This experience is built around the realities you’re navigating every day—not hypothetical case studies or generic leadership theory. Every element is designed around one goal: helping you become a more effective leader when you return to your organization.

Over three days, you’ll bring real leadership challenges into the room and work through them alongside experienced faculty and a small cohort of accomplished peers. Through coaching, guided reflection, meaningful dialogue, and practical application, you’ll gain new perspectives, challenge long-held assumptions, and develop practical approaches you can immediately apply within your organization.

• Work on the Challenges That Matter Most. Bring the conversations, decisions, tensions, and opportunities you’re facing today. Together, you’ll uncover patterns, challenge assumptions, and identify practical ways of leading more effectively in the situations you’re facing today.

• Experience Through Practice. Because the best leaders don’t simply understand new ideas. They practice them until they become part of how they lead. You’ll learn through coaching, guided reflection, experiential practice, and real-time feedback, helping you move beyond insight into meaningful action. This isn’t leadership theory discussed from a distance. It’s leadership practiced in real time.

• Learn Alongside Leaders Who Challenge Your Thinking. Some of the most valuable leadership conversations happen outside your own organization. You’ll join a carefully curated cohort of founders, executives, business owners, and senior leaders who bring diverse experiences and perspectives to the room. Together, you’ll challenge one another’s assumptions, broaden your thinking, and build relationships that often extend well beyond the program itself.

• Return Ready to Lead More Effectively. Every element of the experience is designed to strengthen your leadership back at work. You’ll return with practical tools, stronger judgment under pressure, greater confidence navigating difficult conversations, and new approaches for leading people, decisions, and change more effectively.

Traditional executive education often emphasizes strategy, communication, and execution. But leadership effectiveness is shaped by more than what you know.

We believe leadership is practiced, not performed.
We believe leadership is practiced, not performed.
We believe today’s leadership challenges are systems, not isolated problems.

Our approach at Presence-Based Leadership is intentionally:

• Faculty-led rather than speaker-led
• Experiential rather than lecture-based
• Rigorous without losing its humanity
• Evidence-based while honoring the complexity of real people
• Immediately practical while grounded in lasting development

The most difficult leadership challenges are rarely isolated problems. They’re interconnected systems of people, relationships, decisions, and competing priorities. Learning to recognize those systems changes how you lead within them.

Presence-Based Leadership is taught by the experienced faculty behind Presence-Based Coaching, one of the most respected developmental coach training programs in the field. For more than two decades, they’ve helped coaches, executives, entrepreneurs, and organizational leaders expand their capacity to lead through complexity with greater clarity, resilience, and effectiveness.

Rather than delivering content from a stage, they work alongside participants throughout the experience—teaching, coaching, challenging, and supporting your development in real time.

Presence-Based Leadership is designed for founders, executives, business owners, and senior leaders who:

• Carry significant responsibility for people, strategy, and culture.
• Are leading through growth, transition, or increasing complexity.
• Value their own development as much as the success of their organization.
• Want more than another conference or executive seminar.
• Believe the effectiveness of their leadership should continue growing alongside their organization.

• What’s included: Course fees include tuition, materials, and meals and lodging.
• Location: Portland, Oregon (exact retreat location to be announced shortly!)
• Meals and Lodging: Meals and lodging are included as part of the package. Lodging and meals prices include single occupancy lodging, private bath, and gourmet meals prepared with locally sourced, organic foods. Meals are provided Monday breakfast through Wednesday lunch. Lodging is provided Sunday evening through Wednesday at 2PM.

If you must cancel your registration for any retreat or course, all fees paid minus a cancellation fee will be refunded, as long as the conditions outlined in the terms and conditions are met. If those conditions are not met, no refunds will be provided. See more details on cancellation policies on the Terms & Conditions page.