Restorative retreating

In January of 2022, one of my besties and I met up in Somers Point, New Jersey (Maria from Florida, me from Delaware) to hold the first of what has become our annual retreat weekend. It was an idea only two consultants could think up: deliberately spend time to contemplate where we were and where we were going on our career and life trajectories.

We invested time beforehand to identify and customize formal reflection and planning activities, to set ourselves a schedule of events, and to scope out a good location with comfortable living quarters, meeting space, sights to see, and restaurants to sample. By January we were ready to set out – braving Covid exposure risk (post-vaccine, but still), settling in just ahead of a winter snowstorm, and leaving behind varying disappointments – to take a more positive stance toward the new year.

Two of the exercises we assigned ourselves during that weekend were critical to reimagining my final consulting years and movement toward retirement. In one, we each sketched out and discussed three possible life/work scenarios for the next 3-5 years and what it might take to bring each option to fruition.

My favorite option was labeled “author at the beach.”

When we later created a vision board with magazine cutouts, I put that dream out to the universe in a concrete, colorful way. Thought-provoking activities and long conversations with Maria had brought my desires into focus, and did much the same for her.

In January of 2024, just two years and a few weeks after that, I moved into my light-filled condo in Lewes and changed my “job title”/self-proclaimed identity to writer-beach-walker.

That’s the power of retreat, of taking time to step back and map a new plan forward. (Obviously, there was a lot more to the story of my move, but I do credit the retreat for the fact that I had clarified what I wanted and taken small actions in the years afterward so that I was ready when the opportunity arose.)

Over many years of experience, and with my learning and development background, I’ve noticed a few key ingredients for restorative retreating I can pass on in case you want to reserve time for yourself as we turn the page on a new year.

Get away from it all. Find a restful spot to hide away from daily cares. It might be a quiet corner of your local library, a quirky room at nice B&B, or a sunny spot in the great outdoors – just as long as there’s comfy space for deep breathing and deep thinking. For our retreat weekends, Maria and I like to find a spot with ready access to a charming town for restaurants and window shopping, a museum or two for inspiration, and outdoor (preferably waterside) walking paths for contemplation. My favorite places for ruminating and writing ideas have been in a lawn chair by a babbling brook, on a breezy hotel balcony, and fireside at my own home. It will be hard to top the setting we found in Winter Park, Florida – a truly special hotel, lobby spaces for hours of conversation, great restaurants and unique stores, and a cool art museum to surface different perspectives. Silence your phone, make sure responsibilities elsewhere are covered, and school yourself to access only those parts of your laptop/internet needed for your retreat exercises.

Plan in advance. Decide what it is you want to contemplate and gather questions and materials you’ll need to dig into that. Peruse the personal development section of your local bookstore for workbooks and thought-provoking reading on your subject of choice: life crafting, career decision-making, business planning, faith building. My own retreats have varied from the profound to the practical: to strategize my consulting business, to consider who/how I want to be and what will make my life meaningful, to invigorate my writing aspirations. Whatever your agenda, you can search the internet for questions to ponder from credible sources (please don’t ask any GenAI (chat) tool; they are soul-less!). Adapt or devise exercises for yourself, prompts to help you to deeply explore your feelings and options. Take along what you’ll need; art supplies, brain-food snacks, personal documents, and simple pen and paper.

Follow a process. An inspiring retreat is often a product of looking backward, exploring options, and setting intentions for the future. Drawing from experienced retreat-planners, this reset process can be described in these steps:

• Reflect – Critically review your experiences, relationships, and feelings; ask lots of hard questions, especially “why?” and “why not?” This is where book and internet resources can be most useful; there is nothing more powerful than good questions, except, perhaps, giving yourself a full measure of time and space to explore them. Take time to write your answers – even if you stare at blank pages for a bit; the act of writing IS thinking, and it can help clarity to emerge. Making art to capture your feelings can also prove insightful.
• Ruminate – Identify and deeply consider options. Let your imagination run without too many limitations just to see where it goes. Play out scenarios and ask “why not?” I find that ambulatory thinking is really helpful here… take a long walk and be prepared to jot notes on your phone or a small pad as you gain insights and ideas.
• Reorient – Set your intentions going forward, whether that be a broad vision or well-considered commitments. I take advice here from Oliver Burkeman, who advocates setting intention, commitment, and small experiments (daily-ish to-dos) rather than specific challenging goals. Winnow your intentions down to the few key loose commitments that you can see yourself maintaining over time.  People often scoff at new year resolutions, but a retreat produces more well-considered and deeper commitments than off-the-cuff midnight declarations.
• Reclaim – Consider how you are spending your time and resolve to drop activities that don’t serve your purposes any longer; especially reclaim time from unproductive meetings, stale commitments, mindless scrolling, and wasteful binge-watching.
• Restart – Draw a line in the sand (so to speak) that marks “beginning now.” Challenge yourself to change what needs changing, but don’t set impossible expectations for yourself. Don’t try to implement all of your ideas at once; pick a place to start and begin.

Produce a remembrance. Piece together a vision board, keep a reflective journal, make a short list of intentions, create a framed graphic of an inspiring quote, discover your word of the year – whatever it may be, plan to take away some kind of useful artifact that will serve to remind you of your retreat insights. You might even get a souvenir as a reminder; I often bring home a new owl for my collection. The trick is to regularly pull out that remembrance as time moves forward, to bring your dreams and commitments back into focus. After years of working in corporate America, it’s natural for me to wind up with a PowerPoint slide that captures my vision and commitments for the coming year. I keep it as a quick link from my desktop, and it’s something I come back to and revise year-round.

My annual retreat with Maria this year actually took place in and around the Delaware beaches during my birthday weekend in December, and it was more about long talks than planned exercises. But drawing from that, I kept thinking about my hopes and dreams and eventually sketched a revised vision. This coming year, I aspire to write more essays (mostly blog posts) and to work toward developing my writing skills. There’s another book in my future, I think, and I want to write to explore that possibility. I’m excited to launch my retirement years with multiple vacations to places long on my someday list (and as a bonus, all with friends and family instead of my usual solo excursions). My key intentions describe a life that is vivacious, generative, and meaningful. Overall, I commit to “be not afraid of the enormity of the possible.”

I find retreating is the best gift I give to myself – self-development, self-care, and self-indulgence all rolled into one. Whether alone or with friends, focused on one topic or about life in general, for a few hours or a few days, take a retreat to reflect, to ruminate, to reorient, to reclaim, and to restart – and then see how your life might be expanded and focused when you take steps forward, refreshed and reinvigorated.