644: Create Retreats That Shift Energy, Change Lives, and Sell with Ease with Darla LeDoux

After all, you’re not there to run a weekend getaway. You’re there to lead something that changes people. The problem is, most retreats don’t actually shift anything.

Let’s talk about why.

First, Stop Teaching So Much

You don’t need to pack in more content to “prove” the value of your retreat. In fact, the more you teach, the more you risk overwhelming your clients and blocking the breakthroughs you want them to have. 

Transformation doesn’t come from information. It comes from space. The space to feel, witness, reflect, and release.

If your retreat is all slides and systems, you’re likely missing the point. Clients don’t need more content. What they need is more context. The retreat should feel like an energetic reset, not a three-day lecture series.

Design for Energetic Alignment, Not Logistics

It’s easy to obsess over locations, meals, swag bags, and welcome gifts. But those details mean very little if you’re not aligned with what the retreat is really about. 

Start by tuning into the core transformation your clients are craving. Then build around that.

Remember, your job isn’t to entertain. It’s to help clients see something they haven’t been able to see on their own. 

That means designing anchor experiences that stir discomfort in a good way, experiences that gently expose the patterns, beliefs, and behaviors that are holding them back.

Integration Is Non-negotiable

This is where most retreats fail. You can’t just drop people back into their old lives and expect the magic to stick. Post-retreat integration is what makes the transformation real. It’s how you help clients take aligned action after their energetic shift.

Start integrating during the retreat. Prepare people for what resistance might come up when they go back home. Make space for reflection, journaling, and future-planning. Even better, build in follow-up support after the retreat so they don’t feel like they’ve just been dropped like a sack of potatoes.

Profitable Retreats Don’t Require Big Lists

You don’t need a thousand followers or a big launch budget. You need intention. You need to know your magic and who it’s meant for. 

The most profitable, life-changing retreat can happen with just, say, six people in a living room. This is because the energy is dialed in, the space is safe, and the transformation is real.

Moreover, small retreats often convert higher-ticket offers more effectively than big, flashy events. You see, when clients shift at the identity level, they’re ready to go all in. 

It’s because you’re not just selling them the next step. You’re aligning with who they’ve become.

What It Really Comes Down To

If your retreat isn’t moving people and making money, it’s not always a venue problem. It may not even be a market saturation problem. 

It’s most probably a design problem. 

When you shift the energy and create a true space for aligned action, your retreats won’t just feel better, they’ll convert better.

And that’s what makes everything worth doing.

RESOURCES: 

• Ultimate 57-Point Checklist to World Class Transformational Retreats: https://sourcedexperience.com/checklist 
• Sourced Magic Quiz: https://sourcedexperience.com/quiz 

ABOUT DARLA LEDOUX 

Darla LeDoux is a transformational business coach and founder of Sourced™, guiding service-based entrepreneurs to lead powerful, profitable retreats. A former engineer turned intuitive guide, she helps clients confidently market, sell, and deliver deep transformation by trusting their magic and inner knowing — building soul-led businesses without struggle or compromise.

WHERE TO FIND DARLA LEDOUX

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/darlaledoux/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darlaledoux/

CONNECT WITH SAMANTHA RILEY

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TRANSCRIPTION

Samantha Riley  0:00  

Welcome to today’s episode. I’m super excited. We’re talking about retreats today, and I have invited Darla Ledoux along to chat to us and take us through why retreats are such an amazing part of a business model, I guess so. Darla, welcome to the show.

Darla LeDoux  0:21  

Thank you. I’m excited to be here.

Samantha Riley  0:24  

Me too. Let’s dive straight in, because I like to do this. It’s like this gives us more time to discuss retreats. What really makes them such a powerful container for deep transformation compared to other delivery models, do you think?

