I’m so excited to talk about this today. I recently went to a business retreat. It was up in the mountains in this beautiful home, and I got to hang out with some really good friends and some coaches that I know and really think about my business and what I want this place to be for you and for me, and what feels right.

And I think this is so important. So I’m just gonna give you a couple of the tips and, and like things that stood out to me during this retreat. And then I’m gonna talk about retreats for yourself, whether it’s an actual retreat that you go to up at the mountains, or just ways to create a retreat for yourself every day.

So this retreat was called My Business Identity, and it really was looking at, we actually spent more time really talking about like our childhood, who we think we are, why we do the things we do, and really what I understood and learned what stood out to me at this retreat was just. To love ourselves to notice why we’re doing things and why it’s important.

And sometimes we do things from an identity that we’ve created that that doesn’t really serve us anymore. Like maybe it’s something that happened in your childhood or something that someone said, something that came from outside of you that made you doubt yourself. That is part of our identity and we wanna love that part.

But also as adults, as people who want to be intentional in our lives, we also want to let go of some of those stories if they’re not serving us, if they’re blocking us, if they’re not helping us, because we do have the power to take the parts of our story and. Use them to move forward and be who we want to be.

And so I hope that that that’s something that you can do is just really think, what is my identity? Maybe what is my identity in grief? What do I think about myself? What do I think about what’s possible for me? And maybe where am I blocking myself in ways that I don’t need to be? This is really what we do in coaching.

Sometimes it’s hard to see these things ourselves. Sometimes we need someone outside of us to show us things, to ask us different questions because we get stuck in the same ruts. And so asking different questions, being in a different space, like being in a space with other people who also understand grief, but want to find themselves and find that joy again.

It’s so powerful. So I just wanna invite you, if you’re interested in having someone to ask you really great questions and inspire you, and help you and support you, come and talk to me. Go to smooth stones coaching.com, and then there’s a big button that says Get support. That’s gonna explain. My programs right now, I have two amazing programs available.

One is called Lift. That is for anyone who’s been through the loss of a baby, who just needs some help letting go of their grief, learning and lifting up your eyes. If your eyes are down with grief, we’re gonna help you get ’em up back to where you want them to be. And if you feel like you’re doing okay and you just wanna aim higher, I’m gonna help you there too.

My other program is Pregnancy After Loss. Peace. This is a magical program. It’s everything I wished I had when I was pregnant after loss three times and really struggled. We’re gonna help you so that you don’t have to hold your breath the whole time. You actually are going to find peace every day, not just when you get to hold that baby in your arms.

It’s so good. It’s so perfect. You gotta go check it out. Okay, so let’s talk about retreats. I looked up the definition in the dictionary and a lot of the definitions we’re really talking about like military retreat and so it’s to withdraw to fall back. And I kind of was thinking about this as. We see that in a negative light a lot of times.

Like if you retreat, it’s almost like you’re too scared. You know, the, the good thing to do is just stand there and be murdered, you know, be, be moaned down. Um, that we should just stay up at the battlefront. We shouldn’t withdraw, right? We don’t wanna be a coward or anything, but I actually think about it in a different way.

Like if you want to live to fight another day, Uh, sometimes you gotta run away. Sometimes you gotta withdraw. And sometimes the smart thing to do is recognize when you need to go back and take care of yourself and get safe, and so that you can fight another day. So really, really interesting to always look at words and, and the meanings that we have for them.

Um, why we think about that. Because retreat doesn’t have to. Be negative. In fact, I think it’s really, really positive. And another definition that I really liked was a period of withdrawal for prayer, meditation, study, or instruction. And this is what happened at my retreat. This is why I went, because daily life can be a grind.

Daily life can be loud and busy, and you’re multitasking and you’re pulled in so many different directions. That sometimes you just need to get away from it all to find some clarity again and to really focus, and that’s what I think it is. I think it’s having focused time to take care of you, to go towards your goals, whatever those are.

