By the time you receive this I will be about to head off to gorgeous North Carolina with Tracey Owens and several other amazing women – healers, artists, coaches, and entrepreneurs who are all savvy leaders. Each of us is there to create meaningful transformation in our lives and business. We are there to generate change.
Create Space for Change to Occur
Together we are going to spend three days in the mountains at the Fire Starter Retreat for Women Leaders, looking at our stories, our fears, our passions, our values, and our purpose. On the last day we will build a strong individual plan to boldly bring our gifts into the world with renewed focus. This is deep work. It can stir up a lot of emotion, which typically precedes and follows the miracle moments we call “breakthroughs.”
Change is Messy
We avoid doing this in traditional business settings. Emotion like this is – well – it’s messy. Those of us who left corporate careers just keep the habit of avoiding the emotional work as a standard practice. We do this even though these emotional dives are actually necessary for the most powerful growth. We must be courageous enough to risk getting messy in order to incite creativity, innovation, or build emotional ties with customers.
A retreat like we are hosting is a safe place to have our messiness, so we can go back and do what it is that needs doing with real focus, and clarity of purpose.
Change Demands Action: Before, During AND After
Still, opening to the emotion and potential messiness are the “do’s” and I promised you a “Don’t” – which is this: The thing you must not ever, ever do at peril of wasting every juicy moment of this transformative space a retreat offers is ride the high of emotional release and inspired passion right back into your office, without taking the necessary action.
DON’T STOP short of the starting line. A retreat is not the beginning. Your first day back is the actual beginning, and you need to be ready for that before you go on a retreat.
Prepare Yourself for the Change to Come
I do two things to prepare myself for a retreat – whether it is self-hosted or under the loving guidance of someone who can Sherpa me through some of the trickier, hidden beliefs and fears I am holding onto. The first thing I do to prepare is I spend the week preparing my mind and body. I clean up my eating, amp up my meditation, renew my commitment to yoga, sleep and daily exercise. This means the time and money I am investing is well spent, because I am not bringing my noise and confusion at its most fevered pitch to the party.
Second, I arrive at the retreat with a plan already in place for how I will re-enter my daily routine in a way that I can begin to integrate any new activities and insights immediately. That plan includes writing out a new daily plan as my first scheduled action on that all-important initial day back at my desk. It includes blocking out an hour in the middle of the day, or end of the day to assess where there were opportunities to do things differently, by reviewing my retreat notes.
In advance of the retreat, I identify time-wasters that have crept into my routine, which I could set aside for the first week, as I try new activities that take extra time to learn or get started. In other words, I recognize how my existing routine might sabotage my new insights, and I “clean out the cupboard” of temptation to just lean on old habit – especially when I am likely to be a little tired and even a little raw.
The Process of Change is Universal
Today, I am well into my cleanse, having already had some aha’s, and looking forward to learning even more from Tracey as well as these other incredible souls. Over the next few days/weeks, I will share some of the breakthroughs, which undoubtedly will resonate. How each of us changes, and how we create moments of personal transformation, is universal. Watching others grow is how we learn to do it for ourselves