"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" ― Mary Oliver

This retreat is designed to be the foundational experience to set the context - and to start building the inner and outer skills - for the year long leadership program The Path of Vertical Leadership.

However, this retreat also works perfectly well as a stand-alone experience. Regardless if whether you decide to continue, we are committed to make a real and meaningful contribution to your development and your life through the structure and processes of this retreat.

One of the many things that we'll be working with together is the relationship between presence and in-the-moment impact: You might begin to get a small taste of this by feeling how you and I already begin to meet - in this moment - in the lucidity of your presence - through the letters and words of this sentence.

This retreat is partially based on one of the articles in Harvard Business Review's "10 Must Reads on Leadership" which was written by one of my primary mentors: management professor Bill Torbert. In that article Bill writes about The Seven Transformations of Vertical Leadership. Throughout this retreat we'll be working on these seven transformations in our own beings - with particular focus on the later transformations.

In this retreat you will also be introduced to the leadership practice of Action Inquiry. Action Inquiry is a way of being and relating with oneself, others and life in general that is more dynamic and alive than most people's habitual mode of living. The intended objective and outcome of this practice is that one becomes:

(A) better at continually learning and growing, no matter what one's life circumstances are, and
(B) more effective and successful in life.

While it needs to be said that the days we'll be together are nowhere near enough time to embody this practice, our commitment is that by the end of the retreat you will have a grounded experience of the practice of Action Inquiry and have a sense of how you can bring this new pattern of awareness to your daily life, if you so choose.

Another way that we think about this retreat is that it provides inspiration, preparation, and guidance for stepping through a doorway within oneself. We'll share more about this doorway and where it leads at the retreat. I only mention this here - and now - so that the process can already begin to be born within you.