A confident, rapid and intuitive response
Successful organisations are already responding to the credit-crunch society and are thinking ahead, planning their place in a post-recession economy. To do this with confidence, they need people with a high state of awareness, who can think in different ways, absorb change, assess new challenges and adapt rapidly and intuitively.
Most management training is behavioural, teaching us how to respond to the situations we are likely to encounter in our work. This type of training tells us, "in this situation, do this, not that, and do it in this way."
The more courses we attend, the more situations we are able to manage, or so the theory goes. But behavioural training asks us to ignore our natural responses, when sometimes it is precisely those intuitive responses that are the most effective.
Time out is not time wasted
You may already know what you need to do, but day to day pressures take over, preventing you from giving it the attention it deserves. Taking time out gives you the space to review, re-evaluate and re-prioritise your schedule to make it more effective. It is also a good opportunity to re-charge your batteries and go back to work refreshed.
The retreats
So at Clarity we have designed two retreats to give us the time and the right environment to reflect, to help us reconnect with our natural insight and find, understand and release the layers of conditioning that prevent us from using it.
The first retreat is a 48 hour "taster" that focuses on communication and reflects on how we perceive, filter, misinterpret and block messages coming from others, often without realising it. Once aware of this, and of the reciprocal effect on the messages we want to get across to others, we can choose to change the way we communicate to make it more meaningful and effective.
The second retreat is a five-day experience that focuses on creativity and reflects on how learned, assumed and stereotypical responses can channel our energy away from the real issues. When we become aware of these, we widen our options and our opportunities to create more appropriate responses to challenging situations.
Bespoke focus
The formats are flexible and can be adapted to create bespoke retreats for your organisation. Or they can allow retreatants to build their own agendas, focusing on the issues they want to address, both at work and in their personal lives. The retreat environment will help them to identify specific tensions so that the underlying pressures can be eased, releasing more energy to both areas.
RAP - Reflect, Aspire, Plan
At the core of the retreats is the iterative RAP (Reflect, Aspire, Plan) process, where we look at new ways to reflect, how to discover what it is that we really want and need to achieve, and the most potent and direct ways to make it happen.
Once learned, this uncomplicated but powerful tool can be used to find the way forward in any situation from personal to professional and from individual to collective.
The benefits
The retreats are experiential in nature and feedback from other sessions shows that participants gain a wide range of benefits for themselves and their organisations. These include a greater level of:
· clarity in challenging circumstances
· understanding of the underlying issues
· awareness of why we react as we do to people and situations
· appropriate response once habitual behaviours are acknowledged
· power to achieve more when hidden potential is uncovered
· creativity after intuition is released
· choice when some or all these benefits are combined
Venues
We choose calm and serene venues to enhance the feeling of openness and to allow participants to embrace fully the retreat process and derive the greatest benefit.
The photos on this page are of two of our preferred venues:
Bore Place, near Sevenoaks in Kent and The Mill Retreat Centre in Picardy, France
