THE HEROINE’S JOURNEY: PARIS

Rewrite Your Story. Transform Your Life & Business.

A private, five-day immersive coaching journey through Paris 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 Paris, 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

Paris is a city of reinvention, and women have always been at the centre of it, even when history was slow to say so.

It is the city of Joan of Arc, who left her village and changed the course of a nation. Of Olympe de Gouges, who wrote a declaration of the rights of woman during the Revolution. Of Marie Curie, who arrived as a student with very little and left two Nobel Prizes behind her. Of Berthe Morisot, who exhibited with the Impressionists. Of Simone de Beauvoir, who asked what it means to become oneself. Of Joséphine Baker, who crossed an ocean to be free and later stood in the world’s most public arenas to demand that others be free too.

From the literary cafés of Saint-Germain-des-Prés to the studios of Montmartre, from the galleries of the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay to the crypt of the Panthéon, Paris is a living theatre of women’s transformation.

The Heroine’s Journey: Paris uses the personal stories of the city’s women (artists, writers, scientists, resisters, performers, founders, and the heroines of its literature, film, and music) 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.

Paris offers extraordinary examples of women who dared to rewrite their stories: the determination of Joan of Arc, the creative independence of George Sand, who wrote under a man’s name and then made it her own; the reinvention of Coco Chanel, who built an empire from an orphanage childhood; the intellectual courage of Simone de Beauvoir; and the quiet persistence of Marie Curie.

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 Paris:

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

Paris provides fascinating mirrors for these characters:

• The Innocent in Amélie Poulain, who believes small, kind acts can change the lives of strangers.
• The Orphan in Cosette of Les Misérables, and in Édith Piaf, who rose from the streets to become the voice of Paris.
• The Warrior in Joan of Arc and in Louise Michel, the fighter of the Paris Commune.
• The Caregiver in Marie Curie, who took mobile X-ray units to the front lines of the First World War.
• The Seeker in Alexandra David-Néel, the Paris-born explorer, and in the expatriate women of the Lost Generation, such as Gertrude Stein and Sylvia Beach.
• The Lover in George Sand and Colette, who wrote about desire and independence on their own terms.
• The Destroyer in the Parisian women who marched to Versailles in 1789 and helped bring down an old order.
• The Creator in Berthe Morisot, Suzanne Valadon, and Camille Claudel.
• The Ruler in Catherine de’ Medici and Marie de’ Medici, who shaped the Paris of palaces and gardens, and in Coco Chanel, who ran an empire.
• The Magician in Sarah Bernhardt, who transformed herself, role by role, into a legend.
• The Sage in Simone de Beauvoir, Madame de Staël, and Hannah Arendt, who spent years of exile in Paris.
• The Jester in Joséphine Baker, who used laughter, play, and style to disarm a room and change it.

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.

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

Joan of Arc and Olympe de Gouges each confronted a monster far larger than themselves. Édith Piaf and Coco Chanel rose from poverty to world fame. Marie Curie’s search for radium is a quest in its purest form. Joséphine Baker’s life is a voyage and return: from St. Louis to Paris and back, to speak at the 1963 March on Washington. Amélie and Colette’s Gigi show comedy as a way of finding one’s place in the world. Camille Claudel’s life, brilliant and ultimately confined, is a tragedy that asks what a talent needs in order to survive. And Chanel’s comeback in 1954, after years away, is a story 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.

Paris has been the stage for some of history’s most dramatic human conflicts: revolution and authority, love and betrayal, ambition and sacrifice, freedom and responsibility, creativity and convention. Women in this city have often faced those conflicts without the protection of title, vote, or 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.

Paris offers a particularly inspiring perspective on this choice. Its history shows women who stopped waiting for permission, such as Suzanne Valadon, a former circus performer and artist’s model who became a painter in her own right, and Simone Veil, a survivor of Auschwitz who became a minister and a defender of women’s rights in France.

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.

