I'm Charlotte Desorgher
This is my story
And this is why I care about helping women navigate their third chapter
This is a stage of life that nobody prepared us for.
Not the practical side – by this stage we know about our finances.
But the deeper question that keeps surfacing:
Who am I now?
What am I actually for?
And why does nobody seem to understand what I’m going through?
I understand it.
Because I’ve lived it.
And trained for it.
My credentials
My authority as a guide for women at this time of life comes from four things working together. Not any one of them alone.
Lived experience.
I have personally navigated multiple reinventions – built businesses, created careers, guided others through major transitions, and undertaken my own search for meaning and direction in later life.
I understand these questions from the inside.
My degree and dissertation
Underlying all of it is something that began at twenty years old: a degree-level training in personality assessment through movement, using a formal methodology that connects posture, gesture and movement to personality, mood and inner life.
I have been learning to see what most people cannot see for fifty years.
Over a decade of helping women realise their potential.
Long before Ignite existed, I was working with women who were struggling to become someone they wanted to be – helping them recognise possibilities, identify what was uniquely theirs, and build lives and careers that fitted them more authentically.
My recent formal training.
I undertook almost a year of specialist study and achieved formal Supergenius certification – not because I felt I lacked instinct, but because I wanted a rigorous, tested framework to put around it.
That training gave me practical tools for uncovering what women genuinely want, identifying the patterns that have been shaping their choices, and translating insight into action.
It is the combination of all four that enables me to be the guide who can bring out the uniqueness in each woman.
My adult life and how it prepared me for Ignite
In 1983 I met Paul – a brilliant graphic designer, twelve years my senior,
and the man I wanted to share my life with.
I set aside the dance career I’d been building and threw myself into creating a business with him instead.
We built it together for nearly twenty years.
We won awards and created a thriving team.
Then, aged 43, I felt a strong pull to make a difference
– specifically to women’s lives.
I returned to dance – and the dance I chose? Bellydance.
Bellydance, despite a lot of misunderstanding, is a dance form with a remarkable power to transform a woman’s sense of self.
To help her feel comfortable and confident in her body, often for the first time.
I also discovered through my work, that for women who had been in abusive situations it helps them recover their own beauty and self-worth after years of violence, control and being verbally abused.
The Joy of Bellydance, Sadlers Wells
I built a professional company – supported by Arts Council England,
and created a new dance style, artistic and theatrical –
which warranted performances at Sadler’s Wells.
And I founded a charity providing classes for women escaping sexual violence, trafficking, and war.
Including Syrian refugees arriving in England carrying children born of rape.
I also discovered a great love of choreography –
the work of creating something from nothing,
of taking people on an emotional journey,
of moving them and giving them joy.
What choreography taught me was this:
creativity is not airy-fairy.
It is not inspiration floating down from somewhere
and landing in your lap.
The imagination is only the opening act.
What follows is structure, problem-solving and building something real.
My choreographic understanding sits at the heart of the Life Design Method.
The visualisation and reflections I teach open the door and start the imagination working.
But without a good brief, structure and a plan,
it won’t change lives.
Alongside my choreography and the company,
lay a richly satisfying decade of mentoring professional performers through the most significant transitions of their careers.
Helping women find their own unique voice.
Seeing what was possible in someone before they could see it themselves.
And staying with them until they could.
Fox Searchlight thought it was worth a film.
They optioned my life and work,
commissioned a script from Gwyn Jones
-
the writer behind Mr Bates vs the Post Office.
And it came close to production.
It’s still sitting on their shelves – a possible series.
But then everything changed
I loved my work and had expected to continue for many years.
But Paul was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease
and I decided to stop work to be with him.
To do all the things we had missed out on from a lifetime of achieving.
It was the right decision.
It was also one of the hardest things I have ever done.
Paul is older than me and I had watched him struggle with retirement ten years earlier.
He would say:
“Who am I Charlotte?
What do I say to new people when I meet them?“
It was a question I saw reflected in many of his friends. And it worried me deeply.
He also talked of feeling that he was trying to walk through a door
but couldn’t get to the other side.
When I retired I understood his struggle from the inside.
And suddenly all the platitudes I’d given him,
all the things I’d encouraged him to do to fill his time, were on me.
I tried what you’re supposed to try.
Book clubs.
Walking groups.
U3A.
But nothing filled the emptiness that was growing deeper every day.
Part of it was grief – watching the man I love disappear slowly to Parkinson’s –
a daily loss that has no end point and no resolution.
That alone would have been enough to floor me.
What I didn't expect was the existential dimension.
My brain – a brain that had spent forty years planning growth, spotting opportunities, solving problems, building things
– was suddenly just filling time with gentle activities.
Until I finally dropped off my perch.
And I think this is true of very many women of our generation.
Our brains have literally been changed and reshaped by the lives we’ve led.
We’ve had opportunities not afforded to previous generations of women
Some of us have chosen careers – and fought to smash glass ceilings and earn our place in a “man’s world.”
Others have spent a lifetime caring for everyone else
– children, partners, parents –
and suddenly the question surfaces.
When does it get to be my turn?
Either way, this time is a pivotal point like no other.
And it’s a time when there is no real guidance on how to navigate it.
What happened to me?
I went into a deep depression that lasted nearly two years.
Not wistfulness.
Not mild dissatisfaction.
The real thing.
What brought me back was building Ignite.
Through work I did with a method called Supergenius, I realised I hadn’t lost myself. I had simply forgotten what lit my own fire.
And what lit it – what has always lit it,
across every career I’ve built, is making a difference.
The design business worked in social housing and regeneration.
The dance company and the charity changed women’s lives.
The mentoring changed individual women’s trajectories.
That thread runs through everything.
Ignite is the same thread.
Just a different chapter.
But I want to say something important here
What worked for me – finding a new mission, building something
– is not the answer for every woman.
Some women want to work again.
Some don’t, and never will.
Some want to travel, create, care, rest, or simply live more fully and freely on their own terms.
My job is not to tell you what your answer looks like. It’s to help you find it.
And I’m possibly unusually well placed to do that.
A degree-level training in personality assessment through movement –
the formal study of how inner life is expressed in the body, which I continued to develop over five decades of practice.
Over a decade mentoring women through identity transitions.
Formal certification in life design methodology.
And the lived experience of navigating this exact terrain myself.
That combination is rare.
Possibly unique.
And if you’d like to explore whether I’m the right person to help you, the first step is a conversation.
Free, without obligation – just a discussion. My time is yours.
