Why You Need To Book A Retreat

It’s hard for me to share this, but last week I nearly blew up my forum. Now I know, you would think as an EO president, professional facilitator and forum junky I would be above this but unfortunately we can all make mistakes.

Let me share with you what happened. It all began last year when against my wishes I was put in charge of running our retreat. We have traditionally been quite a strong forum but our retreats haven’t been that amazing. Being a very experienced EO & YPO forum retreat facilitator the forum wanted an experience like they have heard that I give others. My intuitive sense did not feel like it was a good idea because I feel having the sole responsibility to run your own forum retreat is really challenging (hence I do what I do!) I didn’t want to let the forum down though. I made a number of requests like minimum budget, time frame, use of passport and complete trust in how I run it as I wanted it all to be a surprise. 

Unfortunately the commitment dwindled over time with a number of pressured requests to make it shorter, cheaper and more local. What was more challenging was what happened the day before it began. After flying around the World after a 6 week trip away to get back to America to attend the retreat, I arrived to a mess. There were requests for agendas, exact details of what we were doing etc and a lot of grumbling that this was a bad time to do a retreat, it felt like my retreat had been hijacked.  This was really challenging for me as I had put a lot of effort into organizing an incredible retreat and I intentionally wanted it all as a surprise (remember it was one of my requirements for doing it). As a professional facilitator this wouldn’t faze me if it ever happened with another forum as I would see it as a great coaching opportunity on the topic of control and trust. What was funny is that it had never happened before, every other forum had completely trusted my way. This is what put me into a spin as I realized my own forum couldn’t get out of their way and completely trust me. This combined with my jetlag broke me. I felt deflated and thought if that’s how it's going to be I am going to self sabotage our success as well. I am not proud of this behaviour but I realized that I hadn’t enjoyed parts of this forum for a while and this was the straw that broke this camel's back  The retreat on paper was still quite good, but It was the worst retreat I have ever been part of. In a weird way it may have ended up being the best thing for our forum as there were a lot of open conversations about the state of our forum which contributed to 3 members leaving. 

Now fast forward a year, we have rebuilt an incredible forum and are just starting to build momentum and once again I accidentally nearly blew up the forum again. We had set retreat dates for September with a professional facilitator and we were making payments. I had done some visioning with my girlfriend over the previous month and we have decided to start some global travel in October built around chapter speaking tours and retreats that I was getting booked for. So I wrote in my update that I am not sure that I should go to the retreat or not because I may be taking a pause from the forum and  as we're planning to get 2 new members before the retreat, the forum may decide it's better for me not to be there. Unfortunately this coincided with our first virtual forum last week and it was interpreted that I was unsure if we should be committing to retreat inlight of corona. Then someone else expressed a similar concern and suddenly once again retreat was being questioned. After the forum ,I reflected on what happened and I saw the deflation in the retreat organizers face and I realised that as we had created a bad habit of retreats, the slightest mishap or excuse and it would all fall apart.

This would be devastating for me and my forum and thankfully we quickly had a group call about it.  I explained my situation and shared that I am 100% in for retreat if they want me there and emphasized that this needs to be a non negotiable and a huge priority.

The facts are that a strong retreat is the greatest investment you can make into your forum health over your year. The forums that are extremely intentional with the structure of their retreats and their desired outcomes have such a better experience over the year and dramatically increase their ROI on both their time, money and energy. Right now there is obviously a lot of uncertainty around how the rest of the year will look like and we’re unfortunately seeing a lot of forums think that they are too busy to hold forums and then also cutting any retreat planning.

I appeal to you to not succumb to this fallacy. We all need our forum now more than ever. We have in fact moved to a bi-monthly forum for the next few months so we can lean in and support each other even more. An annual retreat (& ideally a mini retreat) is a critical part of the forum experience.

Don’t do what we nearly did and let it slip. Get dates into the calendar now for the latter half of the year. If it’s not in the calendar it won’t happen! You don’t have to make any hard decisions around it, be flexible but at least agree on a loose structure. Set an intention for the retreat, pick a location, set a budget, ask a facilitator to hold dates etc. 

We don’t know what the future will look like but there is one thing I can guarantee, if you lose the discipline of forum best practices, then your forum will never be the same. I am confident that this current global situation will pass and the forums that scheduled that retreat will be so grateful when the time comes to be on it as we will need connection more than ever then.