And. To really just make space. I think that was another theme that came out of this retreat, was just giving yourself the space to think, because we’ve got our phones and we’ve got music, and we’ve got voices, and we’ve got traffic, and it’s just, there isn’t a lot of space for quietness in our lives. And if you’re never quiet, how are you gonna hear yourself?

How are you gonna listen to your inner wisdom? How are you gonna know what to do? I think this is one of the downsides of the information age that we live in, because we don’t have to think for ourselves. We always have answers at our fingertips. So when you ask a question, we wanna just Google it, but sometimes we need to just let ourselves think, let our brain work on the problem.

Find the answer for yourself. That is, What’s most important, your inner wisdom is it’s magic. It’s everything. And when there’s so much noise, you can’t hear it. And when you have all these experts around you, you don’t trust it. Learning to trust your inner wisdom, learning to trust yourself is so vitally important to every human, but especially to people who are grieving, who are trying to figure themselves out.

Right. You still have that. There’s so much inside you. We gotta reconnect with that, and I think that’s what a retreat will do. So I just wanna quickly talk about how we can incorporate retreat into our lives daily. What do you do? What’s the first thing you do when you wake up? What does your morning look like?

What does your routine look like? Now, everyone is different, and I think sometimes there can be a lot of pressure, like I’m not gonna say you need to meditate for 30 minutes every day, and it has to be at 6:00 AM before everyone wakes up and et cetera, et cetera, which is sometimes the message we get and sometimes it just doesn’t work.

Now, for some people it does work, but I want you to think about where in your day. Could you make space to retreat, to withdraw, to focus on you to incorporate prayer, meditation, study, or instruction? Because the thing is, if we don’t plan for it, it’s probably not going to happen. And a lot of times, especially as parents, as moms, as people socialize, as women, we put ourselves last always.

Because that’s what a good woman does. She puts herself last, she puts herself at the bottom. But we also know that that does not create the best results for us. So daily, can you retreat? Can you find time to learn something that you’re interested in, to connect with a higher power, to connect with your heart and your body to do a check-in?

I want you to think about how you can retreat each day and come back even stronger and more focused and more ready to go with a better energy. Then weekly, how do you retreat an easy way if you go to church? I think this is beautiful, that God created a day for us to retreat. That’s a Sabbath day, and we rest and we regroup and we think about a higher power and we connect with God, and that is already built in.

So if you do that, how could you make that weekly retreat even more powerful? How could you make it more restful? How could you make it what you want it to be? Because again, sometimes life just gets away from us, and if we’re not intentional, Um, it’s easy to kind of just let it be what it is, but I wanna encourage you to make a weekly retreat, or maybe it’s Monday mornings, you like to sit with your planner and just plan out the week and see what’s going on.

Do that as a way to focus, as a way to recharge, as a way to retreat from everything and just get things organized. If that’s your thing, do that. It’s really so individual, but I want you to also say, how can I build in a little bit of retreat to my week? And then I was thinking yearly a year goes by so fast.

I don’t know about you, but I feel like the years are just going by. So quickly and we can go a long time. Um, I’m actually gonna be going on a trip to Europe to visit my dad. He lives in Europe and I can’t believe that the last time we were there was four years ago. It was right before C O V I D hit, so a year before, but.

I remember just feeling this prompting inside of me like, I need to go and take my girls, because they had never been to visit their grandpa in Europe. And so I took my older girls, my husband stayed home with my little Rainbow boys, and now my little rainbow boys are big enough to go themselves. And I’ve had that prompting again, like I just need to go because today’s the day there’s, you know, We don’t know if tomorrow’s guaranteed.

So we’re, we’re making this trip happen. But my point is I can’t wrap my head around that. It’s been four years. Since we went last and it was probably, you know, I, I had never taken my kids or been to Switzerland, um, since I started having babies, just cuz I was always having babies, having losses, nursing, having, you know, difficult pregnancies.

It just, there wasn’t a lot of international travel, but now we can, and so we’re gonna do it, but time really does fly. So how can you just say, I. Really need to take a little bit of time for me. Maybe it’s one day and you get a hotel and you go and you just be by yourself and you do whatever you want. Or you set up a, a girl’s trip or a family trip or whatever is a retreat for you.