Darla LeDoux  0:42  

Yeah, I mean, the first thing that pops to mind is when we think about having a retreat as part of your business model is, retreats create the sense of intimacy that not much else can parallel. And you know, we all work so hard, podcasting is one way to create intimacy, right? You can listen, have someone’s voice in your ear, but when you’re on retreat and you’re in person, and it’s a well facilitated retreat, obviously the level of trust is so much higher. So people are the way that I teach. I teach something called retreats that shift the field. So it’s really that someone walks out, they’re vibrating differently than when they walked in. And the other piece of that is when we’re in that higher alignment, right? Like I believe we’re all here walking this path as business owners to help bring us back to who we are, to further align with our sole purpose. And so when someone’s on the other side of your retreat, they are more sovereign. They’re more connected to their yes and no, and they’re more able to see a possibility that they can invest in with you to grow their business, right? So it really is a win-win.

Samantha Riley  2:07  

Oh my goodness, I’m so loving the depth of where this is going already. Let’s take one little step back, because you are an intuitive guide, but you started out as an engineer, what was the moment that you made that shift and really realized that this was your calling, not just with the retreat work, but in this deep alignment work, this intuitive work, you know, becoming a guide, because there’s very different from engineering. 

Darla LeDoux  2:45  

It is, it is. I feel like I’m an unlikely advocate for intuition over here, there’s a couple key moments. I was trained as a coach in corporate, so I worked at Procter and Gamble. I was in the Product Development Department, and I was nominated for this role to be a coach within the organization, helping people work well together. And we were trained via retreat based training. And while on retreat, we did an exercise where I saw a truth that I had no idea about. I specifically, I realised that I had these biases about men that were affecting how I was showing up at work, and in this space, I was able to, one, admit that I didn’t even know that that was there, and then embrace it and start to see what else could be possible. And so in that process, I thought, why doesn’t everybody know this? Why are we not talking about this all the time, that we have filters that are affecting how we show up and we don’t even know it. And I knew in that moment that that was what I would prefer my life to be about. You know, I was engineering fake fake juice at the time. Um, yeah, and that was the first moment. A second moment was I had been through divorce, and I was dealing with I knew I wanted to be a coach. I still wasn’t doing it, and I was dealing with some debt from my wedding and all of the things that I had paid for, and I talked to a spiritual guide, and I don’t know that she said anything in particular, but as I was driving home, my car swerved on the highway, as I was thinking about the different ways I could solve and it just I didn’t do it. It happened spontaneously, as I was thinking through these options and so, so I don’t know how, but something in me said, What were you thinking about exactly when that happened? And I went back to that, and I followed that path, and I took some financial actions, and within a couple of weeks Samantha, I had a new job. I wasn’t still at Procter and Gamble at this time, I had a new job that was paying significantly more, and then my company got bought and I got a buyout package, all within a short period of time. So like, I followed weird intuition, and it led to the world opening for me. And so I would think that I would have been a fanatic about it by then, but I was kind of embarrassed, you know, I was like, I can’t tell people that my car swerved on the highway, and I used that as a sign to change my life. And so it wasn’t until years into coaching, where I was working with a specific client who was raised Catholic, and she was learning how to trust her energy. And I just remember where I was while I was on this session with her, and I realised, Wait, this is all there is for me, is that energy is real and it’s guiding us, and it’s spiritual. And I’ve never said this out loud, and it probably took me another year or two to weave it into my marketing, but I remember that moment where I claimed it for myself.

Samantha Riley  6:17  

It’s such an incredible feeling, isn’t it, when you fully lean into who you’re meant to be, I remember I didn’t start talking about like the energy work that I do now until about 2020, I think maybe it started seeping in, and I’ve been working like this since the early 90s, but I had this story that people wouldn’t take me seriously, because I trusted my intuition, or, you know, I I use my energy or my the guidance from my body, it’s I thought that, you know, the story I was making up was everyone would think, Oh, she’s a bit silly, like she won’t know anything, if that’s what she believes. So it does take a while to or it can take a while to step into that, I think, especially for those of us that had very logical careers. So I love that, I love that you trusted that guidance. 

