Exploring Your Ocean with Immersive Retreats
Tl;dr
The best leaders invest time and energy in understanding themselves. This inner work is akin to exploring your own personal ocean.
In this piece, I explore why it’s easier to explore your ocean with help, psychedelics, and how not to explode. There’s some stuff about why Immersive Retreats are a fundamental practice of any leader’s journey in there, as well 🙂.
Diving Into the Ocean
Most of us want to get a better understanding of ourselves. This "inner work" allows us to more clearly assess our reality and understand our relationship to it, which helps with forward-looking efforts like decision-making and planning.
There's a lot of territory to navigate on this path.
We're kind of like the ocean. The deeper you go into your ocean, the more layers you unearth about yourself. Progressive elements of these layers can include beliefs, stories, patterns, ways of being, and traumas.
You can explore the depths by yourself, but swimming is a pretty inefficient way to go about this (for our purposes, let's assume you wouldn't explode from the pressure). You'll have to stop to acclimate as you go deeper. This is a slow and tedious process. In our metaphor, this is doing inner work by yourself.
Now, imagine you're in a submersible. You don't have to worry about acclimating as you go deeper because you're in a tool that does that for you. You can also descend more rapidly and safely because you’ve abstracted away a lot of the energy and focus that swimming requires. In our metaphor, this is doing inner work with the help of tools and frameworks, like presencing, meditation, and philosophy. Instead of focusing our energy on navigation, we can focus on insight.
Now, suppose you hit a point where you have to choose between 3 paths. The submersible helps navigate a path a lot more efficiently, but you're still exploring new territory and each new path can come with its own traps and wrong turns. If you had someone on the surface of the ocean communicating and guiding you on the optimal path downwards, you'd avoid a lot of those traps. They're equipped with more advanced tools like rangefinders, video cameras. Most importantly, they’re experts in submersible usage as they've been these places before.
In our metaphor, this is doing inner work with tools and frameworks, AND a coach. Compared to doing it by yourself, the path becomes clearer, more navigable, and more insightful.
The Problem
It's hard to do meaningful inner work in a distracted state:
The world around us is hyperconnected, and we are afraid to lose out on keeping up with it.
We have the desire to disconnect, but rarely find the time or inputs to do so.
When we do disconnect, it's in an unstructured manner.
When we run into these issues, we diminish the progress we are able to make by handicapping our efficiency.
Immersive Retreats are structured to provide the set and setting for efficient progress. They help calm the waters and take the sharks out of the ocean.
Diving Deeper: Compounding and Inconsistency
In my experience, the magic of Immersive Retreats comes from leveraging the Law of Compounding and Healthy Inconsistency.
The law of compounding refers to the idea that small incremental gains can accumulate over time to result in significant overall improvement. 1:1 coaching sessions apply the law of compounding to create consistency over time. By meeting with a thoughtful coach on a consistent basis, we create the conditions for accountability toward a goal over time. However, we are only able to go as deep as the time allows us in 1:1 coaching sessions, which usually last for 60-90 minutes. This gives us progressively deeper views of the ocean over time and the accountability to further explore the territory that supports us.
In contrast to 1:1 coaching sessions, Immersive Retreats apply the law of compounding to create consistency in environment. They create the time, space, and structure to get to a level of depth that is very difficult to achieve in a single 1:1 coaching session. An Immersive Retreat allows us to explore the entirety of the ocean at once. This awareness compounds when we bring that picture back to our 1:1 coaching sessions, supercharging our efforts.
The best-run retreats push your mind into novel planes of thinking and experiencing. This offers an effective counter to consistency bias, the tendency to stick to pre-existing beliefs and mental models, even in the face of new information that contradicts those beliefs. Consistency bias can lead to dismissing or ignoring evidence that goes against those beliefs, which hamstrings our ability to lead effectively.
Immersive Retreats also create an environment of healthy inconsistency, akin to psychedelic experiences. Psychedelics open us to what is already within by shifting our brains into novel ways of thinking that shatter old mental models and beliefs. The retreat environment is designed to create a similar setting, sans the druggy effects. By carefully designing the setting and itinerary and offering support from coaches to help guide mindset, a well-designed Immersive Retreat disposes of the need for a dosage. This also has the side effect of allowing the results of a retreat experience to integrate more quickly. In our retreats, we combine individual sessions, group work, experiential activities, and tools such as meditation, presencing, and connection to others to provide novel stimuli for the mind and body to process in relation to our goals.
Our oceans are often very similar to others’ oceans. Immersive Retreats allow you to explore the depths of your ocean at the same time as other people in their own submersibles doing this work. You get a source of support and learning from the path that others take, which helps you make better decisions when navigating.
This happened on a Retreat that I was a part of last year.
Exploring My Ocean: My Experience on Immersive Retreat
I came to the retreat unclear about the next step in my entrepreneurial journey. I thought I had to figure out how much money my business needed to produce before I'd make the jump to full-time founder. Over the course of the first 2 days, I fumbled around and hacked away at this issue with the tools I knew - productivity hacks, performance tweaks, meditation, back-of-the-envelope estimations, group discussions, and 1:1 coaching sessions. Nothing seemed to hit. My submersible was stuck.
On day 3, the magic happened. In what I can only describe as an emergent property of the retreat, the combined efforts of days 1-2 led to a lightbulb moment. My core issue was that my relationship to success and failure is toxic. This was the glint of gold on the sea floor that I had to dive and dig to find. Walking the sea floor was revelatory, an insight that I was unable to see from years of inner work prior, even with the help of coaches and therapists.
And then, something even cooler happened.
I sat in group sessions listening to the other attendees talk about their explorations and realized that I saw mirrors of myself in every one of them. The challenges that Sandeep faced in low energy from previous businesses that didn't pan out, the oonchiness that Brianna felt from how she didn't want to be in the co-founder role. All of them reflected parts of my own ocean.
As I shared my own issues, Sandeep and Brianna started coaching me. The retreat compounded the value I'd get from a session of meditation or coaching because I was also exposed to the surface area of work that others were doing, which provided a rich source of information about my own ocean. As a result, I ended up having 7 coaches instead of 2. Each person (carefully selected to remain in integrity with the principles of the retreat) offered me a beautiful style of their own coaching, and I to them.
I left the retreat with a profound sense of inner confidence that comes from deeply understanding myself. In exploring my ocean and hearing others' journeys, I also found a well of self-compassion from the simple realization that my struggles were not so unique.
An Immersive Experience for You
Here's some feedback from our last transformational retreat:
"I made more inner progress in 4 days than 2 years prior of hacking away at inner work, even with the help of coaches and therapists."
"This retreat was life-changing for me, a phrase which is often thrown around, but I truly feel as though the space, introspection, and focus of the retreat has led to a fundamental shift in the direction of my life. I've come away with a new sense of what the next 5+ years of my life will look like thanks to this retreat."
"Justin and Jeremy are magicians: in the course of a few days, they weaved together tangible and tactical career-advancing insights, a space to fully re-charge and re-align, and even delivered some much-needed wisdom. Wisdom in the form of showing us ways to drop into the present moment, truly connect with the people around us, and find more fulfillment in the simplest, but most profound parts of life."
We're back with another retreat this October. And this go-around will be bigger and better. We have more seats (up to 9 stellar folks), more and better tools, and added an additional coach (hey! 👋). All of this, AND we're charging less than we did last year.
If you're someone who wants to level up your leadership, tap into a deeper purpose, a deeper level of intuition and knowing, expand your leadership toolkit, and develop a lifelong set of peers to grow alongside, I cannot think of a better way to spend the money. Think of it as an IRL, tried and tested leadership lab for your growth and development.
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