How to Host Your Own Personal Retreat

This post originally appeared on The Focus Course on August 14, 2024.

A quarterly Personal Retreat is a great way to make sure that you continue to live your life in alignment with your vision and your values.

In this post, we’re going to dive deeper into the Personal Retreat process so you can make your next Personal Retreat more effective.

What is a Personal Retreat?

A Personal Retreat is essentially an all-day quarterly planning session. I call it a Personal Retreat because of this definition of the word retreat that I happen to like a lot:

A place providing peace, quiet, privacy, or security.

The key to a Personal Retreat is getting away to a secluded place so you can think clearly about the previous quarter and plan the next one.

It’s kind of like a miniature version of the Think Week made famous by Microsoft founder Bill Gates, where he’d leave for a week to just think about the future of the business. Without the disruptions of the day-to-day, he was able to get the clarity he needed to focus on the things that would move the company forward.

It’s also tied to the idea of thinking time from author Keith Cunningham, who said:

“I don’t need to do more smart things. I just need to do fewer dumb things. I need to avoid making emotional decisions and swinging at bad pitches. I need to think!”

Keith teaches that whenever we set a goal, there is always an obstacle between us and its successful completion. The problem is often that we’re in such a hurry that we don’t recognize the real problems we’re coming up against. By simply creating the space to think and asking the right questions, we can identify the real problems and the answers usually become clear.

The job of thinking time is to uncover the real problems preventing us from creating the positive change we want to see. Once we identify the obstacles standing between us and our ideal outcomes, then we can overcome them.

I’ve been doing Personal Retreats every quarter since 2017. Over the years I’ve revised the specific questions I use, but the process has stayed largely the same.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Planning Your Personal Retreat

The first step is to schedule your personal retreat. You’ll need to identify when you are going to host your personal retreat, but even more importantly you’ll need to select where it’s going to happen. The location you choose for your personal retreat will go a long way toward determining whether it is a success or failure. Remember, the goal is to achieve clarity around your goals and create momentum as you work towards your ideal future — your literal future is at stake here! So make sure you pick a quiet location where you can be alone for an extended period of time to think clearly about things.

I can’t overstate the importance of solitude here. The location you choose should give you time away from everyone and everything, allowing you to cut out noise and be alone with your thoughts. It’s critically important that there are ABSOLUTELY NO INTERRUPTIONS OR DISTRACTIONS!

The ideal location will differ for each individual, but you need to make sure that it is conducive to focused contemplation. You need to unplug your everyday routine and just be alone with your thoughts. Some people may prefer to stay inside, while others may prefer to get out in nature. I’ve been doing my personal retreats at a https://getaway.house for the last couple of years, which is basically a tiny cabin parked on a secluded campsite. (If you want to see if it’s right for you, I did a YouTube video about it a while back.)

As you think about the ideal place to host your personal retreat, remember it doesn’t have to be a 2-hour drive from home — it just can’t be your home! It has to be some place you don’t go to often. If you are too familiar with your surroundings, you will be easily distracted. You don’t have to go far, you just need to get away and think for an extended period of time.

It also doesn’t have to be a whole day, but more time will bring more clarity. If you can get away overnight, even better. But if four hours is the best you can do right now, that’s OK. Just recognize that if you try it once and it doesn’t stick, it’s probably because you made too many compromises. Give it an honest effort, and do everything you can to unplug beforehand.

The Personal Retreat Process

Here’s a checklist of my entire Personal Retreat process:

• [ ] Review My LifeTheme
• [ ] Review My Core Values
• [ ] Review My Journal Entries
• [ ] Review My Ideal Future
• [ ] Review My Eulogy
• [ ] Complete the Wheel of Life
• [ ] Retrospective, Part 1
• [ ] Break
• [ ] Retrospective, Part 2
• [ ] Set Your Intentions/Goals
• [ ] Review My Ideal Week

Here’s a deeper look at each step of the process.

Review LifeTheme

A LifeTheme is my personal version of a one-sentence personal mission statement that encapsulates my reason for being. I’ve found that this brings motivation to consistently take action on the things that are important and clarity to cut the things that aren’t.

Here’s my LifeTheme as an example:

“I help people find their why, multiply their time and talent, and leave a bigger dent in the universe.”

I filter everything I do through my LifeTheme. If I don’t see how something connects, it becomes a lot easier to say “No.”