Darla LeDoux  7:16  

I remember being in a business mastermind. This was while I was just starting to think maybe I could come out as spiritual, and my coach, at the time, had gone to a VIP day with another coach. She had bought a private retreat and came back and reported that the first thing she did was have her pull an Oracle Card, and then she rolled her eyes and made fun of this coach, and was like, I knew right then I wasn’t going to learn anything. And I kind of, all this, the cycle of proving right when we start to move in a certain direction, and then something shows up to validate our fear of like who we’ve been trying to prove ourselves to be. And it was immediately after I said, Okay, I’m a spiritual coach, she came back with that experience, and I thought, Oh, maybe I shouldn’t tell anyone.

Samantha Riley  8:09  

Yeah, well, I’m glad that you did.

Samantha Riley  8:12  

Let’s start off with the, from the retreat. What are the key ingredients that create that real transformation as a retreat host, because I think that a lot of people can get thought in the like, in the thought of, let’s just have this nice weekend getaway. And really that’s not what it’s about. So how do we fully lean into creating that real transformation?

Darla LeDoux  8:38  

Yeah, I’ll talk about it at two levels. So at the higher level, if we’re taking a bird’s eye view of someone in their business, and they get that call to host a retreat, and like you said, a lot of times people get granular, like, where is the location? And they go to the details, which aren’t as important. They’re important, but they’re really not that important, if you show up in your magic. But so, from a big picture, in a business model, I teach something called the anatomy of a transformation. And there’s three stages. The first is commit, the second is shift the field, and the third is integrate. And so the commit stage and the integrate stage are outside of the retreat, right? It’s like what happens before and what happens after. But when I work with people, knowing what that is helps define what the retreat is. So when you know, if you go somewhere. And people, I get so many examples of this, oh, we’re having a retreat in Italy. We rented a fabulous villa, and we have a chef, and that’s the invitation, right? And people are like, Well, sure, I’m wanting to go to Italy. Let me go. And people aren’t coming with the same you. Intention, or any intention, necessarily, other than to go on vacation. I just was registered for a retreat that got canceled, and I kind of had like spidey senses that it wasn’t gonna fly, because nobody had asked me my intention for the retreat. So I figured that was probably the case with other people as well. So the commit stage that happens before the retreat is a guided process to help someone look at, what is it that I really want? Like, if my vibration could align with anything, what is that? What am I playing for? Where am I now, and the discomfort in that, right? So, like the typical thing we think of with marketing, what’s the discomfort and the gap? And how committed am I, not just to getting the result, but if I know that between me and the result is seeing something, I do this with my hand by my head, like seeing something that’s hidden from my view. That is the path to get from here to there, right? There’s some energy pattern that’s maybe stuck in your field, in your body, that you believe is true, but it’s really based on a liar. It’s not in alignment for you. In order to get that result that you want, we’re going to have to take a look in the shadows. And so in the commit stage, we want to make sure people know that they don’t have to know what it is. They don’t know they just, they have to trust that you can help them with it, guide it, but that they want something that’s greater than their fear of looking at what’s been in the way. Because I’m sure, you know, it’s often tender and vulnerable, yeah, to see what’s, you know, what’s been hidden from our view, or how have we been showing up that’s actually been in conflict with our goal? And so rather than just say, come to Italy, or I have a great speaker, or you like me, don’t you want to come to my retreat? You want people to have a clarity of purpose, so that they and an awareness that they’re going to go deep when they walk in the room. And then you want to consider your integration. I won’t talk too much about that, but what happens after the retreat, because they’re going to leave in a whole new vibration, and then they’ll go to the environment that the old version of them created, and that’s probably going to cause some friction, right? So you want support after to help someone actually go do the thing. So there’s being in harmony with the outcome, and then there’s taking the actions. And so that’s what integration is about. So before someone decides what their retreat is about, because people have so many great ideas like we could probably brainstorm 1000 good retreat ideas right now.

Samantha Riley  13:01  

Exactly, yeah.

