58%
of European employees report burnout symptoms
Meditopia 2026
€4,000+
estimated annual cost per burned-out employee per year
WorkTime Research
$2.71
returned for every $1 invested in employee wellness (Johnson & Johnson)
Harvard Business Review
The performance ceiling nobody talks about
Your people know what to do. Something is stopping them from doing it.
It is not a skills gap. It is not a motivation problem. It is the body running an old survival script in a modern high-pressure environment. The leader who cannot switch off between meetings. The decision made from fight-or-flight that costs the organisation six months later. The team that performs below its own ceiling because the person at the top is dysregulated. These are nervous system events. And they are costing you more than any leadership programme will recover.
Mindset coaching addresses beliefs. Leadership training addresses behaviour. Wellness apps address symptoms. None of them address the physiological state that determines how well any of that learning actually gets used under real pressure.
The white space
Two industries. One blind spot.
Corporate wellness makes people feel better. Leadership coaching makes people perform better. Neither asks the question that determines the ceiling of both: what is happening in the body when your leaders and teams are under real pressure? This is the gap. And it is largely untouched.
What the market offers
Mindfulness apps
Calm the surface. Do not address the source.
Leadership and performance coaching
Better frameworks, sharper communication, stronger presence. The same dysregulated nervous system running all of it.
EAP programmes
Reactive, opt-in, stigmatised. Rarely used.
One-off yoga sessions
People feel good for 48 hours. Then back to baseline.
Mindset workshops
Cognitive reframing. Useful until the body overrides the mind at the moment that matters most.
What this offers
Nervous system regulation
Addressing stress at the physiological level where it actually lives, not the cognitive layer on top of it.
Leadership presence built from the inside out
High-stakes decisions, difficult conversations, and sustained pressure are body experiences first. Working at that level produces results that hold.
Mindset built from the inside out
Beliefs shift permanently when the nervous system is no longer generating them from a place of threat.
State management as a skill
Teachable, repeatable techniques for entering and sustaining high performance, even under pressure.
"The top performers already do this. They just do not call it wellness."
What we offer
Three ways to bring this work into your organisation.
Workshop
A 75 to 90 minute session shaped entirely around your team. The topic, content, and format are designed in conversation with you before delivery. Combines education, guided somatic practice, and interactive Q&A. Onsite or virtual.
- ✓ 75 to 90 minutes
- ✓ Onsite or virtual
- ✓ 10 to 80 participants
- ✓ Tailored to your context
Corporate Programme
A structured 90-day engagement for organisations who want lasting change, not a one-off session. A kick-off workshop sets the foundation. Monthly sessions build the work into daily life. Individual 1:1 slots let people go deeper at their own pace. Monthly leadership sparring keeps the person at the top supported. Built to produce results that hold after the programme ends.
- ✓ Kick-off workshop for the full group
- ✓ Monthly group practice session (45 min)
- ✓ Up to 10 individual 1:1 slots per month
- ✓ Monthly leadership sparring
- ✓ 3-month minimum
Corporate Retreat
A fully immersive 2 to 5 day residential experience for leadership teams or full-company offsites. Yoga, somatic workshops, coaching sessions, team dynamics work, and genuine rest, at a curated venue in Portugal. Custom-designed for your team's goals and culture.
- ✓ 2 to 5 days residential
- ✓ Custom programme design
- ✓ Portugal venues
- ✓ Leadership or full-team format
- ✓ Pre and post-retreat coaching
Case study
How Rydoo used their learning and development budget to give employees real tools for stress.
Rydoo is a fast-growing European SaaS company building expense and travel management software for mid-market and enterprise clients. With roughly 270 employees operating across multiple countries, the team runs at the pace typical of B2B tech scale-ups: high output, recurring pressure, and a performance culture that rewards people who push through. That environment is exactly where somatic work delivers its clearest results.
Isabel delivered a 90-minute workshop for the Rydoo team, shaped around the specific pressures of their working environment. Participants left with immediate tools and a shared understanding of why they feel the way they do under pressure.
After the workshop, Rydoo made individual sessions available to employees through their Learning and Development budget. Employees who wanted to go deeper could book directly with Isabel for one-on-one work, addressing their specific triggers, stress patterns, and the habits that would actually work for their life.
WHY THIS QUALIFIES AS LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT
Stress regulation is a teachable skill. It belongs in the learning and development budget alongside communication training and leadership development. The return shows up in focus, emotional regulation under pressure, and the quality of decisions your people make when it matters most.
The outcome
Employees who took up the individual sessions gained a clear map of their personal stress patterns, practical tools they could apply the same week, and a tangible shift in how they experienced pressure at work. The company got the same, funded through a budget line that already existed.
Why this model works
The workshop creates the shared context. The individual sessions do the real work. Together they produce something a one-off session never can: change that holds because it was built at the body level, not the cognitive one.
The workshop creates shared context. The individual sessions do the real work. Together they produce something a one-off session never can: change that holds because it was built at the body level, not the cognitive one.
Rydoo · Corporate programme
Who this is for
The pressure is different. The tools are the same.
01
High-pressure client-facing teams
Rejection, performance anxiety, and high-stakes conversations are body experiences first.
Whether your team is closing enterprise deals, managing key accounts, or presenting to boards, sustained pressure over time puts the body into low-grade fight-or-flight. Over time this erodes focus, shortens the fuse in critical conversations, and quietly hollows out the drive that made your best people great. The tools Isabel teaches are not soft. Regulated breathing before a high-stakes conversation is a performance skill. Knowing your stress response pattern lets you work with it instead of against it. Presence is built in the body, and the people across the table feel it.
