THE FOURTH SIDE - GROUP PROGRAMME
You've spent decades building a successful life.
Now what?
The Fourth Side is a six-month group programme for midlife career change and life redesign, built for accomplished GenX and older Millennial professionals who are ready to design the next chapter deliberately, not drift into it.
We created this programme because aspiring ‘era-shifters’ deserve a future worth choosing.
The programme runs three times a year and operates on an invitation only basis, drawing on waiting list applications.
WHO IS THIS FOR?
You've built a successful career. Now you want to design what comes next, on your own terms.
Before we go further: The Fourth Side is not career coaching, retirement planning, or life coaching. It is a life design programme.
The work is about examining your belief system and paradigm, what you've been operating on for decades, and deliberately rebuilding what you want from life at this stage, based on who you are today. That includes deciding what role your professional life plays in the overall picture going forward.
You are professionally accomplished. You have delivered, provided, and performed. And somewhere in the last few years, something has shifted. The identity that carried you this far is starting to feel like it belongs to a previous version of you. The people around you are still heads down. Nobody in your professional environment is having the conversation you now need to have.
This programme is for people who are ready to have it.
Sound familiar?
Your career has been successful by every external measure, yet something still feels incomplete
The professional identity you built over 20+ years is starting to feel like it belongs to someone else
You can see the invisible age ceiling in your organisation, rarely stated, clearly felt
You want the next chapter to be intentional, not accidental, but you don't yet have the structure to design it
Nobody around you is asking the interesting questions you're now asking yourself
You've tried to address this with a new role, a new goal, a new plan, and it hasn't held: it just feels like more of the same
Bad news: nobody wrote your next chapter for you.
Great news: nobody wrote your next chapter for you.
THAT IS EXACTLY WHERE THE FOURTH SIDE BEGINS
WHAT IS ACTUALLY GOING ON
This isn't a career problem.
It's a design problem.
Most accomplished professionals at this stage try to solve it the way they've solved everything else, with more information, a better strategy, a new role. They jump straight to rebuilding. This strategy rarely leads to a long-term sense of satisfaction, because the fundamental questions weren't asked.
Three things are sitting below the surface:
The Context Problem
Unless you have scrupulously mapped five-year plans throughout your career, your path has likely been more accidental than designed.
You've spent decades responding to opportunities, expectations, and obligations.
The original social contract you entered when you started working all these years promised that a long career would lead to a comfortable retirement.
That contract has been rewritten.
Retirement ages keep rising.
Geopolitical and economic instability is real.
And despite decades of hard-won experience, many organisations now structurally favour younger, cheaper employees.
The rules were changed without your agreement.
The Identity Cost
When you started your career, nobody talked about fulfilment at work.
You delivered results, collected the titles, and moved on to the next thing. But something shifted over the decades, in you and in the culture around you. Fulfilment is now a legitimate expectation, not an indulgence.
The problem is that the job title you once pursued with real ambition no longer delivers it. Your identity has been built around what you do, and what you do is no longer enough.
That gap between who you are at work and what you actually want from life is not as clear as you’d like, and this feels uncomfortable.
The deeper question is: who are you without your job title?
The Gap
There is no existing script for the real questions of the second half of life.
For the first time, you're designing this yourself, without a map, and mostly alone. In fairness, this is both exciting, and uncomfortable.
The discomfort is a function of shallow thinking, after decades of living on autopilot.
The exciting part emerges from deeper thinking and more intentional decisions, which is what this programme focuses on.
THE FRAMEWORK
How personal reinvention actually works
The instinct when something feels off is to problem solve, fix and rebuild immediately: a new role, a new plan, a new goal.
Taking action and keeping busy feel like progress. But rebuilding on top of an unexamined belief system tends to reproduce the same frustrations in a different context.
Genuine reinvention moves through three distinct phases, drawn from the Applied Adaptability Method, the framework that underpins The Fourth Side. While the programme broadly follows this sequence, themes surface and resurface as your awareness deepens throughout the six months.
Phase 1: Deconstruction
Examining what you have been operating on
Over decades you have accumulated a set of beliefs about who you are, what success looks like, and what you owe to the people around you. Most of those beliefs were handed to you: by your family, your education, your industry, the culture you grew up in.
Most of these have been running in the background, shaping your decisions without your full awareness. Some have served you well and continue to do so. Others are no longer as helpful or relevant at your stage of life.
A simple example: as you grew up, your parents advised you not to speak to strangers. Yet as an adult, you have faced repeated expectations to network, which is essentially speaking to total strangers.
