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A performance playbook for female leaders navigating (peri)menopause. The tools, the tribe, and the clarity to keep leading on your terms.

You've always had the edge.
This is how you keep it.

Biology changes the rules. No one built the tools. Until now.

What is Gutsy?

No one built a performance playbook for the transitions that arrive at the peak of your career. (Peri)menopause is where the playbook starts. Intensive caregiving and other transitions sit alongside it. Different causes, same moments. The word that disappears mid-sentence. The brain that doesn't respond the way it used to. The confidence that has carried you into every hard room for twenty years feeling suddenly unreliable.These moments don't pause for board meetings. No leadership program was built for them.At its core is the Gutsy playbook. Specific moves, techniques and tools drawn from performance psychology, elite sport and cognitive science. Not theory. Practical tools you reach for in the moment, in the room, when you need them.The playbook is supported by training, events and a community of women who are done figuring this out alone.

Other programs look at what's happening to her body.
Gutsy looks at what's happening in the room.

This is for you. Or for the women in your organisation. Often both.

• This is me
• This is my organisation

This is me.

You are still the leader you always were. Some days are just harder than they should be.

You know the moments. The brain fog before a critical presentation. The word that disappears mid-sentence. The confidence dip before a board meeting. The heat that rises at exactly the wrong time. The decision that takes twice as long as it used to. You've been navigating these moments alone. Adjusting, compensating, performing. No one gave you a playbook for this.The Gutsy playbook changes that. Not to fix you. To give you the moves to stay sharp, present and in command. Whatever is happening in the room.

What you get:

your edge. strong. always.

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This is my organisation.

Your most experienced female leaders are navigating the transitions at work, at the peak of their careers. (Peri)menopause. Intensive caregiving. There is support for their health. There is nothing built for their performance in the room.

You've seen it. The senior female leader who goes quiet in a meeting she used to own. The high performer who suddenly seems less certain. The woman you'd earmarked for the next role who starts pulling back.You couldn't name it. And you had nothing to offer her.As AI takes over analytical and operational tasks, leadership value shifts entirely to judgment, contextual reasoning and human systems capability. These are precisely the strengths concentrated in your most experienced female leaders. Losing them now is not just a retention problem. It is a strategic one.Gutsy was built for this moment. Not as a wellness initiative. Not as a menopause awareness session. A menopause workplace programme, that protects your most valuable leadership capability at exactly the moment AI makes it irreplaceable.

What your organisation gets:

your edge. strong. always.

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Who we are.

We stopped waiting for someone else to solve this. So we built did.

We met on a beach in Byron Bay. Two women, one AI retreat, and a conversation that started with artificial intelligence and ended somewhere much more personal.Ariane had spent decades walking into boardrooms, executive briefings and high stakes strategy sessions and owning the room. Sharp, prepared and confident. Until the day her edge felt less reliable than it used to. Perimenopause. Nobody talks about what it actually does to the tools you've spent a career building.She went looking for solutions. There was nothing. So she started building her own approach, and talking to women around her. She kept hearing the same thing.Belinda was navigating a different transition. Intensive caregiving, a career she had never stepped back from, and the particular kind of exhaustion that comes from holding everything together at once. She left corporate HR to build her own executive coaching practice, and is completing her Master in positive psychology. She brings the methodology and the deep listening that turns lived experience into something you can actually use.Between them: the product and the program. The strategy and the room. The yin and the yang.

"Between us we have three kids, two continents worth of senior leadership experience, and exactly zero tolerance for being told to just take it easy."

Ariane Fricke & Belinda Thomas

Work with us.

Three ways in. Small rooms. Real tools.

Gutsy programs run as small, focused cohorts. Register your interest and we'll be in touch.

Get in touch.

Whether you're navigating this yourself or building something for the women in your organisation, we'd love to hear from you. Every message gets a personal reply.

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