What this looks like in practice: someone who used to freeze in silence after a hard objection now has a two-breath reset that brings them back into the room. A senior person who would spiral after a setback can process it somatically, reset, and pick up the work the same afternoon. These are not mindset shifts. They are physiological ones.
02
Leadership teams
Dysregulation at the top is not a personality trait. It is a nervous system pattern, and it cascades.
Neuroscience is clear: nervous systems are contagious. A dysregulated leader dysregulates their team. The meeting where the CEO is visibly tense changes how every person in the room speaks, thinks, and decides. Leaders who can regulate themselves create calmer, more psychologically safe teams around them. This is not about being less driven. High performance and nervous system health are not opposites. It is about making better decisions, more consistently, under the pressure that comes with leading.
03
Whole-company wellbeing
A shared language for stress changes the culture, quietly and permanently.
The most effective wellbeing investment works at group and individual level. A workshop gives your entire team shared tools and shared vocabulary. Individual sessions create lasting change at the personal level. Together they build a culture where people feel genuinely supported and capable of performing at their best. The result shows up in retention numbers, sick day rates, and the quality of energy in your workplace: the kind that does not show up in an engagement survey but that everyone in the building can feel.
What employees and teams get
Concrete outcomes, not a feel-good day.
For individual employees
- ✓A clear map of their personal stress triggers and nervous system patterns
- ✓Three or more somatic techniques for real-time regulation under pressure
- ✓Reduced reactivity in high-stakes conversations and difficult moments
- ✓Better sleep and physical recovery when pressure is highest
- ✓A felt sense of what regulation is, so they can find their way back to it
- ✓Practical tools they can apply the same week, not six months from now
For teams and organisations
- ✓A shared language for stress that makes support between colleagues natural
- ✓Leaders who dysregulate less, and whose calm cascades through the room
- ✓Fewer defensive patterns in team communication under pressure
- ✓A wellbeing investment employees actually use and remember
- ✓A culture where performance and recovery are not opposites
- ✓L&D budget used on something measurable, not just trackable
The results that matter most are the ones that show up on a Tuesday afternoon, not during the workshop.
Somatic change is durable because it is not cognitive. The body learns a new pattern. Under pressure, that pattern is what activates, not the stressed one. That is the shift.
Reference
Fidelidade · Lisbon
Sessions that are both relevant and easy to apply.
Fidelidade is Portugal's largest insurance group, with more than 7,700 employees across its worldwide operations and deep roots in the Portuguese economy. A company of that scale and structure brings its own specific pressures: large teams, multiple layers of management, and the kind of sustained, low-grade organisational stress that rarely makes it into a wellness survey but costs the business every single day.
Isabel has delivered multiple mindfulness and holistic health workshops to the Fidelidade team in Lisbon. The sessions combine practical nervous system education with immediately applicable techniques. When content is genuinely useful, people keep coming back, and at Fidelidade, they did.
"Isabel has been in our top of mind when it comes to holistic health and mindfulness workshops. Her sessions are always filled with relevant topics and easy techniques to apply on a daily basis. I would definitely recommend these workshops."
Rita Barros · Analytics Business Development at Fidelidade · LinkedIn
About Isabel
She came from where your team is now.
Before founding Monkey Mind Retreats, Isabel spent three years in international software sales at Deltek Inc, working across Europe. She went through multiple sales training programmes, hit quota under pressure, and experienced everything that sustained high-performance environments produce in the body. She did not learn about this from the outside. She lived it.
Today, around 70 percent of running Monkey Mind Retreats is sales, marketing and personal branding. She is not a yoga teacher who consulted a book about corporate pressure. She is someone who has carried a target and built something from nothing at the same time.
Her approach has always been body-based. She is an 850h+ certified yoga teacher, a trained somatic facilitator, and completed a course in Eastern psychology in India. The insight that runs through all of it: the body carries the stress the mind is trying to manage. Addressing it at the cognitive level alone is not enough.
She does not teach mindset as a set of beliefs to adopt. She works with the nervous system patterns that generate those beliefs in the first place. When the body stops running a survival script, the mindset shifts naturally. That is the difference between a workshop that feels good and one that changes something.
Read the full storyGetting started
Three steps from enquiry to delivery.
01
Discovery call
A 30-minute conversation to understand your team's context, size, goals, and timing. No pitch, no pressure. Just clarity on whether and how this work makes sense for you.
02
Programme design
Based on the call, Isabel proposes a tailored programme. Workshop topic, format, duration, and any individual session package are designed around your team's specific context.
03
Delivery and follow-up
Isabel delivers the session and provides a post-session summary with key insights and recommended next steps. Individual packages are set up directly with participating employees.
Common questions
What organisations usually ask.
Do you offer onsite and virtual delivery?+
Both. Workshops can be delivered in your office or virtually. Individual mentorship sessions are online. Corporate retreats are residential, held at curated venues in Portugal.
What is the minimum group size for a workshop?+
Workshops work well from around 10 to 80 participants. For smaller teams, a more intimate format is available. Individual sessions are always one-on-one.
How is this different from a mindfulness app?+
Apps deliver information. This work happens in the body. Stress is a physiological state that lives in your muscles, breath, and gut. A screen cannot address that. Working with a trained somatic facilitator produces results that sustained app use rarely achieves.
Can the content be tailored to our team?+
Yes. Every workshop is designed around your team's specific pressures. A sales team session looks very different from a leadership session. An intake call before delivery ensures the content fits your context exactly.
Ready to talk about your team?
Book a free 15-minute discovery call. We will talk about your team's specific situation, what format makes the most sense, and whether this is the right fit. No obligation.
Book a free discovery callOr email info@monkeymindretreats.com