Deconstruction is the process of mapping your belief system honestly, without judgment, separating what is genuinely yours from what was inherited, and deciding what you actually want to carry forward. This is not therapy. It is a fascinating, rigorous self-audit.
Phase 2: 'Me'construction
Rediscovering who you are beyond your job title and social role
This is the phase most people skip, and it is arguably the most important one.
For people who have spent decades driven by duty, obligation, or other people's expectations, putting themselves at the centre feels unfamiliar, sometimes even selfish. That discomfort is normal. Moving through it is the work.
ME-construct is where you gradually and genuinely become clear on what you need at this point in your life and who you want to become in the next stage.
The confusing part is that the question is not about what is expected of you, nor what made sense ten years ago, but what is true for you now. This clarity becomes the compass for everything that follows.
Phase 3: Reconstruction
Designing the next chapter on solid ground
With a clearer sense of who you are and what you want, you can begin to design deliberately.
Reconstruct is not necessarily about making dramatic changes. It is about making considered choices: what to keep, what to let go of, and what to build next.
Some participants redesign their professional lives significantly. Others make shifts that change how they relate to the life they already have. Both are valid. The point is that the choices are conscious, not accidental.
And, as importantly, all participants give themselves permission to change their minds if and when needed. They leave with the tools to continue the work themselves, beyond the programme.
THE PROGRAMME
Six months. Three phases. One direction.
The programme is built around four dimensions of a fully designed life: Grounding, Intention, Clarity and Action. Most people have built theirs on two or three. The fourth is what has been waiting, something neglected. And this creates a sense of instability in the structure. We all, at some point in our life, neglect at least one side. For some, it's grounding. For others, it's action. One thing is certain: when we feel out of sorts, one side needs our attention. This is what inspired the name of the programme.
These four dimensions are woven through the three phases mentioned above, giving structure to your thought process and helping you identify whether you are progressing on the new path you are imagining.
The six-month timeframe is deliberate. Designing the next phase of your life is not something to be rushed through an intensive programme. Like a good wine, it requires time to unfold. The pace allows you to absorb, reflect, and integrate your learning, as well as run experiments in your life. Because reinvention is not linear, themes from earlier phases resurface and deepen as the programme progresses.
The focus of the programme is on growth rather than self-improvement. We start from the recognition that you are already enough, and the next chapter is worth designing with the same seriousness you brought to everything else. This will not only benefit you personally, but will help you create an intentional, positive impact on the communities you engage with.
01
Months 1-2
Deconstruction:
The Surfacing
Before the programme begins you will have a 1:1 onboarding conversation with Josianne and complete your AQ (Adaptability Quotient) Assessment.
Sessions one to four are focused on Deconstruction: mapping the belief system you have been operating on, identifying what is genuinely yours and what was handed to you, and beginning the work of separating the two.
Most participants find this phase more revealing than they expected.
02
Months 3-4
'Me'construction:
The Architecture
Sessions five to eight shift the focus inward. This is where you get genuinely clear on what you want from this stage of life.
The Conditioning Map and the Belief System Audit produce their most significant results here, and the Focus Compass and Decision Simplifier are introduced as permanent tools.
For many participants this is the most demanding phase, and the most liberating.
03
Months 5-6
Reconstruction:
The Launch
Translation into the world. Small, deliberate experiments. Building the habits of attention that sustain what you've built long after the programme ends.
The programme doesn't conclude with a plan sitting in a folder. It concludes with a sense of direction and momentum already in motion.
WHAT'S INCLUDED
So you don't just reflect. You implement.
STANDARD + PREMIUM
Fortnightly live pod sessions
Each cycle begins with a video released in week one, which you watch and reflect on in your own time. The following week, your pod meets live to explore the content, so every session builds on thinking you have already started. Each pod is facilitated by a coach accredited by the ICF and/or EMCC Global.
STANDARD + PREMIUM
Curated peer pods
Each cohort is organised into pods of 3 to 8 peers, small enough for in-depth conversation between serious professionals navigating the same questions. Sessions run under the Chatham House Rule, reinforced by a mutual confidentiality commitment that every participant signs, creating the conditions for a level of conversation your current professional environment simply cannot offer.
STANDARD + PREMIUM
Proven toolkit, tried & tested
The programme draws on a combination of frameworks developed by Josianne and tools curated from leading researchers in behavioural science, neuroscience, and coaching psychology. All have been used and refined through five years of 1:1 practice. The value is not in any single framework but in how they work together, each one chosen because it does something the others cannot.
STANDARD + PREMIUM
Reflection workbooks
Comprehensive reflection workbooks accompany the curriculum, so the thinking you do between sessions is structured, cumulative, and yours to keep.
The tools remain with you long after the programme ends.