Darla LeDoux  13:04  

Because, like, it’s so fun and people can get off track with that, the goal of the retreat, then, is to shift the field. So the goal of the retreat is whatever energy is out of harmony with the goal that you want gets transmuted. So that’s step stage one, right? Is just to know in my retreat, if it’s about if I’m doing a painting retreat or a dance retreat or a breathwork retreat, or whatever the modality might be, that we’re really shifting their energy. And then within the retreat itself, there’s a few structures I teach, but the main one that I’ll highlight is there are these anchor experiences. So if you’ve ever done a journaling exercise, for example, where you know you journal what you want and what you think the problem is, or or you even journal about when’s the last time you were annoyed in your life? Right? We could use that, because anything, place where we’re annoyed or we’re triggered, it’s showing us an energy pattern that we haven’t healed. So we could go journal about that, and we might get somewhat accurate reflection of how we behave. But you know how witnesses never actually describe the scene thoroughly, like in an accident or something like that. They studied that. We make stuff up, right? So we aren’t that great at accurately assessing ourselves, and so on the first day of retreat, I help people to create an experience that’s going to be an energy revealing experience. There’s so many ways to do this. You can get creative. Use different modalities based on your magic, which I have everybody uncover what their magic is. But there’s something experiential where we get to see ourselves and go, Oh, I see how I’m being, was resonant with that result. So whether it’s a game or a team activity or something personally challenging, but there’s some experience on the first day to help us access a truth that’s been hidden from our view.

Samantha Riley  15:35  

I love that you talked about the …

Samantha Riley  15:42  

Yeah, yeah, totally, because there’s just been so much already. How, how do you work out what that piece is when you’re actually on retreat? Like, how is it that you choose what it is that’s going to bring that hidden piece of you out?

Darla LeDoux  16:07  

So if I’m working with a retreat host, how do I help them find that exercise? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, the first thing we do, we tap into this, what I call the soul of their retreat, and I use visualization, and I guide people through a visualization process that’s going to give them something of the energy of the experience. So there’s like an arc, right? I love a three day, but you could do a five day, you can do different patterns and still create this three part arc. So when they do this visualization, they’re feeling into the energy of this arc. So for some people, they will get a download of here’s the exercise, and they just know this first anchor experience. It just comes through. For others, they might see a location, and then we build from that location and what’s available. I’m a big advocate for not over-complicating. So let your location inform you, or if you get the exercise first, then that’s going to be the screener for your location. Like, if that exercise is this hard to do at that location. It’s no so we tune into the soul of it, and it’s a spiritual process. Because, you know, I’ll give you an example. I did a retreat called Retreat and Grow Rich Live. I did it probably 10 times, and every single time I did it, it was totally different. Even though the curriculum was exactly yeah, because the energy of who I was drawing in, based on my own journey of transformation, was different every time. And so the soul of the retreat is going to attract the people that are going to be resonant for me right now. So it’s really, really important that we know that and we design from there. Aside from that, you know, some of the standard marketing things like, what is your ideal client avatar? What are they struggling with? What is the typical pattern? Are they, you know, if your people are in relationship, and they’ve been parents and now they’re empty nesters, and perhaps there’s fear of intimacy, and you know that, right? So then you would design something around intimacy, like we’re a couple alone together for the first time in 20 years, we really take into account the themes and the patterns that their clients have.

Samantha Riley  18:52  

I love that so much. Let’s move on to the integration piece, because I find this personally, is something that many retreat hosts don’t think about. They create this amazing retreat, and then it’s like you’re led out into the wild. And I can think specifically of a retreat that I went on, and it was like it was out of the city, and I remember driving back into the city, and I started to get more and more agitated by the time I had to go back into the delivery phase the next day with my clients. I was like a cat on a hot tin roof. I didn’t know who I was, where I was. I was, like, really agitated and anxious. Can you talk to us about the integration phase? Because since that particular experience that I had, I’ve always thought there’s got to be a better way.

