Why The Future of Work Requires a Chateau
We didn't ask for it — the Chief Economic Opportunity Officer of LinkedIn told us about the 5Cs
Two years ago, Jill Czarnik hosted an entrepreneurship dinner in Paris. Amanda Riley was at the table. What started as a good conversation over a long dinner slowly evolved into a friendship and eventually, a shared venture.
Amanda comes from Hollywood and theater and costume design. Jill has spent years in corporate and tech environments, while coaching leadership and leading mindfulness classes throughout the pandemic. Different worlds, but the same frustration: that the most important skills, the ones that actually change how you think, create, and connect never get prioritized in the non-creative environment. Yet they are the basis to where the most innovation occurs.
So they decided to build something different. Something that MUST happen in France.
Why Host a Retreat in France ?
There's something that happens when you leave your normal context completely behind. Traveling somewhere new gives you a new pace, a new aesthetic, and entirely new rhythm of your day. France does that in a way few places can. The landscape slows you down. The culture insists on presence. And a centuries-old château in the South of France has a way of making the quarterly review feel very, very far away.
Les Voyages Intérieurs is built around that shift. We take small groups of women to carefully chosen locations across France: châteaus, vineyards, villages in the South, and we use that setting as the foundation for work that simply can't happen in a zoom room.
What Actually Happens There
This isn't a retreat where you sit and listen. You move. You make things. You go outside. You work with your hands alongside local French artisans. Amanda brings theater and design exercises into the workshops: the kind of creative practices that bypass the thinking mind and get straight to something more instinctive and true. The somatic work happens in the landscape itself, in gardens, in open fields, in the particular quality of southern French light.
And then there are the conversations and the power or women gathering in a circle.This experience of disconnection, it turns out, is its own kind of education in the ultimate form of modern connection.
The Five Cs: Skills for the Future of Working & Living
We’ve crafted Les Voyages Intérieur around what LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky and Chief Economic Opportunity Officer Aneesh Raman call the 5Cs in their new book Open to Work, the uniquely human skills they argue will define who thrives in the age of AI:
Curiosity — slowing down enough to actually wonder about something again.
Courage — saying the real thing, not the safe thing.
Creativity — making something from the inside out.
Compassion — for yourself and for the women beside you doing the same hard work.
Communication — real listening, real presence, real conversation.
These aren't things you can learn from a book or a prompt. They're practiced. They're felt. And they tend to surface most naturally when you're somewhere beautiful, doing something with your hands, surrounded by women who showed up for exactly the same reason you did.
A Community That Travels With You
What we're building isn't just a retreat. It's a community of women — American and European, creative and corporate, established and emerging — who stay connected long after they leave. Because the work doesn't end when you get back on the plane. It's just beginning.
If you've been waiting for the right moment to step away, to reconnect with your own instincts, to be in a room or a vineyard, or a château garden with women who get it, this is that moment.
Spaces are still open for our Spring Retreat in Grasse (May 5-10). Please email hello@levoyage-interieur.com for information.
