A North Yorkshire resilience coach who rebuilt her life after chemotherapy for a rare cancer has created a one-day retreat for high-achieving women, designed to address what she describes as a hidden epidemic of burnout among women who appear, outwardly, to have everything under control.

Sophie Forbes-Perry, who has spent two decades working in emotional resilience across sectors including education, the NHS, policing, and youth justice, said her experience of illness reshaped her understanding of what resilience actually means.

"Resilience isn't built by pushing through," she said. "It's built by coming back to yourself and the need for spacetime to be still, which isn't my natural state. This was imperative when rebuilding my life after months of chemotherapy. Cancer forever changes you."

That experience, combined with years spent working with offenders, troubled youth, and gang members as well as senior leaders in boardrooms, convinced her that resilience is a skill that can be taught rather than a fixed trait, she said. This experience inspired her to establish Kairos, a day-long retreat for women who she describes as quietly losing their strength while maintaining their composure.

According to the Health and Safety Executive's most recent annual statistics, women are 25 per cent more likely than men to report work-related mental ill health, with the disparity persisting throughout women's working lives from the age of 25 on.

"The women I work with aren't struggling in any visible way," Forbes-Perry said. "They're brilliant, successful, and managing everything effectively. "They're just doing it completely alone. Kairos was built for that woman—the one nobody worries about."

The retreat takes place on Monday 21st September. from 9.30am to 6.30pm, at Saltmoore in Sandsend, near Whitby, where the North York Moors meet the coast. It is deliberately limited to eight women, attending by personal invitation only, with no public booking system.

"There's no website and no public booking link," Forbes-Perry said. "The intimacy is the point."

The day is structured around four stages—anchoring, awakening, rewriting, and re-emerging—which Forbes-Perry says work from the nervous system upward rather than focusing on practical to-do lists. Participants leave not simply rested, she said, but with greater clarity and a form of resilience built from the inside rather than performed outwardly.

Forbes-Perry is the author of two bestselling books and a co-founder of a youth charity that specialises in emotional resilience. She is a finalist in this year's Yorkshire Muddy Stilettos Awards and the Small Business Awards.