Darla LeDoux  19:43  

Yeah, I really relate to that. I went to a Hay House event where they had all the different speakers, and it was two days, and all you could buy was a book, you know. So people had bags of books, and as it was getting close to the end. And I could feel, I started feeling anxious, and then I realized it was the energy in the room, because everybody now just learned 20 different areas of their life that you know are messed up, that they want to fix, and all the you know. So, yeah, it’s so important, because the way that I teach and the way I facilitate, we leave with what I call our sourced energy, which is a series of words, like one to three words could be an archetype that’s a descriptor of what is the energy I’m embodying now. So on the other side of this transformation, I am, beloved queen was one of mine at one point. So now one on day three, we’re going to think through as beloved queen goes home, where is the resistance going to be? So you start that on the last day of the retreat. So people are really prepared for it. There’s something in my I have a certification program, and within that, I teach something called the cycle of proving, which is basically, inevitably, you’re going to go home and the exact thing that you’re afraid of is going to happen in some form. And so we people with tools to go, Okay, I see you. I’m not afraid. But beyond that, it’s to me. I always have a container of support, right? If you know being in your new energy is going to be really hard when you get home, stay connected to the people on retreat, who know you, who know who just created yourself to be, who can remind you who you are when you forget, because it’s it’s inevitable that it’s going to happen. And then the other thing, I believe is post retreat, we’re on fire to implement so course completion can be a big topic in our space, like if you have a course or a program and people drop off or they don’t do the homework, and then they feel bad about themselves having a retreat that’s strategically placed, that raises the vibration and has people out executing in a way that gets results right. Because when we’re in our aligned energy, we’re magnetising results in our direction. It goes such a long way to them actually getting the thing that you promise right. So let’s say it’s a relationship retreat for someone who’s having trouble dating, right? They haven’t dated their divorce or something like that, then they need to go date and they need, they’re going to attract all the things the old person would have, but they’re going to respond. So having that group is really critical.

Samantha Riley  22:58  

I love that

Darla LeDoux  23:00  

you can include some integration in with your retreat, or it can be a separate optional upgrade at the end.

Samantha Riley  23:11  

Yeah, nice. What’s one mistake that you see people make when they’re hosting a retreat that keeps the transformation shallow or transactional and not really getting that deep movement?

Darla LeDoux  23:32  

Yeah, two things come to mind. The first is the structure. So when we structure in these anchor experiences, and there’s one that’s likely on day three, that’s like claiming the New Energy, those two anchors, and then knowing everything in between is about the energy shift. So people over teach, right? They create too much contact content, not enough context. You know, for an experience to do what it’s designed to do, we have to create a lot of context, we have to let people know this. This is going to change your life if you play full out so people over teach they fill too much space. They don’t allow. When you have a group that’s coming together for a similar intention, there will be themes and threads I know you’ve experienced with someone else asked the question that you really didn’t even know you needed an answer to. And so we want to allow the group to generate a percent of the content in the room, like people we know we’re crazy about control. We want to make sure we know how it goes. Don’t want anyone to think that we didn’t give them enough. And so we teach. You know, I my first retreat, I had 182 PowerPoint slides, and now I now I have a flip chart and roughly four key conversations that we have during. Doing during a retreat. And there’s a I have people identify their content archetype, so it helps them know, are they comfortable leaving a lot of things to arise in the room? Do they need more structure to help them feel safe like we help sort that out. But either, no matter which of the three archetypes someone is, they should not over teach.

Samantha Riley  25:31  

The magic really happens in the conversations around the content. And every single one of us has, you know, at the beginning of our journey over taught, but then you’re controlling the situation that they don’t even know that they need. And so I love it that you just have those four key areas that you know that you want to touch on, but you’re allowing the retreat guests to create what it is that they need. And I think that’s that’s perfect. Yeah, I wanted

Darla LeDoux  26:01  

to talk about the Beatles. Right? Yeah, I don’t I forgot this piece, which is the other part is that we’ve done our own transformational work so we can hold space for stuff that comes up that might be uncomfortable, right? Because that’s where the transformation is, is when someone is able to be fully in their truth and be witnessed and validated by the group and and that can just look like I said the thing, and nobody got mad at me, but we need to be able to go there, and so we can feel when the leader is safe right when they’ve done their work, or if it’s edgy to go there. And you also demonstrate that by the way you tell your own stories and share vulnerably. But here we talk in terms of magic, and your magic will fire when there’s like you know, your spidey senses when someone’s not quite telling the truth, and if you’re willing to, you know you can do it gently and with love and with play. Bring Forward, like, oh yeah, what was that there when your voice just cracked, or you looked that direction, like, what’s over there? So there’s the approaching as well.