At this point in the process, I’m just reviewing your LifeTheme to see if it’s still exciting. If not, I feel free to modify it, but this doesn’t happen very often.

Review Core Values

Your core values are a key part of your identity. They represent the things that are critically important to you.

When picking core values, be sure to select things that are actually important to you (not aspirational). Core values are very personal and should reflect who you really are.

At this point in the process, I’m simply reviewing my core values to see if they still resonate. Just like the LifeTheme, I feel free to edit my values at this point, but most of the time I don’t need to make any changes.

Review Journal Entries

The next step in the Personal Retreat process is to review your journal entries from the past quarter. I’ve built my own crazy Obsidian-based journaling workflow over the years for this, but it’s completely fine if you decide to use something else. For example, Day One is a great journaling app (and honestly what I’d be using if I didn’t have Obsidian).

The goal at this step is simply to review all of your journal entries from the past quarter. You don’t need to have any specific takeaways from doing so, but reviewing your journal entries will prime the pump for the type of thinking you’ll be doing in the retrospective. Having a fresh sense of what happened (and how you felt about it) will help guide you through the rest of the personal retreat process.

Review Ideal Future

The next step is to review my ideal future. This is a vivid description of what you want your future life to look like.

The purpose of reviewing this is to get you excited about what a day in the life of future you will be like. This creates motivation to consistently take action on the things that will lead you toward that ideal future.

Here’s an example of my ideal future in bullet point format:

• I wake up at 6am and write for up to two hours.
• After a short break, I go work on a business I’m building with a solid team who are passionately aligned with the vision.
• My schedule is very flexible and I take a regular mid-day break to go to the gym or go for a long run.
• I have lots of time to think.
• I have lots of time to create.
• My family is at home with me.
• We enjoy spending lots of time together and prioritize being together.
• We have dinner together as a family every night and regularly have deep, meaningful conversations while sharing a meal together.
• I live in a house with a view of the woods and the lake.
• I can work from anywhere.
• I coach Middle School and High School sports and have energy to play with the kids.
• We have regular board game nights as a family.
• We serve at church and help lead multiple ministries.
• I have occasional coaching meetings where I help people multiply their potential (but not so many that I feel like I can’t give my very best to my clients).
• My wife and I have enough money that we are able to financially contribute to every cause we believe in.
• I am involved in my community and enjoy working with others to make it a better place to live.

Reading this gets me excited about working towards this.

Review My Eulogy

After reviewing my ideal future, the next thing I do is review my eulogy. This is a note in my Obsidian vault with a description of the type of legacy I’d like to leave behind.

Think of this as a bookend complement to the ideal future note. While the ideal future is future-focused, the eulogy is past-focused (written from the perspective of you already having accomplished the things listed here).

Here’s an example of my eulogy:

Mike Schmitz was a loving husband to his wife Rachel and an ever-present father to Toby, Joshua, Jonathan, Malachi, and Adelaide. His Family was his first ministry, and he always made sure they were priority. He frequently said no to work and business opportunities to spend quality time and go on adventures with the people he valued the most.

Mike was also a committed member of his church, and when he wasn’t spending time with his family he could often be found serving there. He believed that God had blessed him richly, and he gave generously of his time and treasure to those who had need. He invested heavily in others and did his best to help them reach their full potential.

Mike’s life was driven by a desire to be a good steward of what was entrusted to him by God. He desired to inspire, encourage, and teach others to connect to their calling, discover their destiny, and live the life they were created for. Everything he did was filtered through this “LifeTheme,” and he helped others to accept responsibility, gain clarity, and take action in living a purpose-driven and meaningful life. He helped countless people find their why, multiply their time and talent, and leave a bigger dent in the universe.

He was an entrepreneur who loved building businesses and making art. Before he died, he wrote several New York Times best-selling books and gave away over $10 million dollars to causes he believed in.

He taught his kids to be lifelong learners and to discover their own creativity. They have all followed in his footsteps as creative entrepreneurs who live life on their own terms.

Wheel of Life

The next step in the Personal Retreat process is to complete the Wheel of Life. This is where I rate my current happiness with the different major areas of my life.

The wheel itself is like a circle that is cut up into slices (like a pie), and each slice represents a different area. Radiating out from the middle are additional circles that go from 0 (the point in the center) to 10 (the outer rim of the circle). For each area of your life (each slice of the pie), you fill out from the center until you reach the number that represents your current happiness with that particular area (0 is low, 10 is high).

