A season just for you
Three months. A handful of ideas. Bringing them into form.
Working one-to-one. Exploring and creating from your skills, interests, and gifts: deep listening, clear insight, aligned action.
The Wā Programme. Founded by Cleo Shortland.
A season just for you
Three months. A handful of ideas. Bringing them into form.
Working one-to-one. Exploring and creating from your skills, interests, and gifts: deep listening, clear insight, aligned action.
The Wā Programme. Founded by Cleo Shortland.
Designed with you in mind
You know that your latest ideas will take you into new territory.
Your skills, interests, and gifts span several areas. You enjoy having a few projects on the go rather than one narrow lane.
You need devoted support that gets your world and sees the richness of what you’re creating.
You want to explore the rituals, rhythms, and habits that let you create from a place of wellbeing and integrity.
You value discretion and confidentiality.
And you want to finish what you start. Bringing your ideas from the ethereal into reality with completion.
How it works
The Wā Programme is designed with a focus of taking your ideas and designing the actions, habits, rhythms and rituals that are going to bring it into form, all across three movements.
Ideation and vision
We start with what you really want and desire, honest and unfiltered, before it gets shaped into anything else. We delve into your skills, interests, and gifts, and align this with what’s important to you into an idea, a vision, and direction for you to bring into form with me supporting alongside you.
Confusion and uncertainty
Somewhere in the season, things can feel dark and confusing, and if you've done this kind of creating before, you'll recognise exactly what this feels like. But this is an important part of doing something new. This is where the real growth happens.
Creation through aligned action
What's been gathering takes its first real form. Threading everything that has been discussed and visioned into a sustainable pathway of repetitive aligned actions, influencing the outcomes you so deeply desire.
These three movements often unfold in this order, though the season holds room for them to move fluidly rather than following a fixed script. The unknown might return after creation has already begun, or possibility might open again halfway through.
A change of season
Wā means season: time, a period of change.
This work meets that longer life season for three focused months, for the founder or owner with a change already underway, ready to understand what it's asking of them, and of the work alongside it.
"Your positivity wasn't just uplifting, it was empowering. You have a way of helping people see what's possible rather than focusing on limitations, and helping them recognise their own strengths and potential. That gave me greater confidence in my own abilities, and I always left interactions with you feeling energised, capable, and more willing to back myself and take the next step forward. The lasting impact for me was a stronger belief in what I could achieve and the confidence to go after it."
— Aime Carter, South Island Super Yacht Services
What you receive
An unlimited communication line, so momentum holds throughout the season.
Six fortnightly video calls one-to-one with Cleo, each building on the last towards what you’re creating.
A Trello board and visuals that hold the season alongside you, witnessing your idea as it's brought into creation.
Each call threads what matters into a personal framework, one decision, one signal, one question at a time.
Your investment
US$2,000 a month across the three month season, US$6,000 in total. This is priced as a full season of continuity: six calls and an open line between them, held together as one container.
Kia ora, I’m Cleo Shortland
So often the world tries to box us into being one thing. But I totally reject that. Nature incentivises diversity and multifacety, and so should we.
I love working with founders and owners who have a lot going on in their life and work. The challenge is finding simple ways of allowing for the fullness of it all while driving completion and delivery. Nothing worse than having a million things on the go and they're all sitting open. That's the work I'm here to undo.
I work as a weaver, sitting alongside you through the seasons of your creating. I listen closely, naturally excited by possibilities, holding space in moments of uncertainty before threading everything into a personalized framework of aligned action that lets you finish what matters.
The Wā Programme invites you to follow your curiosity into what's most alive, and actually bring it into form.
"My time working with Cleo was alchemical. I had never felt so deeply held and understood, a natural gift she holds. What stayed with me was a connection that transcended the surface and the ordinary. You could always tell that holding space energised her as much as it uplifted us both.
Through ritual, contemplation, deep enquiry and a focus on creating the future, Cleo sped up my personal evolution in a way only very few people can. Blending the rational and the creative, her structures and frameworks create a safe container for deeper magic to come through.
There is a true element of belief and magic in working with Cleo that goes far deeper than the mind, and you have to experience it to understand what can be created together. I made so much progress in those years, having Cleo hold my visions with unwavering faith. Cleo is the real deal.”
— Rhea James Fox, Writer
Step into the Wā Programme
Book a curiosity call with Cleo to learn how to step into the experience.
Frequently Asked Questions
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The three months programme is designed with a focus of bringing your ideas into creation, so each video call is built on the last across each of the phases:
Ideation and vision
Uncertainty and confusion
Aligned action towards creation
You arrive with whatever's most alive: a decision, a doubt, a pull you're still finding words for. I listen for what's underneath it, and we work to understand it deeper and whether anything needs to shift.
We then thread the findings into your personal framework to support you in taking aligned action.
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This is coaching built around deep listening and aligned action. It draws on a real, structured method rather than open conversation alone.
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This work suits a genuine change of season as much as a hard moment: a shift in capacity, a decision on the horizon, a pull toward something new.
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Wā, karakia (Māori incantation), and whakapapa (a sense of place in the world) shape how each session is held. A relational, cyclical worldview, rooted in place, learned over a lifetime.
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This work is built around the particular weight of being the person a business ultimately answers to. That weight has a shape I know well from almost two decades inside that world.
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It keeps this work reachable across time zones and travel, and keeps a full season possible regardless of where you're based.
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Everything shared stays between us. This is a private container for thinking something through, held with the same discretion you'd expect from your own profession.
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Threading works best with enough space between sessions for a theme to settle, and enough structure that momentum holds. Six sessions across a season, scheduled around your calendar, holds both.
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I receive clients in and around spring and autumn seasons only, wherever you're based. Book a curiosity call to talk about timing.
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This work is built on individual attention and discretion, better suited to conversation than broadcast. Find more through the podcast, or start with a curiosity call.