Designing Your Life Rome: An Inspirational Retreat for Women

Early-bird price: $2950 (through September 30)

Standard price: $3300 (October 1 - October 25)

Deposit of $899 paid through Eventbrite. Balance will be invoiced.

Join us in Rome for a transformative experience where you'll learn practical tools and methodologies to design a life where you thrive. Work with a community of supportive women and expert facilitators. Engage in immersive activities and meaningful conversations that illuminate new possibilities. All inspired by the Eternal City's timeless beauty and centuries of reinvention.

“Designing ​​Your ​​Life ​​for ​​Women” ​​is a powerful, hands-on workshop experience where you will learn and apply the Life Design© method to your own life.

This innovative workshop gives you the opportunity to learn and practice ideas and tools contained in the NYT bestselling Designing Your Life, How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life - in the inspirational setting of Rome and in community with women who have come together with a common purpose and who will support you on this life design journey.

This is a highly interactive retreat filled with coaching, breakout sessions and hands-on work. You'll reframe dysfunctional beliefs, explore the social and personal narratives that shape us, and dig into design tools to increase your creativity and confidence. Throughout the experience, we will take moments to reflect and integrate what we are learning. We will also explore hidden corners of Rome together, and unwind over authentic Roman meals and wine. These carefully curated experiences are designed to catalyze your creativity and inspire new possibilities, just as they've done for artists and thinkers for centuries.

This four day retreat includes:

• Aperitivo on Sunday, to welcome you to Rome and begin building our community
• Daily workshop sessions, exercises and activities
• Four-star hotel on the Aventine Hill - an elegant Roman neighborhood where aristocratic villas and ancient churches share peaceful gardens, in a quieter, more contemplative setting just outside of the bustle of the historical center
• Breakfast and lunch each day, as well as two dinners together in Roman restaurants beloved by locals
• Roman excursions - get inspired by off-the-beaten path monuments to creativity and transformation
• A Designing Your Life for Women Workbook for your exercises and reflections
• A one-hour post retreat call with the instructors and fellow participants for follow-up and coaching.

*deposit collected through Eventbrite. Balance will be invoiced.

Barbara is an Italian travel designer who specializes in sharing the undiscovered corners of Italy with her clients.She launched her travel design business in 2012 while living abroad, to help friends and her international network get more authentic exposure and a real sense of the places they were visiting in Italy. For our retreat she'll curate a set of dinners, rooftop apertivo, and cultural immersions that will stimulate our creativity and create experiences that will be the cornerstones of our community of life designers.

Katy is a seasoned facilitator and coach with over two decades of experience guiding individuals and groups toward meaningful insights and actionable transformation. A certified Designing Your Life coach, she creates supportive environments where reflection leads to purposeful change.

Her diverse facilitation experience spans from leading design and innovation workshops at Google to teaching courses at California College of the Arts and Stanford Continuing Studies. Whether working with corporate executives, creative professionals, or aspiring entrepreneurs, Katy excels at building communities where authentic connection flourishes.

Often the greatest challenge to setting a new plan is putting pen to paper, whether it’s in a do-list or a journal entry. Our guest lecturer Sheila Pierce Ortona will jumpstart you in a journaling session to help you reflect upon mapping out your new future. She will provide you with an Italian keepsake journal which you will have to mess up with ink over the course of the workshop. She will share personal anecdotes about how she has had to redesign her life as per the constraints of work, travel, marriage, and motherhood. Both an American and an adopted Italian, Pierce Ortona has spent the past 27 years living and working in Italy, Belgium, Israel and America as a writer and mother while married to an Italian diplomat. A wandering expat raising two binational teenagers, she writes about all this in her Substack newsletter, Missives from a Metropolis. She recently completed writing La vita al dente, her personal memoir about her journey, and continues to agonize over its revisions until publication.

We'll come together in Rome's elegant Aventino neighborhood, a peaceful retreat from the hustle of the city center.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Residenza Lavernale, 17 Via di Porta Lavernale, Roma, Holy See (Vatican City)