Rochelle was a Senior Manager at Salesforce, based in the United States. From the outside, she had built exactly the kind of career that looked right on paper — a recognisable company, a meaningful title, a good salary, and the respect of people around her. She had ticked the boxes she had set out to tick.

And yet something wasn’t landing. Not burnout, not crisis — just a quiet, persistent sense that the role had stopped meaning what it once did. She couldn’t quite name what was wrong, which made it harder to address. It felt easier to stay than to reckon with a question she didn’t yet have words for.

A colleague mentioned my work. Rochelle reached out and we had an initial call. A few weeks later, she flew to Bali for a private, one-on-one Reset Retreat on the Atlantic coast.

Rochelle wasn’t in crisis. That’s an important distinction. People who come to a retreat in that state are often looking for rescue — and that’s not what this work is. Rochelle came with a subtler, and in some ways harder, challenge: she was functioning well and still felt off. She wanted to understand why.

The questions underneath the surface were things like: Is this role still aligned with who I am becoming, or is it just familiar? What does fulfilment actually mean for me at this stage? And if I were to make a move — what would be worth moving towards?

These aren’t questions you can answer in a 45-minute therapy session or a weekend self-help course. They require space, honesty, and the right kind of structured reflection — which is exactly what the retreat was designed to provide.

The five days were structured around daily mindset sessions — long, focused conversations that moved through a sequence: surfacing what was actually going on beneath the professional framing, mapping her core values with precision, and identifying the beliefs that were quietly limiting her choices without her awareness.

Core values work sounds abstract until you do it properly. For Rochelle, it brought genuine clarity. When you can articulate what you actually care about — not what you’re supposed to care about — it becomes much easier to assess whether the environment you’re in is feeding those things or eroding them. In her case, the honest answer was the latter.

We also looked carefully at the story she was telling herself about her own career — the unspoken assumptions about what moves were “realistic,” what she owed to others, and what success was supposed to look like at her level. Several of those assumptions didn’t hold up under examination.

Following the retreat, we continued with weekly online sessions for approximately three months. That phase was about translating the clarity from Bali into concrete decisions and a practical path forward — including a realistic assessment of what a transition could look like and what it would require of her.

Where She Is Now

Rochelle made a move. She transitioned out of Salesforce and into a role at Google that was meaningfully different — not necessarily more senior on paper, but far more aligned with the things she had identified as non-negotiable for her. The work itself was a better fit. The environment reflected her values more closely. The decision came from a clear place rather than from avoidance.

She described feeling genuinely energised by the new role — not in a honeymoon-period way, but in the way that comes from choosing something deliberately rather than drifting into it.