The winter retreat worth running - alone or with others

Photo by Christine Donaldson on Unsplash

There's a particular kind of conversation that only happens when you're not trying to have it.

You'll recognise it, I'm sure - you're in the company of a friend, you talk and talk, catching up on life. And somewhere in the middle of it, things come up that wouldn't have come up any other way.

It's hard to create those conditions in business meetings, which tend to be either rushed over coffee or fitted in around doing the actual work. Even so, some of my most meaningful conversations about life with a flower business have happened wandering through a fellow grower's flower field.

The same thing happens when I meet a flower friend for a walk on her local beach. The dogs are hooning around us, yet previously unspoken problems surface - things we hadn't talked about before. It's when our best ideas get hatched, and perennial issues suddenly look simpler when you're gazing out at the sea.

These intimate conversations only happen when you retreat to a calm and safe space.

What a retreat actually is

The word retreat tends to conjure something formal - enforced time with colleagues, an away-day with a facilitator and whiteboards to fill.

But a retreat can be as simple as a leisurely lunch, a walk on the beach, or a wander through the garden. The key is comfort.

Winter retreats for the FBA these last few years have happened in the comfort of my living room. People snuggled on the sofa in front of the fire with their slippers on, grazing on snacks, with seemingly bottomless jugs of coffee or pots of tea.

It's the setting that does most of the work at a retreat. When people feel comfortable and unrushed, they open up. Honesty starts to unfurl. Questions they'd been too busy or too embarrassed to ask get put on the table without fear.

Sometimes a retreat can look like there's too much relaxing going on - too much chatter. Yet it's the chatting that reveals so much. People listen differently too - no one is trying to fix or advise, just absorbing, thinking, letting things evolve.

Sometimes in conversation, pens start moving, notebooks start filling up. It's not highly polished plans being hatched. Mostly it's ideas to explore, moments of clarity, or an insight that solves something that's been bugging you for months.

Why thinking with other people works

There's something that happens in a room full of flower farmers that doesn't happen when you're planning alone.

Partly it's understanding - saying something out loud to another person who truly knows what flower farming takes. Partly it's perspective - getting an outside view from someone who knows what it's like from the inside.

Most of all, it's an unspoken permission to think and talk freely - no judgment, just a deep knowing of what it's like to struggle with something. Perhaps you've been putting off raising your prices, or approaching a new florist. Perhaps you know you need to stop growing tulips, or take a break at high season so you can spend time with your family.

On retreat, you realise you're not the only one carrying these questions. Which makes it easier to actually answer them.

If you have a flower friend you trust - someone who gets what you're doing and why - a winter walk or a long lunch might be the best retreat you run this year. Or maybe you have a group of friends who'd benefit from time out together.

The solo version

Not everyone has that person. And even if you do, there's also value in the kind of thinking that only happens alone.

The solo retreat is different but serves the same purpose: protected time, away from the usual pace, to think about your business rather than just work in it.

It doesn't require a day. It might be one morning. It might be a few hours on a Saturday when the rest of the household is occupied, you've made yourself a pot of something good, closed the laptop and opened a notebook instead.

What matters is the quality of the attention, not the length of it. One honest question, properly sat with, is worth more than a full day of productive-feeling activity that skims the surface.

It could be the perfect time to dive into a seasonal review - not what the season looked like on paper, but remembering what it felt like to live through it.

Perhaps it's making a list of all the things you keep meaning to change but haven't got around to yet. The real question is - what stopped you?

Maybe you've realised you need to rethink your business entirely - find the courage to scrap things altogether, or start something new.

Sometimes it's drilling into how your business can do more than pay you - figuring out what it isn't quite giving you yet.

The questions may be small or feel gigantic. But taking the time to retreat, so you can answer them fully and frankly, tends to produce something useful.

A practical companion

If you'd like a framework to work through, we made a Winter Planning Starter Workbook that walks you through the key questions - reflecting on the season, thinking about what comes next, and connecting the dots between your growing, your selling, and what you actually want from the business.

It's free, and it's yours. [Download the Winter Planning Starter Workbook here.]

It works well as a solo thinking tool, and just as well as the starting point for a conversation with a flower friend or a small group of growers who want to think together.

Making it possible

The hardest part of a winter retreat, in any form, is not the thinking. It's making the space for it.

When your business lives where you live, the  line between work time and not-work time can be blurred. There's always something visible that needs attention. The planning that could be done. The emails still sitting unanswered.

There's no point promising yourself you'll get to it. You need to make a date with yourself and your business - which might mean telling someone you're unavailable for a morning, leaving the property entirely, or simply lighting the fire and snuggling up in front of it in your favourite house slippers.

A winter retreat - even a small one, even a solo one, even just a walk with the right person - tends to produce better thinking than the same number of hours spent at your desk. Not because desks are bad. But because the thinking that shapes a season needs a different quality of attention than the thinking that runs one.

The season is quiet enough right now to offer that. The question is whether you'll take it.

Over to you

Have you ever run your own version of a winter retreat - a thinking day, a long walk, a conversation that changed something? I'd love to hear what it looked like.

And if you're looking for a flower friend to think alongside, the FBA community is full of them.

Happy wintering.

Written by: Julie Treanor - Owner of The Pickery and co-creator of The Floral Business Activator, who is known to do her best thinking on a beach with a dog and a flower friend who doesn't let her get away with vague answers.

Follow Julie on Instagram @thepickery