Trailblazers’ Stories: not-your-average Blog
Here you’ll find more than 450 full-lenght articles, most 4000 words+, about subjects that would interest people who are navigating huge life changes, challenges and crises and are starting the next chapters in their lives. Most articles feature the story of someone who had to cope with a life-altering crisis. Maybe you’ll find the story of someone who survived the exact same crisis as you are facing? You can use the search function below to find inspiring stories:
Here are the main themes:
1. Retreats – Stress Dissolvers & Direction Finders – The transformative power of retreat experiences for people navigating major life transitions, career pivots, and personal crossroads. Explore how stepping away creates space for clarity, renewal, and intentional next chapters.
2. Horses – Partners in Transformation – How equine-assisted learning can accelerate emotional healing, build self-awareness, and guide stressed professionals toward their next chapter with wisdom that only horses can provide.
3. Navigating Life Changes, Challenges & Crises – Practical strategies and emotional support for weathering life’s storms—from unexpected upheavals to planned transitions. Learn to navigate uncertainty with resilience and emotional adaptability during pivotal life moments.
4. Burnout & Stress Management in Transition – Understanding why life transitions amplify stress and burnout risk. Science-backed approaches to managing acute and chronic stress when you’re already navigating significant personal or professional change.
5. Life Purpose – The Foundation of New Beginnings – Discovering and reconnecting with your deeper purpose during times of change. Explore why clarity of purpose is essential when reinventing your life, career, or identity.
6. Emotional Intelligence, Empathy, Self-Awareness & Mindfulness – Developing the inner resources that make transitions smoother. Cultivate emotional maturity, self-compassion, and mindful practices that support you through life’s most challenging passages.
7. Reinvention and Reconstruction after a Major Life Change – Navigate relationship shifts, empty nests, health scares, career pivots, redundancies, retirement, relocation, professional success without fulfillment, and find clarity for your next chapter.
8. Grief, Loss & Legacy – Honouring what’s been lost while creating meaningful legacy. Process grief from death, relationship endings, or life chapter closures, and discover how loss can transform into purposeful living.
9. Nature, Sustainability & Slow and Solo Travel – Reconnecting with natural rhythms as an antidote to modern overwhelm. Embrace sustainable, intentional living that supports well-being during life transitions and beyond.
10. Writing, Reading & Storytelling – How words heal and transform during major life changes. Explore writing your story, reading for solace and inspiration, book reviews, and storytelling circles as powerful tools for processing transition.
Margaretha Montagu
A Guide to Rediscovering Yourself When the Kids Leave Home The Sharp Overview: What You're About to Read So the last child has packed their dubiously laundered clothes, grabbed their childhood teddy bear (the one they swore they'd outgrown), and...
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Margaretha Montagu
Summary:Forget the Hollywood version of transformation—burn your old self, rise like a phoenix, better than ever before etc. etc. etc. Impressive, but not helpful when you’re just trying to survive till Tuesday. When your nervous system is screaming for relief,...
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Margaretha Montagu
#Stress Relief Techniques Here's what I've learned after two decades of watching executives burn out in slow motion: they don't need 60 minutes of yoga. They need 60 seconds of recovery on demand. Last Tuesday, I watched a CEO take...
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Margaretha Montagu
Why Your Retreat Participants Need the Opportunity to Tell Their Truth The Most Powerful Transformative Tool Hiding in Plain Sight So. You're leading a wellness retreat in paradise—pristine meditation halls, organic meals, Instagram-worthy sunrises. Your participants dutifully follow the schedule:...
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Margaretha Montagu
Your Secret Weapon Against Modern Burnout Storytelling? while you're drowning in deadlines, your inbox is a digital avalanche, and your stress levels are somewhere between "astronaut launch sequence" and "contestant on reality TV?" What if I told you that the...
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Margaretha Montagu
Most professionals don't see the difference until they've already crossed the line. Last month, a brilliant C-suite executive sat across from me, her usual commanding presence replaced by something I'd seen too many times before. "I thought I was just...
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Margaretha Montagu
It's Not About Owning Less. It's About Owning More Valuable Things Summary: Forget everything you've been told about downsizing being about sacrifice and deprivation. This article challenges the mainstream narrative that smaller means lesser, revealing how strategic downsizing actually multiplies...
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Margaretha Montagu
Leaders tell me: "Balance is impossible. If I slow down, I fall behind. If I keep going, I burn out." Jennifer, a Senior Vice President at a tech company, put it perfectly: "Everyone talks about work-life balance like I should...
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Margaretha Montagu
24 Simple Practices for Building Resilience Introduction Resilience is basically the difference between people who get knocked down and stay down versus those who dust their resilience toolkit off, get back up and keep going. Think about it - we...
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Margaretha Montagu
I hear this constantly from executives: "I sleep, but I never feel restored. It's like my brain is still running flat out even while I'm in bed." Rachel, a Chief Marketing Officer, described it perfectly: "I go to sleep thinking...