Samantha Riley  27:19  

Yeah, I love that. How I wasn’t going to ask this, but I’m going to after that. What is it that we need to back us up, to tap into that magic? Yeah, like, how? Let me ask that in a different way, because that was pretty terrible. What are we trusting so that that magic comes through?

Darla LeDoux  27:54  

Yeah, source. So that my company is called sourced. It’s the belief that we are all divinely guided, and so not just us, like as the leader, but also the people in the room that they have their own knowledge and wisdom. And I teach something called the transformational Trinity, which is simply us, client, source. And that when we create that space, and we are confident in that space, we know that whatever arises is not a problem. We don’t relate to it as a problem. We relate to it as divine, divine expression revealing, you know, it might be sticky, contrasty, but it’s showing us something. So to me, I wouldn’t be as confident as a leader if I didn’t know that. I know that. I know that everything is sourced

Samantha Riley  28:45  

love that let’s flip to the business side. Because I think there’s this belief that you we can’t run a really, deeply transformational retreat and a profitable retreat. What do we need to be able to do both? Because I know so many people run retreats, and I’ve done it as well, where you just covering costs, and that’s great, because there’s always something off the back end, so I never see that as a problem, but it would be great to run a profitable retreat as well. So how do we balance that?

Darla LeDoux  29:26  

Yeah, well, I always consider the back end sales as part of being a profitable retreat, so I do that math, deciding what level to answer from. Let me just tune in one we try to over give to compensate for what we think is missing in us, and so sometimes we don’t make it could be a generosity decision. I want to send everyone to the spa. It could be a part of the curriculum. It. You believe, if the pattern that your people have is they have trouble receiving and nurturing themselves, then investing and sending them to the spa might be absolutely part of the curriculum. But if it’s coming from are they going to think I’m bad or mean or cheap if I don’t give them everything? We don’t want to do that. So we want to really make sure we’re making clean decisions about where to spend money and not stressing about not spending money on some things. That’s first piece. The second piece is, it’s a personal choice. Would I rather have people in the room, so they get to shift their energy and then make an aligned decision about whether to invest in my higher level program, right? So to me, my back end programs are more high level, in which case you’d charge less and go with the break even pricing. I say you want to break even at half, if you’re half full, you still break even, so you’re not risking losing money. But that might be a perfectly good strategy if you don’t want to do sales calls, if you want to be able to do a webinar or a little class and then have people come to your retreat if you want to really enroll people, then I would say, go 5k, 10k, 15k, like 20k. Go higher level and get on the phone with people. And then that’s a choice. I want to make money on the front end, but someone’s going to have to have that sales conversation with them.

Samantha Riley  31:41  

So what I’m hearing is you need to decide whether you’re going to make money from the retreat itself, or is it going to be almost like a lead generator to make the back end sales. But you have to decide one or the other. Love it. Love that. So what about audience size for being able to run these retreats. Is it something that you have to wait until you’re a certain, you know, way into your business with a certain audience size? Is it something that you can do to build your audience? I’d love, I’d love your take on this.

Darla LeDoux  32:18  

Yeah, this may not be totally popular, but this is what I’ve seen so many people think I’m going to do all the things they say I have to do before I do my retreat. And so we we are sitting home alone in our office trying to write a marketing funnel when we don’t even know what our magic is. So I believe getting six people in your living room and facilitating transformationally is going to reveal to you more about who you are as a leader and what your magic is than working on lead gen over and over and over. That’s my personal take that said audience size. I think I had 500 people on my list when I had my first six figure retreat. So, you know, lists were different than two in terms of more responsive, but you don’t need a huge audience. You just need to bring truth forward in the way you market, right? So you’re resonating with the people who go, oh shit, I have a hidden truth too. I sense there’s something I’m not seeing that I want to get in the room to discover. So the more courageous you are to tell the truth in your marketing about your own journey and your own transformation and examples of transformation, the more you can monetize a smaller audience.

