The theme of this year’s retreat, staged in the beautiful Chainbridge Hotel in Llangollen, was the mind-body connection. With a demonstration of Taichi, a Pilates session and a mindful walk in the stunning North Wales scenery, all the delegates took full advantage of the opportunity to reinforce the connection between a flexible body and a flexible mind.
Learn and grow
By honing the ability to change perspective, see things objectively and engage the energy necessary to initiate change, everyone developed their individual personal development plan and happily committed to life-changing goals over the coming months. Reinvigorated by the headspace created by the deliberately slow pace of the retreat, everyone grabbed with both hands the valuable opportunity to deepen connections, learn and grow.
One particular warm-up exercise engaged everyone in a particularly memorable way. By having fun, engaging all the senses with actions and movement the entire group learnt to count to ten in Japanese within just a few minutes. Readied for the action of the day, it was a pleasure to reveal how the exercise had worked – by engaging all the senses, people had increased their chances of committing facts to the memory from 20% to 80%. By hearing, saying, seeing and doing, the group had managed a feat they would have previously thought impossible.
Reinforcing learning
The real bonus for me, around the full-sensory learning, is to create the opportunity for all participants in the exercise to have an enormous amount of fun and at the same time reinforce the learning in the most effective way possible.
There were many big takeaways from the retreat, but arguably the biggest and most important one was to realise the counter intuitive ambition of slowing down to go faster. Of going together to go further and achieving the connection between physical relaxation and the mental relaxation, which ultimately is the foundation of high performance.
Challenge 24 Coaching for Leaders
In January, I’ll be running two free taster session for my Challenge 24 Coaching for Leaders workshop – in these sessions, I’ll give an interactive two-hour overview of the content delivered successfully with two cohorts throughout 2022 and 2023.
If you want to perform better as a leader, manager – or simply as an individual who has ambition to raise your game – then please, come along and check out what’s on offer. You don’t have to go on to participate in the retreat, but I hope you’ll consider it too, in due course.
Most attendees at the workshops love the fresh and revitalising way of learning and it would be a pleasure to extend that possibility to you too.
Please follow these links to learn more and book your place:
Friday 12 January 10 am – 12 pm at Pant yr Ochain, Old Wrexham Road Gresford LL12 8TY
Friday 26 January 10 am – 12 pm at Pant yr Ochain, Old Wrexham Road Gresford LL12 8TY