There’s a trap a lot of people fall into when they’re creating content for their retreats – especially as RICH leaders: Right-brained, Intuitive, Creative and Heart-centered.
If you’ve come from a background where those unique aspects of your personality weren’t valued or honored – either in a corporate setting, or through wearing yourself out doing 1:1 work with clients who weren’t the right fit for you – it’s easy to find yourself planning your retreat content on your own.
After all, you’re following your own intuition and guidance… you don’t want to be criticized or told you’re “wrong” for wanting to include certain things… and you might feel nervous about sharing what you’re planning for your participants before it’s ready.
So you decide to create your content all by yourself
Many (maybe even most) retreat leaders try to create their content on their own at home, sitting in front of their laptop (or surrounded by notebooks and vision boards!).
I did this when I first attempted to launch a ‘mastermind’ and it didn’t work for me at all. Like, crickets.
Because working alone in a vacuum is generally unproductive, and can even cause issues and unnecessary delays, when it comes to creating the best experience for you and your clients.
Here’s why:
1. You’ll develop what you think your clients want… not what they need
The content of the most transformational and memorable retreats is never created 100% by you. There are THREE creators of your retreat:
- You, the retreat leader
- Your retreat participants – the energy and ideas they bring make up a good portion of the outcome your retreat creates
- Spirit, source, the Universe or God – whatever you call it
With this in mind, when you’re crafting retreat content it’s really important to remember that you’re only ever responsible for one part of what unfolds on retreat. You need waay less content than you think, and a whole lot of walking your talk.
And the content that you do create needs to be designed to meet the needs of your clients. That happens when you’re connecting, co-creating and collaborating with your dream clients, and other creative and inspiring leaders like yourself – not when you’re by yourself at home.
Where do your perfect clients spend time – in person, online, in their downtime?
Allow yourself to get curious, and listen to what their challenges are. How can you best serve them? What do they most value from you? What’s hard for them right now?
Where do others who ‘get it’ and can give you an appropriate reflection gather?
When I started, I was sharing ideas and asking for opinions from people who couldn’t possibly understand what I was creating because it wasn’t in their awareness yet, and that was a mistake that cost me quite a bit of time and energy in self-doubt and reworking things.
Connecting with right audiences is essential if you’re going to create truly transformational retreat content – and it’s a powerful source of motivation for you as a leader.
2. It’s boring!
There are for sure times when you need to go inward, connect with Spirit, and trust that your Soul knows what needs to be brought to life in your retreat.
If you love spending time on your own, journaling and visioning, this is a really important part of your process – and I’m definitely not advising you skip it!
But when it comes to actually planning, creating and exploring the content of your retreat, locking yourself away with schedules and plans can quickly become boring.
There’s only so many times you can look at an hourly breakdown of your schedule – and being able to check in with someone or run your ideas past them can save you hours of going back and forth. In fact, it’s way more fun to do this with someone else.
Plus, for many of us, creating content on our own is actually the least effective way for us to tap into our zone of genius. Here’s why:
3. Most of us aren’t designed to work in isolation
Do you know your Human Design? It’s a tool we use with our clients to discover the way we’re naturally designed to work at our best.
According to Human Design, we all have certain energy centers that are ‘fixed’ that we have access to all the time, and others that are ‘open’ that we need other people to help activate.
If you don’t connect with others in the process of planning your retreat, you’ll find it much harder (or even impossible) to fully activate your ‘open’ energy centers.
For example, my heart center is open. That means that in order to connect with my heart and get clear on what I want, I need to be around others. If I were trying to figure out how to design my business model and what retreats to offer alone, I’d find it really challenging to get that clarity around what my heart wants.
I also have an open throat, which means my content creation is in response to what I sense others need to have voiced. So being around others allows me to tap into that energy center effortlessly and easily.
This also makes sense if you’re a highly sensitive person, or empath. While you might need clear space to think through some aspects of your retreat, your ability to tune into other’s needs and feelings is one of your greatest gifts – not one you need to shut yourself off from.
If creating content starts to feel sticky, challenging or slow, that’s probably a sign that you’re not in tune with your human design. Try reaching out to other high-vibe individuals and see if that changes the energy for you. It can make an incredible difference to the flow you can connect to.
How can you connect and collaborate?
Creating our content in isolation is one of the biggest mistakes we can make as retreat leaders.
Today, I invite you to think about how you can connect with your clients, with like-minded colleagues and peers to help guide your creation process.
There are lots of ways to do that: in person (our Retreat and Grow Rich Live retreat is just around the corner, online (we also have a course that comes with six months of virtual coaching), or 1:1 with a coach or mentor.
What’s important is that you actively seek out spaces where you can create your content in collaboration with others rather than isolating yourself.
If you’re not sure how best to bring your vision to life, why not book a free call with our coach Julie. She currently has a few spots open in her calendar each week this month for 1:1 calls to help you figure out your next step – whether it’s logistics, content, or building out a business model around your retreats. Click here to make one of those spots yours!