Whatever sounds like a way to withdraw and to recharge and to study and learn, do that. Or maybe it’s, you wanna take a little online course and that’s just for you. Anything you want. I highly recommend though, that you do at least once a year to do something out of the ordinary. And I know that the details can be complicated.

You’ve gotta figure out childcare, you’ve gotta figure out work, you’ve gotta figure out all the things and, and it just seems like there’s never a good time. But you know what? That none of that matters. It’s going to be fine. If you want to do it, you will figure out how to do it. And. It will be worth it.

Don’t wait until this perfect free time just appears cuz it’s not going to. So I’d really encourage you, number one, to be on the lookout to be thinking about it. What can I do? What have I been feeling drawn to? What do I want? And then make it happen. And sometimes that’s last minute, just deciding to say yes.

We talk a lot about decision making and coaching and learning how to make decisions. So, If you see something and it’s next weekend and it doesn’t make any sense, like you don’t know how you’re gonna make it happen, but they’re like, oh, we have this one spot and it’s available and we, you know, you can afford it and whatever.

Just go for it. Like say yes to the things. I met this girl recently who was doing like this Weeklong Costa Rica yoga retreat, like it looks incredible. And I wanna put that on kind of my retreat bucket list. So maybe someday I’ll be able to go with her. This year doesn’t work, the dates don’t work. But, um, just, just things like that.

Just be on the lookout. And I also would say like a lot of times we’re worried about the time, we’re worried about the details, and then we’re worried about the money. What is the cost of never taking care of you? What is the cost of you being run down? What is the cost of you putting yourself last and your children watching you put yourself last?

Because they’re always watching. So sometimes we think, oh, it’s selfish to go away. It’s selfish to spend money on me. What if you’re wrong about that? What if it’s the best thing you can do for you and your family and your kids and all the things that are important to you is to like take some time to retreat.

To get away and to take care of you. There is no guilt necessary. This is a gift you’re giving to yourself and you deserve it. I like period. You deserve it. You deserve some time to yourself to focus on things that you want. You deserve to step away from the every day and you. Will be amazed what you can create when you just focus on that.

So if you have a business and you give yourself like 48 hours to just focus on it, to get organized, to do the things you’ve been wanting to do, to, to get into like total creative visionary mode and plan out your next year, whatever it is. So powerful, so worth it, right? Just like shut down the noise. Shut down the every day and retreat and constrain, and just do one thing.

So powerful. Okay, now the last thing I gotta say is I have been wanting to do a retreat for lost moms for. Years. I actually planned one in 2021. Had everything ready to go. Everything was booked, everything was planned, and covid just was not gone enough. People still weren’t traveling. People didn’t have the vaccinations yet.

It was just, I had to cancel it and it was so sad. But I am getting that feeling again. Like, we need to get together in person. We need to connect in person. We need to. Focus on ourselves, focus on healing our hearts, focus on lifting our energy. Have you felt like your energy just isn’t where you want it to be?

Like it’s just lower and more tired and it’s a struggle? What if you could lift that in the company of some amazing. Amazing Lost Moms. That’s what I wanna do. I am going to have a page on my website and you can go in the show notes and find it, but it’s just smooth stones coaching.com/retreat. And I’m gonna have an interest list.

I’m gonna see who wants to come, and I might even send out some questions like, where would a good location for you be? And we are gonna get a retreat planned. I, I have a vision. I can’t wait to make it happen. So go to smooth stones coaching.com/retreat, join the interest list, and you will be the first one to hear when everything’s ready and when spots open up, it’s gonna be so amazing.

Let’s all retreat together and come back stronger and more refreshed. And more focused and ready to take on this life after loss and all the beautiful things that you wanna do. It’s gonna be incredible. I can’t wait to hug you in person. Go sign up for the interest list. I’ll see you next time. Are you tired of feeling like your baby’s death was somehow your fault?

Go to Smooth Stones coaching com and get my free mini course. How to Stop Blaming Yourself After Loss.