Reclaiming Genius · Finland '26
Five days in a Finnish forest,
off the grid.
For leaders who have stopped fully recovering.
The deep, in-person extension of the Reclaiming Genius work. Built for senior leaders who have already done the 90-minute Cognitive Signature Assessment, or who have sensed the underlying pattern long enough that 90 minutes is no longer the format that fits.
dates
12 - 16 July 2026
Setting
A Finnish forest · ~100 km from Helsinki
Capacity
12 seats
Applications close
Friday June 19, 2026
Why this exists
Twenty years of carrying,
And almost recovering.
Decades ears spent running on mental overdrive,
pushing through, staying sharp, staying “on”.
With time, the body’s signals go quiet.
The inner cues that guided them fade away.
Most senior leaders we meet have built their whole identity – and their success – on thinking their way through everything.
Brilliant minds. Strong performers.
But gradually disconnected from the deeper, felt intelligence that used to support their work.
This is the layer we call cognitive accumulation. Twenty-plus years of sustained high-performance produces a measurable buildup of unrecovered cognitive load that no performance review captures, and that the operator cannot see from inside.
It surfaces as the late-afternoon decision dip. The reactive choice that would not have been reactive five years ago. The post-vacation feeling of being almost recovered but not quite. The growing sense that the version of you who built your career is no longer the version available to you.
The 90-minute Cognitive Signature Assessment can identify which pattern is yours. The remote four-session Protocol can begin restoration work. But some patterns cannot be cleared in 90-minute increments. They require uninterrupted time, the right setting, and the company of others doing parallel work.
That is what five days in Finland are for.
What this is. What this is not.
Not optimization.
A return.
The retreat is a five-day, in-person, neurophysiology-informed return from chronic override to felt intelligence. Designed differently from anything else in the executive development space, because it addresses a different layer.
What this is.
- A small-cohort, in-person intensive at a former carpenter's workshop in rural Finland
- Seven sessions calibrated to seven intelligences (essential, somatic, reflective, relational, intuitive, emergent, coherent)
- Co-facilitated by Leo Khirug and Dain Dunston, drawing on twenty-five years of applied neurophysiology and three decades of executive practice
- A return from managing yourself from the outside to sensing yourself from within
- A place that becomes part of the method - quiet road, forest, lake, sauna, long Nordic light, slow rhythm
What this is not.
- Not a leadership seminar or performance-intensive mastermind
- Not a wellness retreat or detox program
- Not "executive optimization" - we are not adding tools to the stack
- Not a therapy intensive - this is not the right format for unresolved past material
- Not a place to escape life - it is a return to the place from which life can be led
The arc of five days
Seven sessions.
Seven intelligences.
The work moves through seven distinct intelligences across four working days. The progression is structural – earlier intelligences build the ground that later ones require. Not a sequence of skills. A diagnostic map of capacities the high-performance self has progressively traded away.
Sunday, July 12
Arrival
Arrival at Elämysverstas
Monday, July 13
Recognition
1 Essential Intelligence
2 Somatic Intelligence
Tuesday, July 14
Restoration
3 Reflective Intelligence
4 Relational Intelligence
Wednesday, July 15
Re-emergence
5 Intuitive Intelligence
6 Emergent Intelligence
Thursday, July 16
Integration
7 Coherent Intelligence
Closing & departure
Thursday afternoon return to Helsinki – or optional extra night in Porlammi with Friday morning departure.
The setting
The setting is part of the method
We will live and work together at Elämysverstas – a former carpenter’s workshop in rural Lapinjärvi, about 100 km from Helsinki. The house began its life in 1945 as a working craft space. Today it has become a warm, self-contained guesthouse for courses, gatherings, and retreats – with a large hall, shared kitchen, sauna, work spaces, bedrooms, terrace, forest paths, and a nearby river and lake. It is not a resort. Leonard’s brother Stas found it in their home village – a place chosen for what it allows, not for what it advertises.
The approach to the venue is part of the deceleration. There is an optional boat from downtown Helsinki to Porvoo (the halfway point), with lunch and Baltic archipelago views, before the road takes us into the forest. The body has time to register that it is no longer in the operating environment.
Across the five days we move between sessions and embodied practices calibrated to bring sensory experience back online: hiking in the surrounding forests, fishing in the lake, pottery, archery, a cooking class with a local chef friend to make simple Finnish dishes, picnicking, barbecue and fire in the evenings. Manual engagement of the hands, taste, smell, and color reduces brain noise and lets body signals become legible again. None of it is performance. All of it is method.
"This is not a hotel conference room. It is a house with memory. A place for shared meals, slow conversations, sauna, walking, silence, practice, and the kind of attention that rarely survives in ordinary working life."
