One of my first posts written for Collin County Moms was A Unique Valentine’s Day: the Family Executive Retreat. It’s hard to believe that was the beginning of 2020, and now here we are at the end of the craziest year of my lifetime.
The idea of having a family executive retreat was born when my husband, a new vice president at his company, attended his first company executive retreat. I thought, “Why not have our own executive retreat?”
It was the absolute most fun we have had together. We got a hotel while my parents watched our kiddo, and we enjoyed hours of conversation planning our future and evaluating the past.
After much interest from my insta-family in doing their own executive retreat, I decided to make it a workshop! On December 31, which is the day we dubbed our Executive Retreat Workshop, we worked through our workshop along with several friends and family members!
If you are interested, you can check it out here, or go to my Instagram page where I am constantly sharing about our executive retreat. During the course of our workshop, we focused on three main things.
Looking Back
While I firmly believe it is not healthy to dwell on the past; it is, however, very valuable to look at your past areas of opportunity and areas of accomplishments. This will help you to learn and grow. When one fails, one has the opportunity to grow. And listing your accomplishments will help to increase your feelings of self worth.
It’s been a trying year for a lot of people, but if you buckle down and evaluate all areas of your life, you are bound to realize how much you have accomplished.
List Your Focus Areas
This is a fun part for me! Listing your focus areas will help you to identify what you want your goals to be. Once you know the areas you want to focus on, you can then delve deep and create ways you want to grow in those areas.
Last year, my husband and I chose the following: personal, family, health, and financial. Other areas that you might consider can be career, education, volunteerism, spiritual growth, social, or even romance.
The great thing about focus areas is that they can change year over year, and definitely won’t be the same person by person. Your focus areas might look vastly different from mine, and that is perfectly OK!
Goal Setting
Now that you have your focus areas, you can create goals. Along with those goals, you will want to create steps on how you will accomplish those goals.
For instance, if you chose health as one of your focus areas and you want to lose 15 pounds, that is your goal: Lose 15 pounds. The steps you can take to get there could be as follows: work out 4 times a week, track my food, and drink a gallon of water a day.
With each goal that you set, you want to create specific and measurable action items that will allow you to work towards your goals. If you just say that you want to lose 15 pounds, but don’t have a plan as to how you will get there, then the chances of you completing that goal are slim to none.
My husband and I were so excited to complete our Executive Retreat Workshop. This 50-page workshop guided us through conversations together that ended with us having a plan for 2021 and beyond. When we have these conversations, it gives us not only a platform to discuss our hopes and dreams, but gives us time to create an action plan that will help us achieve those goals.
The great thing about this process is that it can be done at any time throughout the year, and does not have to be done with your spouse. If you have a best friend that you’d like to do this with, then grab some wine, or in my case, some sparkling cider (#pregnant), and get to planning! And most of all, enjoy yourself along the way.