The lowest area(s) from this section are where I’ll look to set my intentions or goals later on in the Personal Retreat process. But for now, I just record my current happiness with each area.

The end result will look something like this:

Keep in mind that the numbers here are completely subjective. Just pick whatever number you feel is right when doing your personal retreat.

Completing this in Obsidian requires modifying some code, which I walk through in my article about doing a Personal Retreat in Obsidian.

Retrospective, Part 1

The Retrospective is split into two parts with an intentional break in between. The first part of the Retrospective consists of reflecting on the last quarter and answering a couple of key questions:

• What did I accomplish? — This question helps me recall the things I achieved and celebrate my wins.
• What went well? — This question helps me identify the things that clicked or seemed easy, which can serve as clues for things to repeat.
• What could have gone better? — This question helps me identify what parts of my systems are broken and, more importantly, why.

I spend about 60 minutes jotting down as many things as I can think of as answers under these questions. These are set up as headers in my Personal Retreat note and I just jot down responses as bullets underneath these headers when I do my Personal Retreat.

Retrospective Part 2

After taking a break, the second part of the Retrospective is where I take the responses from the first part and consider the possible courses of action as a result. In this part, I ask three simple questions:

• What should I START doing?
• What should I KEEP doing?
• What should I STOP doing

Each of these questions is also a separate header in my personal retreat note. Just like the first part of the Retrospective, I jot down as many things as come to mind as bullets under each header. This doesn’t mean I’ll do all these things, but it’s important to brainstorm as many possible actions as possible here. Then, I always pick at least one thing to stop doing, which systemically adds margin so I can pursue new projects that are interesting to me.

For this part, I recommend you spend at least two hours brewing on these questions. What you’ll likely find when you do your Personal Retreat is that you’ll get a list of things right away. After about 20-30 minutes, you’ll likely feel like you’ve gotten everything you need and you’ll be tempted to move on. But if you stick with it, you’ll see that at about 90 minutes you get to a new level of insight when considering answers to these questions. That’s where the really good stuff lies.

So stick with it, and jot down everything that comes to mind.

Set Intentions/Goals

After the retrospective, it’s time to set my intentions or goals. These are the few key projects I’m going to focus on for the next quarter.

The first step here is to go back and look at the Wheel of Life I completed earlier. When setting my intentions, I try to focus on the areas that are lowest and pick things that will move the needle in those areas and have a positive impact.

The key here is a concept called intentional imbalance. Instead of trying to maintain balance and do a little bit of everything, you focus on one area and spend significant effort trying to move the needle in that particular area. Then next quarter, after you’ve made some progress, you pick another area and focus on that.

When setting your intentions, I recommend you think about them in terms of both projects that can be completed in the next 90 days and habits that you can do consistently that will lead to the successful completion of those projects.

The question to ask is:

What can I do to make success inevitable?

For example, if you want to write a book, you want to break that down into something more manageable, like Write 1000 words that you can take action on daily. If you follow through and do that every day, you’ll end up with 90,000 words at the end of the quarter. Even if you miss several days, that’s still more than enough material for your book (the average non-fiction book is 40,000-60,000 words).

Write the goal as the header, then identify the habits or milestones and list those as bullets underneath.

The next step is to find the time in your schedule to take the consistent action necessary to complete those goals.

Review/Revise Ideal Week

The last step is to review (and potentially revise) my ideal week. This is a rough time-blocked plan for my week that doesn’t include specific tasks, but does include the type of activity you want to do when.

This helps me see when and where I will be to take the consistent action required to move my intentions forward and accomplish my goals by the end of the quarter.

Without an idea of when those things will happen, it’s likely you will have trouble gaining traction. But when you determine ahead of time when and where you will have the time to devote to them, you are much more likely to achieve them.

You can do this in a digital calendar app if you’d like, but I do this in another note inside of Obsidian. This allows me to link everything together, which makes it easier to review.

Conclusion

So that’s how I host my Personal Retreat every quarter. This process gives me the clarity that I need to consistently show up and take action on the things that matter and clarity to cut the things that don’t.

And if you want to host your own Personal Retreat, check out the Personal Retreat Workshop where we walk you through the entire thing.