattan streetcar and won in court; and in Clara Lemlich, who at twenty-three stood up at Cooper Union and called for a general strike.
• The Caregiver in Lillian Wald, who founded the Henry Street Settlement and the Visiting Nurse Service, and in Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell, who founded a hospital for women and children run by women.
• The Seeker in Nellie Bly, who went undercover in an asylum and then circled the globe, and in Holly Golightly of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, who searches Fifth Avenue for a place to belong.
• The Lover in Edna St. Vincent Millay, who lived in Greenwich Village, wrote of love and independence with equal daring, and became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
• The Destroyer in Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, central figures in the movement that followed the Stonewall uprising, who founded STAR to support homeless young queer and trans people.
• The Creator in Georgia O’Keeffe, who painted the skyscrapers of New York in the 1920s, and in Zora Neale Hurston, the Harlem Renaissance writer and anthropologist.
• The Ruler in Frances Perkins, the first woman to serve in the American cabinet, and Shirley Chisholm, who in 1972 ran for the presidency.
• The Magician in Ella Fitzgerald, who arrived at the Apollo Theater’s Amateur Night intending to dance, froze, sang, and won.
• The Sage in Eleanor Roosevelt and Jane Jacobs, two New Yorkers whose ideas still shape how we think about rights and cities.
• The Jester in Joan Rivers, the Brooklyn-born comedian who made a career of saying what others would not, and in Eloise, the small girl who rules the Plaza Hotel.

You will identify:

• The character that currently leads your decisions.
• The character that appears under pressure.
• The character that has served you in the past but may now limit you.
• The character you need to develop for your next chapter.

Your Seven Life Plots

Recognise the larger story structure shaping your current chapter.

You will explore seven fundamental plots:

1. Overcoming the monster.
2. Rags to riches.
3. The quest.
4. Voyage and return.
5. Comedy.
6. Tragedy.
7. Rebirth.

New York is full of women’s stories that illustrate these dramatic structures.

Frances Perkins’s campaign for safer workplaces and Jane Jacobs’s fight to keep a highway out of Washington Square Park are stories of overcoming the monster. Madam C.J. Walker’s journey from a Louisiana cotton field to a Harlem townhouse, and Tess McGill’s ferry rides from Staten Island in Working Girl, are rags to riches. Emily Warren Roebling’s decade-long push to finish the Brooklyn Bridge, and Lillian Wald’s mission to bring health care into the tenements, are quests. Nellie Bly’s seventy-two-day race around the world is a voyage and return. The wit of Joan Rivers and the high jinks of Eloise are comedy, in which disorder resolves into belonging. The Triangle fire and the life of Billie Holiday, whose genius met an unforgiving world, are tragedies. And Eleanor Roosevelt’s second act on the world stage, and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s second life as an editor and preservationist in the city, are stories of rebirth.

You will name the plot you are living now and choose the plot you want to write next.

Your Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations

Understand conflict as the engine of growth rather than something to avoid.

New York has been the stage for some of history’s most dramatic human conflicts: labour and capital, immigrant and native, ambition and survival, tradition and reinvention, freedom and the limits placed on it. Women in this city have often faced those conflicts without the protection of the vote, a title, or an institution, and have shaped the outcome anyway.

You will identify the dramatic tension at the centre of your current challenge: ambition, rivalry, betrayal, sacrifice, pursuit, an impossible task, conflict with authority, or a decision that can no longer be delayed.

You will move from reactive patterns to conscious choice.

Your Two Possible Endings

Explore the difference between an ending created through avoidance, fear, or disconnection and an ending created through full engagement, meaningful action, and flow.

A flow-based ending does not mean the absence of difficulty. It means meeting difficulty with clear goals, focused attention, use of your strengths, and a sense of connection to something larger than yourself.

New York offers a particularly inspiring perspective on this choice. Its history shows women who stepped forward when it mattered: Emily Warren Roebling, who studied engineering to keep a bridge going when her husband fell ill; Frances Perkins, who turned a tragedy she witnessed into a lifetime of reform; and Jane Jacobs, who refused to accept that a neighbourhood must give way to a road.

You will explore which ending you are currently creating and which ending you consciously want to choose.

Your One Great Journey

Finally, you will place your personal and professional challenge within a larger transformation: the heroine’s journey.

New York has always attracted women prepared to leave familiar territory in pursuit of a different future. They arrived through the harbour, up from the South in the Great Migration, from tenements and from small towns, and made the city bigger than it was before.

You will identify the threshold you are crossing, the inner resources you need, the allies and obstacles around you, and the gift you intend to bring back to your organisation, clients, family, or community.