Samantha Riley  33:57  

So off the back of that, how much are we talking about the logistics of the trade, as in, it’s in Italy, and we have a private chef, like, yeah, how much of the marketing is about logistics, and how much of it is about the transformation?

Darla LeDoux  34:23  

I would say 70-30 there will be people who so 70% transformation, 30% details. And a couple of things about the details, location can help. Like someone can go, oh, I put on my vision board that I want to go to Ireland, and it’s in Ireland, obviously I meant to go there. Like that happens. And transformation can happen anywhere. So for me, it’s really about painting the picture of the breakthrough and the alignment that people want, and the location can change. The other piece about logistics that’s important. When someone’s going on retreat, they’re really putting a lot of. Trust in you as the leader, right? It’s vulnerable. You’re going to meet all these new people. You you want to have a sense of the level of care, if that makes sense, like, am I going to be pampered? Do I need to be prepared to share a bathroom? You know, like getting people psychologically prepared for what that looks like, and then you want to, I always say, just outline the three days. If it’s a three day, like the theme and like two sentences about the intention of that day, and then the theme of day two, and a couple sentences about the intention, like just that level of structure lets people know you’ve thought it through, that we’re not just going to go do random things. We’re

Samantha Riley  35:53  

going to just go with the flow,

Darla LeDoux  35:56  

which you know can be a thing that where people don’t put enough structure. Most of the people I work with have too much structure, and I help them feel safe to trust themselves more. Or I should say, a lot of the people I work with are not very structured. Think they should be more structured, and therefore are waiting for the day that they get it all together, to have enough of an outline to trust themselves to have retreat.

Samantha Riley  36:30  

What’s one belief that you’d love to bust right now about hosting a retreat,

Darla LeDoux  36:38  

that they don’t make money, that it’s hard and they you can’t make money with a small group. I’ve done big events. I’ve done 100 person events, and, you know, my team and I and we did the low ticket break even, you know, model and my team and I spent eight months preparing for this event, whereas I, for me having 16 people in a room, I’ve consistently made as much money as 100 people from 16 people. And it’s it does not leave me depleted, right? We’re depleted when we’re doing new things, and it’s edgy and we’re nervous and we’re in in resistance, in some way, which is going to happen every time we up level, that’s going to happen. But really you should be able to lead a retreat. And you know, you don’t want to plan a heavy day the day after, but you shouldn’t feel completely drained, like if you are too much responsibility and not letting source play in the room. So I guess that’s the other thing I would say, is the you know that fear of intimacy being tiring? Yeah,

Samantha Riley  37:51  

I feel that this has been absolutely amazing for people that are listening to you. Definitely go and check out the activating magic podcast, where you hear $1 sharing all sorts of her wisdom. But I know that you’ve also got a free resource for people that are like, You know what? I want to run a retreat, or I want to upgrade my retreat. So can you just share a little bit about what you have?

Darla LeDoux  38:19  

Yeah, it’s called The Ultimate 57 point checklist for world class transformational retreats. And there’s actually more than 57 but we like the number 57 and it really walks through, you know, venue concerns team like, What support do you need in the room, what to think about in terms of experiences, location, that kind of thing. And there’s a little love letter from me that is, half of these things can be delegated like more easily than you think, and half of them go away when you’re tuned into the soul of your retreat, like certain things become like na and so read the note at the bottom, but it this will help you, you know, move yourself forward, and also realize like it. There is a lot, there’s a lot to consider, and there’s a reason people are afraid, but to do the work like you’re courageous.

Samantha Riley  39:26  

So absolutely, I love that so much. So wherever you’re listening or whatever app, whether you’re on the website or the app or YouTube, just scroll down and you’ll see the link for that checklist, and I highly recommend downloading that, Darla. It’s been such a pleasure to chat with you today. I was just sitting here going, oh, I want to go on retreat with Darla. This sounds amazing. So thank you for sharing your wisdom and all of that information with us today. It’s been fabulous.

Darla LeDoux  39:58  

Thank you.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai