UNSHAKEABLE FEMININE LEADERSHIP FOR WOMEN IN SPORT
Five Days in Andalusia for high-level female leaders in sport – going for gold, and nothing less. The deepest work of your leadership career.
At a resort that matches the standard you set for everything else.
ANDALUSIA, SPAIN
Five Days in Andalusia for high-level female leaders in sport - going for gold, and nothing less.
The deepest work of your leadership career.
At a resort that matches the standard you set for everything else.
6 – 10 October 2026 · Viluz Resort · Andalusia, Spain
You. Me. An exclusive group of women who know exactly what it costs to lead in masculine environments.
Where excellence is expected. Where pressure never switches off. Where you are the one who prepares hardest, stays longest and carries the weight nobody else names – and still delivers.
You can lead teams through pressure, crisis and competition.
But sitting on your own couch without feeling guilty for slowing down? That is harder than any boardroom you have ever walked into.
Somewhere along the way, carrying responsibility became your default setting. That is the cost nobody sees. Because from the outside, everything still looks golden.
The next level of leadership is not carrying more. It is leading differently.
You are building a legacy – shaping teams, cultures and futures that extend far beyond you. The question is whether the woman building it is still part of it.
For five days at Viluz Resort in Andalusia, we step out of performance mode – not to escape leadership, but to strengthen the woman behind it.
Five days of leadership work that changes how you lead, make decisions and carry responsibility long after you leave Andalusia. Where everything is taken care of – so you can finally take care of what matters most.
You.
The position. The responsibility. The impact. You have earned everything that is visible.
But somewhere between the boardroom and the sofa on Friday night – relieved that your plans got cancelled because you have nothing left to give – you wonder: is this it?
Your life looks golden from the outside. But you are living it from inside a golden cage.
You would never send your best athlete onto the field without the right preparation, the right recovery, the right investment. But when did you last treat yourself the same way?
That stops here.
Five days dedicated to you. Not as a luxury – as a necessity.
You know better than anyone what high performance demands. You have seen it up close: athletes who trains smarter, recover better and understand that sustainable performance is built behind the scenes.
You would never send your best athlete onto the field running on empty. So when did you start expecting it from yourself?
At Viluz Resort, we create the conditions for your deepest leadership work. Shadow work. Identity work. The work beneath the strategy. The patterns, beliefs and leadership habits shaping how you show up – often without you even noticing.
You leave with a different relationship to what you carry – and what you no longer need to.
Because the next level does not require more of what got you here. It requires a different version of you.
A private 5-star resort surrounded by mountains, sea views and the kind of stillness that reminds your nervous system what it feels like to actually exhale.
Viluz is the kind of place that matches the standard you set for everything else in your life – and then raises it.
You wake up to the scent of the garden. Every meal prepared from the finest local ingredients. The pool. The terrace. The Andalusian light at six in the morning before anyone else is awake. The conversations over dinner that go places your normal life does not make room for.
And in between – the deepest work of your leadership career.
Because transformation does not happen in the gaps between obligations. It happens when you finally remove them.
Every day includes leadership work, great meals, movement, reflection and the kind of space high-performing women rarely give themselves.
There is no colour-coded schedule. No pre-reading list. No minute-by-minute agenda.
And if reading that makes you slightly uncomfortable – good.
That is exactly the pattern we are here to work with.
Because needing to know everything in advance, preparing for every scenario and staying in control even when everything around you is taken care of is not a personality trait.
That is the work.
This is not your typical leadership course. Not your typical yoga retreat. It is something that goes deeper than both.
Twenty-three years at the highest level in international sport. UEFA Venue Director across European club competitions. Multiple FIFA World Cups, UEFA Euros and two Olympic Games. Worked at 20+ countries. Delivered leadership training across three continents – to the women navigating the same rooms I was in.
I never experienced being the only woman in the room as a disadvantage. I showed up. I delivered. Every time. But for years, I led entirely from my head. Driven, sharp, always on. And completely disconnected from a large part of myself.
It was only when I started running into things I could no longer push through that I began looking underneath the performance.