Your Personal Story Guide

Before the journey, you will receive What Story Are You Living Now? A Guide to New York, the heroine’s edition.

This practical self-assessment helps you prepare by scoring statements related to:

• The twelve inner characters that shape your leadership and relationships.
• The seven plots that describe the larger shape of your current chapter.
• The thirty-six dramatic situations that reveal the conflict asking for your response.

Every statement is illustrated by a short story about a woman connected to New York: a reformer, writer, artist, performer, engineer, or fictional heroine from literature, theatre, and film.

These stories are not simply cultural references. They are mirrors.

Through the lives and choices of women whose stories can be encountered in New York, in museums, theatres, streets, parks, books, films, music, and memory, you will recognise your own patterns, strengths, blind spots, and possibilities.

Your completed guide becomes the starting point for your coaching journey in New York and the foundation of your five-year narrative blueprint.

The Five-Day Journey

Day One: Departure & The Ordinary World

The Power of Your Story

Begin in Battery Park with a private conversation about your professional context, ambitions, and central questions, at the water’s edge where so many New York stories began.

This is the gateway to the city. Take the ferry to Ellis Island, where Annie Moore, fifteen years old, was the first person to be processed on the first day of 1892, and to the Statue of Liberty, a woman who has welcomed arrivals for well over a century. Consider Emma Lazarus, the New York poet whose sonnet gave the statue its voice.

In the afternoon, walk through the Lower East Side, where arrivals from Ellis Island found their first homes. At the Tenement Museum, step inside the apartments that held generations of families, and at the Henry Street Settlement, founded by Lillian Wald in 1893, consider what it means to see a need and build something to meet it.

Through the stories of Annie Moore, Emma Lazarus, and Lillian Wald, you will examine the narrative you have been living and the future you want to create.

You will explore the voices that narrate your setbacks, successes, and identity. You will identify what your current story protects, what it costs, and what it makes possible.

Key reflection: What story am I living, and which parts have I never consciously chosen?

Outcome: Your personal energy story.

Day Two: The Call to Adventure & Internal Barriers

Your Twelve Inner Characters

Explore resistance: loyalty to past identities, the habit of being the dependable one, fear of unfamiliar territory, and the comfort of remaining competent at your current level.

Travel uptown to Harlem, the neighbourhood that became the centre of a cultural flowering in the 1920s and 1930s.

At the Apollo Theater, where Ella Fitzgerald won Amateur Night in 1934 at the age of seventeen, consider the moment when you stop doing what you planned and do what is true. At the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, meet the intellectual and artistic world of the Harlem Renaissance and the writer Zora Neale Hurston, who arrived in New York in 1925, became the first Black student at Barnard College, and went on to write Their Eyes Were Watching God. On the elegant blocks of Strivers’ Row and West 136th Street, remember Madam C.J. Walker and her daughter A’Lelia, who made Harlem part of a business and a salon culture that drew writers and artists from around the world.

Through these lives, you will meet the inner characters that shape your leadership.

Consider the Orphan who builds her own family, the Creator who refuses to follow established rules, the Magician who changes the room when she opens her mouth, and the Seeker who leaves familiar territory.

What happens when the character that made you successful becomes the character that limits your future?

You will identify the character that has brought you this far, the character that may now hold you back, and the character you need to develop next.

Key commitment: What am I ready to leave behind, and what am I choosing instead?

Outcome: Your inner leadership profile.

Day Three: The Ordeal & Reframing the Narrative

Your Plot, Conflict, and Chosen Ending

Move from diagnosis to transformation.

Identify the plot of your current chapter, the dramatic situation at its centre, and the ending you are creating through your choices.

New York has been the stage for extraordinary struggles between labour and capital, authority and conscience, convention and change.

At Washington Square Park, begin with the memory of Jane Jacobs and her neighbours, who in the 1950s fought a plan to drive a road through the park and won. On the corner, the Brown Building, now part of New York University, was the site of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911, in which 146 workers, most of them young immigrant women, died. Frances Perkins watched from the square, and the experience shaped her career. This moment is approached with care and with respect. Then walk to Cooper Union, where Clara Lemlich’s call to strike in 1909 helped start the Uprising of the Twenty Thousand.

In the West Village, stand outside the Stonewall Inn and reflect on Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, and the women and men who changed what was possible in 1969. Consider what it takes to say no to the world as it is.

Through stories of ambition, rivalry, loss, sacrifice, reinvention, and renewal, you will rewrite a limiting belief without denying facts, avoiding responsibility, or making promises you cannot sustain.

You will create a narrative that is both honest and empowering.

Key exercise: What conflict is asking me to grow, choose, or act, and what response would make me proud in five years?

