The Life Design Method
A practical, guided framework for designing the next chapter of life
Why it exists
This is the first stage of life for which there is no clear path forward. Until now, every part of life has come with structure, guidance, and expectation.
School – teachers, books, and goals to aim for.
Career – managers, training courses, promotion ladders.
Family life – midwives, books, consultants, communities.
Even retirement has a form of planning – but only in financial terms. No one shows us how to shape that life once we arrive there. And so we reach our sixties with something entirely new: time, freedom, and possibility – but no roadmap for how to live it.
The Life Design Method fills that gap.
It is not therapy. It is not coaching hype. And it is not a self-paced online course. It is a live, guided process, designed with structure, rhythm, and human support – so that insight turns into lived change, not just good intentions.
What we do
A central part of the Life Design Method is learning how to access what I call the creative, or intuitive brain – a distinct part of our thinking that operates alongside analytical reasoning.
Most of us are highly trained in analytical thinking. But the creative brain works differently. It draws on decades of lived experience – patterns, memories, ideas – and processes them in a way that is not linear or forced. Many people recognise it in flashes: a moment in the shower, an idea that arrives on a walk, a sudden sense of knowing when you wake up in the morning.
As a choreographer, I experienced this directly. You cannot create something meaningful by forcing it. You have to give the creative brain a brief – a clear, structured starting point. It then activates and continues working beyond the session itself. Ideas emerge. Images form. Connections are made, often unexpectedly.
This is a trainable process. It is not reserved for artists. It is a capacity that already exists in every woman – but one that most have never been shown how to use deliberately.
The Six Week Process
Week one: Where you are now
You arrive, you connect, and you begin.
Each woman shares where she is and what has brought her here. Then we set the intention – giving the creative brain a clear brief for what we want it to work on. From there, I guide the group through the first visualisation.
This is where the process activates. Once the creative brain has its brief, it doesn’t switch off between sessions. It continues working in the background throughout the six weeks – in the shower, on a walk, in that moment before sleep. The formal work is only part of it.
Week two - What you are made of
Charlotte guides the group to explore four powerful questions using the creative, intuitive brain as a guide.
Answers are often surprising.
You may recognise skills you have but do not value,
pleasures you have stopped noticing,
things that cost you more than they give back,
and what truly feeds your soul.
What are you genuinely good at? Many women carry skills acquired in careers they did not choose. Skills they never thought to claim – that turn out to be exactly what they need going forward.
What do you actually love? Not what retirement is supposed to look like. What you genuinely love, right now – so you take the real thing forward, not an inherited idea of it.
What drains you? The things done out of habit or obligation that cost more than they give back. Naming them is the first step to letting them go.
What truly feeds your soul? Often so central to who you are that you have stopped seeing it. When you name it clearly, everything else begins to organise around it.
Week three - The voice on your shoulder
Most women know this voice. It has been there since childhood.
It says: be a good girl.
Don’t cause trouble.
Put other people first.
Don’t be selfish.
It may have served you. It may have kept you safe,
kept relationships intact,
kept things running.
But a voice that protected you in one chapter can fiercely hold you back in the next.
In week three, we use a guided visualisation to go back to a specific moment in time – set with clear intention – to surface what is actually holding you back now.
Not in theory. A real moment, seen freshly, that reveals something true about the patterns still shaping your decisions.
The aim is not to fight the voice or get rid of it.
Simply to see it clearly.
Because once something is seen clearly, it no longer has quite the same hold.
Week four - What brings you joy
This week grounds your future in your actual lived experience, rather than assumptions about what that future should look like.
Women arrive at this stage carrying a great deal of external noise –
friends who are travelling,
expectations about what retirement means,
ideas about what you ought to want.
Week four sets all of that aside and asks a more honest question:
what actually gives you joy, right now?
By the end of this week, patterns have emerged.
Each woman begins to see – clearly and specifically – what needs to be built into her future.
Not what looks good on paper.
Not what works for other people.
What is actually true for her.
Week five - Shaping your direction
By week five, something has changed in the room. These women have spent four weeks thinking carefully and honestly –
about their strengths,
their patterns,
their joys,
what holds them back.
And they have done it together. They know each other now. Not just names and backgrounds, but the real things: what each woman loves, what she needs, what she is reaching towards.
That depth of understanding is what makes week five different.
Charlotte works with each woman individually – giving her time, her full attention, and the benefit of everything observed over the previous four weeks.
She reflects back what she sees: the direction that has been emerging, the strengths that are there to be built on.
And she asks: does that feel right to you?
The woman can say yes. She can say yes, but…
She can push back entirely.
The point is not for Charlotte to have the right answer –
it is to give each woman a clear, honest picture to respond to.
And then the group comes in.
Because by week five, the other women in the room understand each other well enough to give something more than generic encouragement.
When one woman is still stuck, it is often another woman in the group – who has been listening carefully for five weeks – who says exactly the right thing.
Something specific.
Something that could only come from someone who actually knows her.
That is not something you can manufacture.
It is what happens when a small group of women have done serious work together over time.
Week six - Building the plan
The work becomes practical. You create a clear, reverse-engineered plan: three-year vision, one-year milestones,
six-month targets, and what begins now.
A life design – yours.
An in-depth one-to-one with Charlotte
At some point after the fourth week you can arrange a deep dive with Charlotte.
This session can take place before the planning session, or any time up to two months after the programme has finished – whichever feels right for you.
It might be that you have a particularly knotty problem you want help with before making your plan.
Or it may be that you want to talk through your plan with Charlotte after you’ve created it.
Or indeed, you may feel, after a month or so, that you’re struggling to get going, or would like help with one aspect of your plan.
Charlotte is there to help and guide you, in whatever way you need, whenever you need it.
What you'll leave with
– Clarity about what you want
– A deep understanding of what matters to you. And what does not
– A structured, realistic plan you can act upon
– The momentum to begin
Most importantly: ownership.
Not dependence on ongoing support.
Ready to act.