about me

I have spent most of my career being good at holding things together

Long weeks. Long hours. A calendar that belonged to everyone but me. Three children, a full household, and a job that asked for more of me than most jobs are willing to say out loud. I was good at it - genuinely good - and for a long time, that felt like enough.

Then came the crossroads most capable women eventually reach, quietly, usually unannounced. Not a collapse. Not one dramatic moment. Just a growing sense that I was managing my life rather than living it - that somewhere between the emails and the school pick-ups and the next deadline, I had stopped asking what I actually needed, because there was never a good moment to ask.

What pulled me out wasn't a retreat, or a slogan, or permission from anyone else. It was a city.

I have always loved the human body and mind - how the two are never really separate, how a breath can change a thought, how a place can change a person. And I have always loved to travel, for one reason above all others: a new city has no memory of who you're supposed to be. Nobody in Seoul knew me as the woman who never stops. For 11 days, I wasn't performing competence. I was simply present.

That's why I built consider pause - to offer other women who lead a deliberate pause inside their lives - not an escape from them.
Somewhere unfamiliar enough to see old patterns clearly, and structured enough to put something new in their place.

I'm not asking you to stop. I'm asking you to pause - on purpose, before you need to.

- ailie
founder, consider pause

about consider pause

consider pause exists because of a simple, stubborn belief:
that the best time to address burnout is before it happens

Most wellbeing offerings are built for repair - for women who have already hit the wall, and need somewhere soft to land. There's real value in that work. It isn't ours. consider pause is built for prevention: for capable, high-performing women who are still standing, still succeeding, still holding it together - and wise enough to know that "still managing" isn't the same as sustainable.

We call it prevention, not repair, because language matters. We don't describe the women who come to us as burnt out, because they aren't broken and don't need fixing. They need space, structure, and a genuinely rigorous reason to stop.

That last part matters most. consider pause was never built to feel like a wellness retreat, because the women we work with don't respond to soft language and vague promises of self-care. They respond to the same things that make them excellent at their jobs: evidence, structure, and a clearly reasoned case for why something deserves their time. So our mornings draw on serious frameworks - from Essentialism, The Artist's Way and The 5 Choices to Extraordinary Productivity - used not as a reading list, but as practical tools for discernment, creative replenishment, and protecting your energy. Intellectually rigorous and genuinely restorative, in equal measure.

We keep our rooms small - six to eight women at a time - because who sits beside you matters as much as what's on the agenda. And every programme is held in Seoul, deliberately, because a new city does something a familiar one cannot:
it lets you see your own patterns from the outside, for the first time in years.

This isn't a place to escape your life. It's a place to think more clearly about it - and to return better equipped to live it.

about seoul

Once a year, I open a small number of places for a
5-day burnout prevention programme
for a handful of women who lead

Mornings are structured and rigorous: reflective practice, a repeated movement sequence, and
facilitated conversation grounded in real frameworks for discernment, creativity and energy.
Afternoons open outward - into the city, into stillness, into practices chosen for a single point of focus and nothing else.
Prevention, not repair, held across a rhythm you can actually carry home.

It is intentionally small. Intentionally rigorous. And intentionally not the retreat you're picturing.

If some of this sounds like it's describing a version of you - the one who's still managing,
still succeeding, and quietly aware this can't be the whole plan forever - I'd love to talk it through.