Why you should consider a coaching retreat in 2025
It started with colouring in. The simple, therapeutic act of shading in a circle with pink, green and blue pencils. It was childlike in its simplicity and yet profoundly rewarding for a frazzled professional woman in her thirties.
This meditative shading was the first activity at my Santalan coaching retreat. I was experiencing a taster session of what would typically be a week-long stay to put in place a 12-month programme. There were five of us in total, clustered around the fire in the drawing room of Sibton House, a majestic stately home which sits in the heart of the Wilderness Reserve in Suffolk, where we would be, for the next 48 hours, holistically assessing our professional lives.
We had taken our colouring pencils to the Life-Balance wheel – a circle broken into 10 key sections: relationships, creativity/learning, finances, career, mental wellbeing, physical wellbeing, home/environment, hobbies/recreation, personal brand and abundance. The task was to shade each section in on a scale of 1 - 10 how much we felt we had fulfilment in each of these areas of our lives as well as, on a scale of 1- 10, how much we wanted to have fulfilment. The fire crackling beside me and four like-minded women scribbling away out of the corner of my eye, I realised how revelatory it was to see my life broken into these sectors and to see how much my reality matched up to my desire.
I understood fairly quickly that this pausing to take stock of one’s life is precisely what Santalan is all about. The new coaching retreat, the brainchild of Dalbir Bains – the founder of sustainable fashion brand Aligne and now a qualified professional coach – is named after the Sanskrit word for balance, and is centred around this concept of looking at our lives in the whole; understanding that each part informs the others. While most will come to Santalan looking to enhance their professional lives, they will soon learn that this cannot be looked at in a vacuum. Accordingly, Santalan targets four central pillars: health, career, relationships and personal brand.
Each of us was given individual coaching sessions during our time on the retreat. My first was with the nutritionist Amy Cottrell. It was surprising to learn how much of my mood and energy could be connected to my nutrition, or to come to the realisation that I had perhaps been going about my diet in the wrong way. Cottrell was thorough and friendly and made everything incredibly – if you'll excuse the pun – digestible. I learnt that my tiredness, no matter how much sleep I was getting, could be linked to a lack of iron and that I should be ensuring that I maintain a steady balance of protein with every meal. Though much of what Cottrell told me I had undoubtedly read time and time again, it hit differently knowing that this was now tailored to me and my needs. I left armed with knowledge I thought I already had, but now knew I had been understanding too lightly.
I also spoke to the revered mediator, Jane Gunn, whose CV includes the UN and The White House. Her jurisdiction at the retreat was to help us understand the relationships in our life and how we can adopt the skills and mindset of mediation to navigate our lives. She used a rather cutesy visual aid – a map of experience – to allow me to best plot my emotional route: looking at what baggage I may be carrying unnecessarily, how often I may come across ‘the dragon of doubt’ or get stuck in the mud in the ‘murky swamp of reality’. It could be quite easy to discount this as gimmicky, but it actually served as a canny means through which it becomes easier to open up about what complex emotions and relationships may be holding you back, or causing you to feel imbalanced.
My next session was with Bains herself, to discuss my career. Bains is a hugely successful entrepreneur who, in her new role as a coach, has shrewdly combined her own professional experiences with her fresh qualification. She is enormously empathetic and insightful. I came away from our chat with nothing that I didn’t already know, but somehow, what I already did felt repackaged and therefore it calcified into something clearer. That outcome, Bains told me, is not uncommon. “Often people just need to stop and see what is already there,” she said. “But when do we give ourselves the time to do that?”
Therein lay the crux of the retreat. It allowed me breathing space to get my affairs in order, to analyse what was in front of me and see what I was lacking, what was actually going well, and what I had at my disposal to allow me to do better. This was concluded with a look at personal branding – helpfully including a make-up appointment followed by a brilliant photography session with Amelia Allen – which resulted in a new headshot. It tied everything together nicely, putting a fresh shiny new face on a new mindset.
I hadn't thought I needed a coaching retreat, nor did I particularly want to go on one. I’m very glad I did. It made a very simple premise – stopping to assess your career and all that goes into it – feel startlingly revolutionary. The fact that I did this in the company of amazing women (the retreat is female-only) was also a huge plus point. Out of our sessions, we bonded over a wine tasting and a delicious meal outside by a bonfire, in the woods.
For another bonus of the retreat is its location. Quite separate from a clinical boardroom or conference centre, Santalan instead transports you to the blissful idyll of the English countryside. Analysing your career – the whys and why nots and the where-do-I-go-from-heres – in the cosseting atmosphere of the manor house; a large log fire burning at night and vast, individually designed bedrooms to tuck into, looking out on the undulating verdant grounds of Wilderness Reserve, adds a necessary injection of blissful peace into proceedings.
We were all of us on different journeys, united by a desire to find out more about ourselves. I hopped into the Land Rover afterwards feeling invigorated, armed with a little more self-awareness, motivated to find that perfect balance.
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