Why I travelled 5,469 miles to go on a retreat

At the time of starting to write this blog post, I was sat in my hotel room in Avila Beach on the central California coast.

And I’d travelled 5,469 miles to come on a three-day retreat.

Why? You might be asking?

So let me give you an insight.

Since I started out in business in 2006, I’ve always invested in myself. I’m a qualified coach. I’ve studied clean language. I’m a NLP Master Practitioner and I’m also a qualified Firewalk Instructor! I work with coaches and mentors and I know the benefits that this has given me and the business. I’m not fazed about investing in myself. And to be frank, if I expect my clients to invest, it’s important to lead by example.

But why California?

Early in 2018, my friend and colleague, Sheryl Andrews invited me to join her for a Clean Language retreat in California.

To be honest, she got me at California!

It was only after I said yes that I looked in more detail at what I’d signed up for!

The reason I signed up – apart from the adventure of course – was the time to work on me. When you spend all your time supporting others, it’s easy to forget about yourself.  And it came at the perfect time.

If you’ve been following our trip on Facebook and Instagram, you’ll find that we had a few days for sightseeing on the way (well you have to acclimatise to the time difference!) We also fitted in a few business meetings. This included catching up with recently published Librotas client, Rochelle Cheever, who showed us around the beautiful Laguna Beach.

But I digress. Why did I go and what did I get from the retreat?

Here are my insights from the retreat:

1. It’s funny how when you know something is happening, you often do the work before you get there. With our writing retreats, investing time and money in book writing means that many of our clients get down to the writing before they join us in Spain. And a similar thing happened to me. Before and during our travel time (and even during the sightseeing), I started to focus on my needs and get into the head space of attending the retreat.

2. Many things happen at just the right time when we let them. After a crazy last few months of 2018, I was well overdue to stop doing and start being. The retreat gave me the space to do just that. As it was a retreat, we could come and go as we pleased and some of the insights in this blog were written on Evernote whilst I got stuck in to a plate of nachos by the beach!

3. When you spend so much time supporting others, it’s important to support yourself from time to time. The retreat gave me time to reconnect with who I am and what I want, as well as reconnect with my business dreams and goals.

4. The retreat we attended was a Clean Language retreat, ably supported four facilitators to keep us on track with our objectives. Although you may have goals and a vision, we all need time where we can voice our thoughts, have our ideas reflected back, and then have the opportunity to make the changes that we wish to make.

5. One of the reasons I love our writing retreats is that people can write, sleep on it and get feedback. They’re not trying to squeeze everything into a tiny space of time. This retreat was the same for me. I had time to reflect, to focus, and to recharge. It reminded the value of what we offer to clients as well. I also got down to some work whilst out there. I did some planning. And some journaling. Plus some thinking. We always say that there’s a fine line between working and retreating – and I did a bit of both!

6. I love the connection with other like-minded souls – another thing we find happens on our retreats. In California, others had travelled even further than us, and making these connections and building relationships was a key unexpected benefit from attending.

7. Most definitely our trip to California gave us an adventure and it gave me valuable time to connect with my friend and colleague, Sheryl. To reach our retreat destination, we managed to navigate the twists and turns of Highway 1, then later cope with 16-lane highways in LA. Life can be a stretch from time to time and the whole experience was definitely one of them – but in a good way!

Join us in Spain in September for our writing retreat

Going on the Clean Language retreat helped me to reconnect with the value of attending a retreat and what we offer our clients in Spain each year when we run our Writing Retreat.

It’s the perfect space to write, reflect, plan, or whatever you want to get out of it. Plus you have access to three facilitators to help you to maximise the opportunity.

And as I said in this blog, when you commit to your book, you’ll get started sooner. Especially since we will offer you three FREE Make It Happen days if you sign up now (the first one is 8 February) and a 90 minute mentoring call.

To find out more about we can help you with your book, please go here.

A deposit confirms your place with the balance due in the summer. Don’t miss out as there are only eight places available and we’ve already started to take bookings.