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Margaretha Montagu
Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative I’ve always believed in supporting other authors-especially non-fiction authors-and one of the ways I do that is by sharing book reviews. I focus on the books that have truly shaped how...
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Margaretha Montagu
Can Joining a Range of Activities, Interests and Community Groups Make You Happier, Healthier and reveal How To Recover From Burnout? Quick Take: Your LinkedIn network might be impressive, but when did you last laugh until your sides hurt with...
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Margaretha Montagu
#Operation Optimism: A 7-Day Mindset Makeover Before Surgery Part 3 Surgery Less Stressful Meet Sarah, a 58-year-old teacher who was scheduled for major abdominal surgery last spring. Like most of us facing the operating table, she was terrified. Her blood...
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Margaretha Montagu
Executives often give their best to their work — and their leftovers to their family. I hear this all the time from executives I work with: "By the time I get home, I'm drained. My team gets my best. My...
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Margaretha Montagu
Summary Anxiety loves a stationary target. While our minds spiral into catastrophic thinking, our bodies remain frozen – and therein lies the trap. Action, however small, disrupts anxiety's stranglehold by engaging our physiology, shifting our focus, and proving that we're...
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Margaretha Montagu
Summary: If you are an emotionally regulated adult, you don't explode in meetings, implode over spilt coffee, or need wine to "decompress" from Tuesday. Emotionally regulated adults have cracked the code that eludes most hardworking professionals: feeling all the feelings...
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Margaretha Montagu
The Short Answer: Yes, But Pack More Than Just Your Boots Sometimes the best relationship advice comes not from a therapist's couch, but from attending a couples hiking retreat, walking a muddy trail where your partner's true character emerges—usually when...
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Margaretha Montagu
Summary: You've meditated your way to enlightenment, manifested abundance until your vision board caught fire, and inner-worked yourself into a therapeutic coma. So why are you still stuck in the same job, the same relationship patterns, and the same bank...
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Margaretha Montagu
Quick Summary Are you enabling or empowering those around you? To Enable someone is to hand them a fish. To Empower someone is teaching them to fish, then helping them build their own fishing boat empire. One creates dependency; the...
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Margaretha Montagu
This article highlights a woman's extraordinary professionalism, memory, and poise under intense pressure. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=300t2DS3VdQ What is going on here? This clip shows the moment Maria João Pires realises that she’s prepared the wrong concerto, and then how she seamlessly switches...
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Margaretha Montagu
There is no passion to be found playing small - in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living. Nelson Mandela In Short Here's the uncomfortable truth wrapped in a comfortable sweater: That...
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Margaretha Montagu
The TL;DR That Might Save Your Life Your self-worth is your life's GPS—and most of us are navigating with a broken compass. We manifest what we think we're worth: we don't attract what we want, we magnetise what we believe...
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Margaretha Montagu
Summary Time isn't a magical bandage – it's more like that drawer where we stuff broken things, hoping they'll somehow fix themselves. Spoiler alert: they don't. While time can dull the sharp edges of pain, it takes intentional work, not...
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Margaretha Montagu
The Sharp Summary Distraction from stress is like chocolate cake for breakfast – deliciously tempting, occasionally necessary, but hardly a sustainable life strategy. While temporarily dodging life's curveballs might give your nervous system a breather, chronic avoidance turns you into...
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Margaretha Montagu
Quick Summary Life's most persistent myth meets reality's messiest truths. We'll explore whether there is a grand plan or if we're just really good at connecting dots that don't exist. Spoiler: both answers might be right, and that's the point....
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Margaretha Montagu
A Camino de Santiago Walking Retreat for Stress Relief In an era where burnout affects approximately 70% of professionals annually, finding effective stress management solutions has never been more critical. This retreat in southwest France's sun-blessed Gascony region offers a...
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Margaretha Montagu
In Short Ever heard, "I am not your therapist" on a retreat? Not all retreat hosts are therapists. They can be, with all the qualifications needed behind their names, but many are not. I do have the qualifications, but therapy...
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Margaretha Montagu
Quick Summary Hosting a retreat at home sounds easy – intimate gatherings, no venue rental fees, complete creative control. But before you transform your living room into a meditation sanctuary, consider the hidden challenges: blurred professional boundaries, neighbourly relations, insurance...
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Margaretha Montagu
We have another Wordweavers meeting (one of my two writing groups) today and the theme that we have to write a 1000-word story about is "Black." Both reading and writing have long been effective stress management strategies for me, so...
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Margaretha Montagu
Summary: The Paradox of Healing Others While Healing Yourself Hosting retreats as a wounded healer isn't just beneficial—it's transformative. For the host, it offers personal growth and professional empowerment, and the profound joy of witnessing transformation. For participants, wounded healers...
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