And what I discovered was that I had been leading from only half of myself. The part that performs. The part that proves. The part that never fully lands.
What changed everything was not a new strategy. It was reconnecting with the part of me I had left at the door every time I walked into a room. The feminine part💖
That is what The Golden League Retreat is built on. Not theory. Not someone else’s framework. What I know works – because I needed it to work for me first.
The women I work with recognise this immediately. They earned their seat at tables that were never built for them. They mastered the masculine game. And they are done paying the price that comes with it.
You have mastered performance. Now it is time to experience what leadership feels like when it no longer costs you yourself.
Because somewhere along the way, you started confusing carrying everything with leadership.
This retreat is for women who are exceptional at leading teams, projects and organisations – yet rarely give themselves permission to fully exhale.
When you have spent years operating in high-performance environments, constantly adapting, delivering and holding it all together – eventually that becomes your normal.
For five days, you step away from the noise, pressure and expectations.
Not to escape your ambition. But to reconnect with the woman underneath the constant responsibility.
You will not leave as a different person.
You will leave as more of yourself.
Stronger in your presence. Clearer in your decisions. More unapologetic in your leadership.
And no longer available for the version of success that costs you yourself.
If you read this and thought “finally” – this is for you.
And that is exactly the point.
This work is designed for women who are already carrying significant responsibility, visibility and decision-making power.
This retreat is not for you if:
That last one – I say with a wink😉
And with full recognition of exactly why that feels necessary.
Because many high-performing women learned very early that being in control was what kept everything safe.
Most women at your level have not experienced true support in years. Not because no one cares – but because everyone is used to them being the strong one.
This retreat is where that changes.
A space where you are not the one carrying everything. Not managing everyone else’s needs. Not performing competence every second of the day. Not staying emotionally switched on for everyone around you.
A space where you get to be supported at the level you normally support others.
The Golden League Retreat is the opening of something bigger. After these five days, the work continues – for six months, online, at a level most leadership programmes never reach.
This is where you stop performing for the room – and become the standard the room adjusts to.
This round, the retreat is also available separately. But if you are ready for the full experience, the combination gives you the deepest transformation – and the best investment.
For a long time, I was what I now call a walking head. Highly capable, highly ambitious, rational and strategic. And it worked – until it didn’t.
When my father took his own life when I was 21, I made a decision without even realising it. I never wanted to feel that kind of pain again. The patterns that followed helped me succeed – they taught me how to perform under pressure, stay in control and keep going when things got difficult. For years, I assumed that was simply what it took to succeed in a male-dominated environment.
Until I could no longer ignore what it was costing me. And that is when I started looking underneath – at the beliefs, the patterns and the little-girl rules that had been running the show for years without me even noticing.
When I started doing this inner work, I realised this was one of the most profound journeys I had ever made. Not across countries. The inner one.
And the effects showed up everywhere. Including in my work. I was delivering leadership trainings internationally, in a language that is not my mother tongue.
And what struck me was not that it went well – it was how naturally it came. Not from years of building up that experience. But because the work underneath had done what hundreds of hours of practice could not. A colleague who had been doing this work for more than ten years said: “With you, I know it’s in good hands.” And looking back, I understand exactly what he saw.
And when I started seeing how many women in sport and male-dominated industries were running on the same patterns – capable, successful, but leading at a cost that was never necessary – I knew this was the work I wanted to build a retreat around.
A retreat built around this inner journey – at a location as extraordinary as the work itself.
Not a yoga retreat. Not a leadership training full of frameworks. And not a room where you automatically become the most experienced person and end up carrying the group instead of being held by it.
A space where power meets power. Where you get to be supported at the level you normally support everyone else. That is the retreat I wish had existed years ago. So I built it.
This is what I want
The retreat will be conducted in English.
This retreat is designed for women leading in male-dominated industries. My world is international sport – and the examples and context on this page come from there. But high performance in a masculine environment looks the same whether you are in finance, tech, law, politics or beyond.
If you read this page and felt seen – that is probably all the answer you need. Send a message to contact@estherhuijsmans.com or book a call and we will see if there is a match.
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