Outcome: Your plot, conflict, and conscious ending plan.

Day Four: The Road Back & Behavioural Integration

From Insight to Leadership

Bridge reflection and execution.

In the quieter surroundings of Central Park and the avenues beside it, translate your insights into practical leadership behaviour.

Begin at the Plaza Hotel, where Eloise lives in the pages of Kay Thompson’s books, and on Fifth Avenue, where Holly Golightly stands in front of the Tiffany windows at dawn. Then walk into Central Park, to the Literary Walk, where in 2020 the Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument, depicting Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, became the first statue of real women in the park. Continue to the reservoir named after Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who also helped lead the campaign to save Grand Central Terminal. The park is a fitting setting for reflection on perspective, balance, and the relationship between personal ambition and the wider world.

Test your revised narrative against your calendar, relationships, team dynamics, strategic priorities, and operational demands.

You will design a practical 30-day, 60-day, and 90-day implementation plan.

You will define the decisions, boundaries, conversations, and visible behaviours that will make your new story real.

Key reflection: If I genuinely lived this story, what would I decide, stop doing, and begin doing tomorrow?

Outcome: Your leadership and coaching implementation roadmap.

Day Five: Return with the Gift & Legacy

The One Great Story

Bring every element together.

See your challenge not as an isolated problem, but as one stage in a larger journey of growth, contribution, and transformation.

Begin at the United Nations, where Eleanor Roosevelt, born in Manhattan, chaired the commission that drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948. Then travel downtown and walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, completed in 1883, with the story of Emily Warren Roebling: the woman who taught herself the mathematics and engineering to see the bridge finished, and who was the first to cross it, carrying a rooster as a symbol of victory.

Through the stories of women who transformed difficulty into meaning, you will gain perspective on the road behind you and the road ahead.

Reflect on the courage of Sojourner Truth, the persistence of Emily Warren Roebling, the reforming spirit of Frances Perkins, the curiosity of Nellie Bly, and the global vision of Eleanor Roosevelt.

What does it mean to leave something meaningful behind? What do you want people to remember about your leadership, your work, and the way you lived?

Rehearse a high-stakes conversation, receive feedback, and commit to the next chapter of your story.

The journey closes with a private celebration dinner overlooking the Manhattan skyline from the Brooklyn waterfront.

Final question: If my life is one great story, what challenge am I being called to meet, and what gift will I bring back when I return?

Outcome: Your five-year heroine’s journey blueprint.

What You Take Home

• A finalised five-year narrative blueprint for your personal and professional next chapter.
• The story-editing methodology to audit assumptions and reframe limiting narratives under pressure.
• Your inner character map to understand the roles that shape your decisions and leadership.
• Your plot and conflict map to identify the story structure and dramatic tension of your current chapter.
• Your flow-based ending plan to replace avoidance and drift with conscious engagement.
• A 90-day implementation roadmap with behavioural commitments, milestones, and accountability.
• The leadership and coaching toolkit with practical questions and exercises for high-stakes conversations.
• A certificate of completion for the five-day executive programme.

Practical Details

Detail	Description
Location	New York City, United States
Duration	Five full days
Facilitator	Peter de Kuster
Format	Exclusive private group, up to four participants
Dates	Scheduled by arrangement
Language	English
Closing	Private celebration dinner overlooking the Manhattan skyline

Investment

€3,450 per participant · Excluding VAT

Private group booking, designed for small leadership teams or handpicked groups of up to four participants.

Included in your investment:

• All personal coaching and facilitation across five days.
• Private transport between curated New York locations.
• Scheduled museum and site admissions.
• Gourmet lunches and daily refreshments.
• Closing celebration dinner.
• Complete narrative, coaching, and implementation toolkit.
• What Story Are You Living Now? A Guide to New York.

Ready to Author Your Next Chapter?

New York has always been a city where women come to change their story.

It is a city of immigrants and reformers, writers and artists, performers and engineers, dreamers and doers. A place where old orders have been challenged, new ideas have found a home, and extraordinary transformations have taken place, often with women at the centre.

Through the lives, films, theatre, literature, art, architecture, and music found in New York, you will discover mirrors for your own journey: stories of courage, creativity, ambition, love, loss, reinvention, and legacy.

Join a small, private group of leaders and coaches for five days of reflection, conversation, cultural discovery, and practical transformation.

Rewrite your story. Transform your life and business.

Contact us to arrange your private group dates and tailor your five-day journey through New York.

The Heroine’s Journey: New York, a journey through the stories of the women of a city that keeps reinventing itself, and an opportunity to write the story that will shape your future.