STANDARD + PREMIUM
Adaptability profile
Your Adaptability Quotient (AQme) assessment, delivered through AQai, a scientifically grounded, independently accredited provider. Josianne holds an advanced certification in the AQai framework.
It establishes a personal baseline and identifies the specific dimensions most relevant to your transition, exploring the levers to work on to enhance your ability to initiate and adapt to change.
PREMIUM ONLY
Fortnightly live pod sessions
A monthly 1:1 session with your coach throughout the six months, a private space to clarify your goals, stay on track and explore questions you may not want to raise in the group.
A private debrief on the AQ assessment is included in this package
1,600+
coaching hours
200+
coaching clients
30 years
in financial services
13 years
APAC experience
5 years
executive coaching
Studied & worked on
4 continents
ABOUT JOSIANNE
She's lived the transition you're standing in front of.
And she's offering to guide you from the other side.
Early fifties. Amicably divorced. Empty nester. Regional C-suite title.
And a persistent, uncomfortable feeling that she had spent thirty years pursuing a version of success that wasn't entirely hers.
In 2021, at 51, Josianne left corporate life, retrained as a coach, and conducted 500 hours of 1:1 coaching in her first year. She invested in both a mindset coach and a business coach, because she needed to do the work she now asks her clients to do.
It was an extraordinary experience of rediscovering who she was, despite having lived with herself all her life.
She brings close to three decades in financial services across Europe and Asia Pacific, including regional C-suite roles, ICF Professional Coaching Certification (PCC), and five years of full-time coaching practice with clients across more than 15 countries.
She lives on Lamma, a pedestrian island off the coast of Hong Kong. This was a deliberate choice: she has dreamt of living on an island since she was ten, and wanted to enjoy the benefits of living in blue space.
ON BUILDING YOUR WORLD
"To anybody who wants to change the world…
It might feel like the world that’s most worth changing is the world outside of you.
It may also feel like the way to change the world is to stand against people or stand against things and hold up a flag and say, I’m not this and I’m not that.
But I would say that the only world you can ever change is your own world.
And the only world you can ever build is your own world.
And your world is worth building.
And your imagination is worth taking seriously.
So please do that for the sake of everybody.
Everybody needs you to speak from that place and articulate that for us.
Because that’s why you’re here.”
- Jacob Collier
This is right for you if...
You have built a career and you sense the next chapter deserves equally serious design
You want depth and rigour, not motivation, not techniques, not someone to hand you the answers
You are willing to look honestly at your own foundations, without judgment
You value discussing and learning with committed peers as much as the curriculum itself
You are ready, not perfectly ready, just ready enough to begin
You understand that this is an investment in the most important asset you have: the architecture of the rest of your life, so that you do not fritter the remaining time you have available mindlessly away
This is not right for you if...
You are looking for quick fixes, a motivational experience, or someone to save you
You are not genuinely open to self-reflection and being challenged
You believe life is happening to you and are not ready to take ownership of what comes next
You are in acute crisis, this programme is for people at an inflection point, not in freefall
You want a done-for-you solution rather than a thinking partnership
ABOUT YOUR FUTURE
Every trajectory compounds.
The question is which one will you choose?
Where you are today is not the problem. The problem is what happens if nothing changes. Not dramatically, not immediately. But over time, the gap between a life designed deliberately and a life drifted into becomes very wide indeed.
The green line does not require a dramatic reinvention. It requires a decision: to look honestly at where you are, get clear on what you actually want, and start moving in that direction with intention. That is what the next six months are for.
The red line is not dramatic failure. It is the slow accumulation of small deferments: the conversation not had, the chapter not designed, the question not asked. Most people on the red line are not aware they are on it. More often than not, they aren't aware of their own mortality. Or of time being their most valuable asset.
They are simply busy, until they are not, and the years have passed.
The Fourth Side is for people who are choosing the green line, now, while there is still time and energy to make it count.
THE INVESTMENT
Structured to make the commitment real, not prohibitive.
WHAT'S THE COST?
The programme pricing is shared during the application process.
Once we have established fit, you will have everything you need to decide.
WHAT ARE THE PAYMENT OPTIONS?
Both a pay-in-full option and a monthly payment plan are available.
Payment plans are spread over 5 payments, and start with a deposit that secures your place.
We don't apply an administrative charge on payment plans, but we offer an incentive for you to pay in full, prior to the start of the programme
LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT GUARANTEE
After your first month, if either of us feels the programme or the cohort is not the right fit, you can exit.
The deposit and first month's payment are non-refundable: they cover your onboarding, your AQ assessment, and the pod seat reserved for you. Beyond that first month, you are not financially tied in.