Paris has always attracted women prepared to leave familiar territory in pursuit of a different future. Scientists arrived as students and became pioneers. Writers left conventional lives to find their voices. Performers and painters crossed borders and oceans to make something that did not exist 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 Paris, 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 Paris: an artist, writer, scientist, resister, performer, founder, or fictional heroine from literature 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 Paris, in museums, books, films, music, architecture, 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 Paris 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 Saint-Germain-des-Prés with a private conversation about your professional context, ambitions, and central questions.

This is the historic neighbourhood of writers, thinkers, and philosophers. Its cafés have witnessed conversations that changed literature, philosophy, and politics, and women were part of them: Simone de Beauvoir wrote at Café de Flore, and Sylvia Beach, the founder of the original Shakespeare and Company, published James Joyce’s Ulysses when no one else would.

Through the stories of Beauvoir, Beach, Gertrude Stein, George Sand, and other women who made Paris their home, you will examine the narrative you have been living and the future you want to create.

Explore the literary atmosphere of Café de Flore and Les Deux Magots, and reflect on the relationship between personal freedom, responsibility, identity, and purpose, and on the moment when a woman stops being what is expected and begins to become herself.

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 into Montmartre, the neighbourhood that became a home for artists who challenged conventions and reinvented the possibilities of their work.

At the Musée de Montmartre and the Renoir Gardens, you will meet Suzanne Valadon, who began as a model for Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec and became a painter whose work they respected. The museum occupies the house where she once had her studio. Alongside her, you will encounter the Montmartre of Piaf, of the cabaret stages, and of Amélie, the Innocent who rearranges her little world from a Montmartre flat.

Through the lives of Valadon, Piaf, and other creative pioneers, you will meet the inner characters that shape your leadership.

Consider the Creator who refuses to follow established rules, the Seeker who leaves familiar territory, the Orphan who learns to rely on herself, and the Warrior who continues despite rejection and uncertainty.

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.

Paris has been the stage for extraordinary struggles between tradition and innovation, authority and freedom, ambition and responsibility.

At the Louvre, explore the power of artistic and cultural reinvention, and the long history of women who were patrons, rulers, and subjects of the art on its walls, often without being credited as its makers. Through the history of the French Revolution, and the story of Olympe de Gouges, consider what happens when established systems can no longer contain the desire for change, and what it costs the woman who says so first.

At the Musée d’Orsay, discover the Impressionists, including Berthe Morisot, whose rejection of artistic convention created an entirely new way of seeing the world. Consider Camille Claudel and the question of what talent needs, beyond brilliance, to survive.

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 the Jardin du Luxembourg, the Palais-Royal gardens, and the beautiful historic streets of Paris, translate your insights into practical leadership behaviour.

The Jardin du Luxembourg was created for Marie de’ Medici, who built a palace and a garden to be her own court in Paris. It is a fitting setting for reflection on perspective, balance, and the relationship between personal ambition and the wider world. At the Palais-Royal, where Colette lived for years and wrote beneath its arcades, consider what it means to build a life that is truly your own.

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 Panthéon, where France honours its great figures and where the women are a growing presence: Marie Curie, the first woman buried there on her own merits; Simone Veil; Germaine Tillion and Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz, women of the Resistance; and Joséphine Baker, the performer and activist honoured in 2021.

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 Marie Curie, the voyage and return of Joséphine Baker, the intellectual contributions of Simone de Beauvoir, and the resilience of Simone Veil.

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 Eiffel Tower.

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	Paris, France
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 Eiffel Tower

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 Paris 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 Paris.

Ready to Author Your Next Chapter?

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

It is a city of artists and revolutionaries, scientists and entrepreneurs, writers and visionaries. A place where established conventions have been questioned, new ideas have emerged, and extraordinary transformations have taken place.

Through the lives, films, literature, art, architecture, and music found in Paris, 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 Paris.

The Heroine’s Journey: Paris, a journey through the stories of the women of a city that has inspired the world, and an opportunity to write the story that will shape your future.