The Transformative Power of a Retreat

Many of us are fortunate enough to enjoy offsites, planning sessions and other “out-of-band” events with our colleagues from time to time.?They provide an opportunity to reflect on how your team is working together, contemplate the future and sometimes to get to know your colleagues on a deeper level.

This week, I returned from a retreat in Wales that was so utterly different and profound from the above, I wanted to share what I experienced and why I think this is a must for anyone working at the forefront of transformational change.

The word retreat first appeared in the 1400 century meaning an act of retiring or withdrawing, typically from a military setting.??Today we think of it as a period of time used to reflect and study quietly, or to?think carefully away from normal activities and?duties.?

My calling as a purpose practitioner is to give of myself to others, whether it be sharing knowledge, stories or just providing a safe listening space for others to reflect and find their personal purpose.?I love every minute of my work and have such deep gratitude that I can spend my life living my Purpose – to inspire people to thrive through Purpose.??The leaders I work with are also constantly giving of themselves.?Working to lead their organisation forward, to find the right answers to guide their employees, customers, investors and an array of other stakeholders. The pace they are operating at is often frenetic, with little time for deep reflection.

The question is where do those leading transformation go to refuel??Where is the private and safe space they go to??To sit quietly with themselves and give themselves permission to step back from this world of “doing” and just enjoy “being”.

So when I got an invite from my dear friend Andrew White (Senior Fellow in Management Practice, Sa?d?Business School, University of Oxford and CEO transcend.space) to join a group of 15 people from all walks of life and all four corners of the globe for a transcend.space 3-day Retreat in the remote Welsh countryside, I jumped at the opportunity - both from a place of curiosity and also anticipation.

From the minute our inspired facilitator Nick Ross started by reading a speech from Howard Thurman and Sophie Maclaren led our first meditation session, I knew this was going to be a very different experience.?There was no list of agenda items, powerpoint slides or must-do actions.?Just a couple of questions we were asked to ponder…

• What are we learning from our work about the world of organisations and leadership?
• How do we need to develop as facilitators, coaches and leaders to address these developments?

Here is an excerpt from this speech called the Sound of the Genuine..

There is something in every one of you that waits, listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself and if you cannot hear it, you will never find whatever it is for which you are searching and if you hear it and then do not follow it, it was better that you had never been born…

You are the only you that has ever lived; your idiom is the only idiom of its kind in all of existence and if you cannot hear the sound of the genuine in you, you will all of your life spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls…

The rest of this incredible speech can be found here and I encourage you to read it through a couple of times to take it all in.

Over the next couple of days we participated in facilitated conversations, 1-2-1 and small group coaching.?We also spent time alone in nature, shared our stories, all intermixed with mindfulness and meditation.

Then something incredible happened.?Our cloaks dropped, the conversations become deeper and more profound, we started listening to the sound of the genuine within ourselves and because we did that, we could hear the sound of the genuine in others.?Answers to our questions starting flooding in.?

The relationships we built across this group of people that were strangers just 3 days earlier was utterly profound.?The gifts of wisdom we were able to give and receive were abundant and directly from the heart -?with no ego or agenda in sight.?I have no doubt that friendships forged here will last a lifetime and we will be united forever as a collective through this wonderful time spent together.

As I have come back into the world this week, processing everything I heard, saw and felt at a deeper level – I realised something in me has shifted.??I can now see that the work we need to do as leaders and facilitators must come from an even deeper place within ourselves if we want to lead truly transformative change.?The more time we spend listening to the sound of the genuine within, the more we can listen for the sound of the genuine in others.?

So as I live my life then, this is what I am trying to fulfill. It doesn’t matter whether I become a doctor, lawyer, housewife. I’m secure because I hear the sound of the genuine in myself and having learned to listen to that, I can become quiet enough, still enough, to hear the sound of the genuine in you.

Now if I hear the sound of the genuine in me, and if you hear the sound of the genuine in you, it is possible for me to go down in me and come up in you. So that when I look at myself through your eyes having made that pilgrimage, I see in me what you see in me and the wall that separates and divides will disappear and we will become one because the sound of the genuine makes the same music.

So my ask of you is to seriously think about making time in your world to do a retreat.?Give yourself the time and space to move at a slower and deeper pace allowing you to:

• Review what you are learning about the environment in which you are working
• Understand what this means for you and the work that you are doing and how you need to develop
• Make changes to how you appear in the work to which you return