One of my team members, Marissa is here.

40 hours of planes from frozen white Indiana over the North Pole to Hong Kong before landing here in lush, hot, sweat-dripping tropical paradise.

She’s here for 25 days, to review the last year and plan out the next big dream expansion of the company with me.

It’s a big investment for her to be here: of money, of time, of sheer effort.

And yet it makes the difference.

It was just over a year ago since I first came up with the idea of flying her from America to Australia for a planning retreat.

One night I had a vision of her in a room with me, taking dictation as I listened to whatever Great Spirit needed us to know next.

How to grow, how to expand, where to go next, what was needed next, how we could help more.

And at the first thought, I thought it was impossible.

But I decided it wasn’t so crazy, and in fact it was a genius idea… I just had to work out a way to make it possible.

Looking back, it was something that made us go pro.

It affected all of us:

Me, my team, the company.

Spending this amount of deep time in review, reflection + forward planning is the stuff that turns you from reactor instead of creator.

It gives you the space + time to see if you’re on the right track.

It gives you the chance to craft your path forward.

Plan out how you are going to get from where you are right now to that place where your dreams are, that place you can inhabit in a year’s time.

How We Structure Our Planning Retreat

Last year, I compiled a heap of questions for us to work through together.

This year, I took all those questions and turned it into the 2013 Create Your Incredible Year in Business workbook.

(It’s not a bad deal when you think about it – that $9.95 workbook contains the exact questions that doubled our business from $250k to $500k in a year. And we’ll be using it to plan out our first million dollar year this year! ROI (Return On Investment) is pretty dang high! Ha!)

But What If You Don’t Have Staff?

Just because you don’t have a team, a business partner or someone you can do your business planning with, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it!

Because here’s the joy of it:

you get to do it with your very own best friend for liiiiife, YOURSELF.

The very best kind of company you can get!

I remember deeply the first time I took a planning retreat for myself.

I didn’t have even an office to do it in, so I spent a full week (of my two hour work blocks) in cafes + at the park.

It made me get SO much clearer about where I was wanting to head, what I needed to do to get there + create the map to get there.

Then it’s just a matter of implementing the shit out of it, and waddya know:

The Dream Comes True!

I’m Not Being Superfluous Here… or Superficial.

Planning retreats ARE effing powerful on every single level… financial, business, spiritual, emotional, life.

If you’re not taking time to review, reflect + map out what changes are needed and what direction you need to take, you’re just getting swamped in REACTING instead of CREATING.

Ya get so busy studying trees, you forget to look at your whole forest and work out how it needs nurturing and expanding.

What’s more, it’s not just a left-brain analytical process.

My planning retreats are what I call “business attunements“. It’s like getting a reiki attunement – when you give yourself the time and space to allow yourself to expand into the next level, evolve and grow. For me, these planning retreats are like receiving the new download of the vision of my company, along with how I need to create it in the physical world.

And as the big expansion comes through, I often face fears and sadness inside me as parts of me resist the growth, change and transformation that is to come.

It requires a lot of tools to process through it: tears, journalling, intuitive healing, meditation, EFT.

In fact, I’m reading this with puffy eyes after a particularly huge day of reaching one of my “upper limits” (as Gay Hendricks calls it) and knowing it was time to let go of it. I know that those kinds of limits aren’t my soul’s truth… they are just fears that need to be heard and understood. So I listen and hear it out. Stay gentle with myself. Take a long bath afterwards. Lay down piece after piece of baggage that I’m no longer needing. Getting lighter, ready to fly higher.

Tomorrow I’ll wake up. And we’ll dive deep again.

Doing this huge, immense work of birthing a new miracle into the world.

all my love,