2018 Spring Visioning Retreat

A couple weekends ago, we had our annual spring visioning retreat. We packed up our aeropress and favorite Perc coffee beans, put our phones on “do not distrub”, and drove 2 hours to a little cabin in the middle of nowhere.

We traded a coffee shop for nature

Last year we chose a location based on a favorite coffee shop (you can get a peek into our 2017 visioning retreat here). This year we traded coffee for nature and never regretted it for an instant. We found a cozy little cabin with a porch swing on a screened in porch, a hot tub, and a view of rolling hills down a little gravel lane.

(Don’t worry about the coffee shop part. We came fully equipped with our travel coffee gear!)

We unplugged from email and social media. Put my planner and to-do list away. Brought out old fashioned paper and pens. When you live in a digital world, sometimes there’s just something about scribbling notes and diagrams on a piece of paper that lets your thoughts flow in new directions

Every year we choose a very intentional way to focus on our business. We give ourselves space to dream a little bigger. When you own your own business, there are a million directions you can go!

How should you be spending the minutes of your day?

It’s so easy to get distracted by all the things you feel like you “should” be doing, and it’s easy to lose focus on things that really matter to you. You add on one little thing at a time. Before you know it, you have hundreds of things on your to-do list. And trying do them all well.

This year was all about stepping back and examining the big picture of where we are, where we’re going, and what all the pieces look like when we put them together.

Joel is a big picture person. He was in his element. I’m very much a tiny detail person. These visioning times are important for me because they don’t come naturally!

A favorite memory:

One of my favorite memories of the entire weekend was waking up Saturday morning to a spring thunderstorm. We snuggled up in blankets on the porch swing and wrapped our hands around steaming mugs of coffee. Those in between moments are usually when we do our best visioning!

We’re working on some things to really up the game in our newsletter community this year, and we spent a lot of time pulling the pieces together and talking about how we’re going to serve them well. Serving our couples and fellow vendors is also really important to us. We dreamed up some ideas for going above and beyond to serve them!

The porch swing and our dreams

That perfect porch swing rocked gently through our discussions about elevating our client experience with a little extra. What we want to pour our focus into and what we need to slow down on,. How we can remember to do this all for God’s glory and not our own. (<– The most important discussion of them all!)

Being intentional with our time and effort means really diving into what we’re doing, where we want to be, and how we can best match them up. It’s always a super exciting thing to vision about!

We spent time visioning our long term life goals and how we want to live this life we’re given. We also own two real estate investing companies and travel a lot. Things intertwine in really interesting ways when we put the big picture together!

Whether you want to vision about your business, your marriage, or just personal life goals, these mini visioning retreats are so priceless! If you don’t have a full weekend to get away and do that, maybe take an afternoon with your spouse or business partner and dive in!

We want to hear from you! What would your dream spring visioning retreat look like? Lay on the beach and talk for hours, or settling into a coffee shop? Maybe while hiking up a mountain? Tell us where you would plan your retreat in the comments below!

I hope you enjoyed a little behind the scenes peek into this year’s visioning retreat. We can’t wait to see what fun things happen this year because of it!

*hugs*

Amber

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