A 'Follow Your Curiosity' Weekend Getaway
How I’ve been agonising about the first line of this post! How to communicate in a pithy hook of a sentence the magnitude of a weekend spent in deep conversation and contemplation, following creative curiosity and changing my whole approach and understanding of my work. On this weekend I learned so much about myself and how my past is still affecting my present, and took away some really life-transforming lessons. I'll dig into this openly and deeply in the post, but having space and time with a like-minded soul has made me think about my business in a better way, and has helped me make peace with my perceived shortcomings.
But anyway, I guess I should start at the beginning…It all started with one of my clients, the Amsterdam-based graphic designer Naomi den Besten. She created quite possibly the best opt-in I’ve ever seen in the form of her Brand Clarity Getaway Guidebook – a beautiful PDF with an itinerary and suggestions for having an effective weekend away planning your brand. It made me crave an experience just like the one she was describing, so I roped in my Insta-bestie, Jessica Rose Williams, to join me for our own Business Getaway. The final piece of the puzzle came from the wonderful Andrea at Wild Meadow, who generously gifted us a stay in her eco-cottage in a wild flower meadow on the English/Welsh border.
So the stage was set for a super-productive weekend of business-ing. We set up a shared Google Doc where we listed all the things we wanted to get done and ticked off, the things we wanted to think about, and I’m in no way ashamed to say that I put all these things into an itinerary to make sure we were making the most of our time. But then we arrived – and everything changed.
Turns out, when you put together two people who are incredibly similar in their outlooks, passions and backgrounds, they have a lot to talk about. This was the first layer of the unravelling of our itinerary – the thrill of having an actual two-way conversation with someone who got it. Who understood the intricacies and obsessions we develop in this online world, who you can talk about Instagram with without the confused, glazed expressions we get from our loved ones. We spent a lot of time obsessing over images, analysing compositions, looking at other businesses and gleefully unpacking what they were doing and how we could apply it ourselves.
And then, of course, all the talk of photography led to us picking up our cameras. Wild Meadow is not short of photo opportunities – from the huge oak beams and old furniture in the house, to the white roses climbing up the weathered exterior, to the meadow itself. I don’t think I’ve ever seen somewhere that wears the afternoon light so well – the long June sunshine glimmered on the waving grasses, and the silvery weathering of the cottage cladding glinted and reflected the light. As we walked through the meadow to get shots with the ox-eye daisies, butterflies, moths and bees flew up in clouds from our feet like we were in an Enid Blyton adventure. It’s just a shame that we’d come at the wrong time of year to take full advantage of Andrea’s orchard…
Inspired by our conversations and our environment, for the first time in a long time, I just took photos. I get so trapped into not shooting something because I’d never post it; because it doesn’t fit in my feed, because it's the wrong colour. But that afternoon I just shot for the love of it, to practice, to play with compositions. Even though many of the photos you see here won’t be posted on Instagram, the practice I gained taking them has improved my photography, and my confidence in it, hugely.
At some point, after taking photos on the lovely upstairs floors, we ended up sinking into the chairs on the balcony and sinking, in turn, into a deep conversation. We sat for hours, and talked out things we didn’t know were in there to be talked out. Jess’s stories are hers to tell, but for me, I unearthed things that I thought had been buried but that it turned out was affecting the way I showed up here and online.
At university I had been bullied and excluded by the flatmates I lived with (and I think this is the first time I've allowed myself to say this truth out loud). It was the kind of manipulative behaviour that dresses itself up as being nothing untoward, nice even, but that had me second guessing myself and everyone around me. That, I realise now, has left me with an unconscious mistrust of the words and actions of others that is now revealing itself in my business. If you have sent me a DM or left a comment I’ve never replied to, you are the unfortunate victim of this mistrust. I have had a real block around reading and replying to messages online, and have really had no firm idea of why. I didn’t know whether it was because I was lazy, or arrogant, or fearful, but none of these explanations felt quite right. And now I think the reason I couldn’t put my finger on an exact reason was that my subconscious was protecting me from a perceived danger. I realised that my block came from a worry that these lovely messages may not be what they appear, may have an ulterior motive, and that even if they’re genuine (which of course they are), I don’t deserve them.
So one of my biggest takeaways was that other people’s actions towards and interactions with me, both positive and negative, are nothing to do with me. This really set me free, both in letting go of the idea that what happened to me in the past was not my fault, and giving me a way to move forward and be the person I want to be for you. I realised that we send messages and comments to people because we want to be heard, not necessarily because of the person we’re messaging. And I have to honour that.
There were other, more positive, realisations among it all too. For my whole life I’ve sought external validation: from my mum, from teachers, via academic marks and impressive job titles. I sat on the balcony, looking out over the hills as the afternoon sun lowered in the sky, easing an orange glow over the long grass of the meadow, and I tried to work out where my validation came from now. And then I realised: for the first time in my life, my validation is coming from within me. I feel so confident and powerful in the work I do, I believe in it, and my ability to do it, so strongly that I no longer need to seek that feeling externally.And most of all, I felt so happy. So happy and pleased for that girl eight years ago who was too scared to leave her university bedroom, who turned virtually nocturnal in order to avoid the other people around her, who would walk to the Birmingham Art Gallery and sit for hours with the paintings alone. I’m so happy for her that this is where she is now. And then we both cried.
Needless to say, we didn’t stick to the itinerary. Not one bit. I had planned to write six blog posts; I wrote a third of one. By the end of our second day I had renamed our Business Getaway the Follow Your Curiosity Weekend. Because that’s what we did – started talking about what was on our minds, went on a walk to take some photos, moved from conversations as relatively inane as Instagram compositions through to deeply considering what people really want from us and our businesses. And what’s holding us back from giving them that.
I remember having some guilt around this. That the itinerary wasn’t being kept to, that I had things I ‘had’ to do, that I was having too much fun on our serious Business Getaway. It feels (and must sound!) pretty indulgent to have a few days out from life, following curiosity and messing about in a meadow. But the conversations we had was the work that needed to be done. Giving ourselves the space to just create without purpose rather than powering through a to do list for once in our lives meant our brains could free wheel. We had ideas for more inspiring content, new products and offerings, new ways of approaching and teaching people – more than I’ve had in months.
Both of us ended that weekend more galvanised to go on and make amazing things happen than we ever would have had we just ‘done work’. I have things I’m still processing (and that I might have to talk out in a podcast episode soon!), but I feel like I have a new lease on life, and renewed power and purpose within me and a drive to create that I haven’t had for a long time.And I’d say that’s a weekend well spent.
Ps: so powerful was our two days that Jessica and I are working on creating similar retreats for small groups next year - if you have been inspired by this post we'd really appreciate it if you could fill in our five question survey to help us shape these for you.
