For Emerging and Seasoned Change Catalysts
Boost Your Clarity!
Step into 2023
with More Ease,
Commitment, and Confidence
a Virtual Group Retreat
Friday, January 13
Carol McClelland Fields, PhD, BCC
Your Retreat Guide
When you think of year-end planning, do you imagine creating a detailed plan for your business based on the offers you want to share with your clients, the marketing calendar, and your income projections?
Theoretically, setting bold goals and getting all the pieces spelled out means that you can work your plan, month-by-month, to meet your goals.
Unfortunately, if you have any gaps in your vision, you will struggle to do this. The resulting plan will likely reflect the instability of your foundation.
Traditional End-of-Year Planning Doesn’t Work for Several reasons
There are several very good reasons why this traditional planning process is NOT a viable approach for Change Catalysts.
Reason 1: Your work and Business are Emerging or evolving
If you are Starting a new business, Re-imagining your existing business, Developing a new body of work, or Scaling your business, the details of your work and business are emerging in this moment. If you follow an organic business model, you may notice that your business is always growing, always evolving, and always in development. At any given time, you are clear about certain aspects of your work and business and a bit fuzzy about other details.
“Carol’s system for guiding you to clarity is simply brilliant. Thank you Carol for this new clarity, my heart thanks you, my business thanks you, my life thanks you. (Full testimonial below.)”
Your lack of clarity about your vision and your next steps is a natural phase of starting your business, evolving your work, and growing your business.
Don’t take this lack of clarity as a sign that there’s something wrong with you or your business
You are right where you need to be: strengthening the details and essence of your new or evolving work.
Though temporary, your current lack of clarity does make it difficult and frustrating to engage in the traditional business planning process.
How do you lay out your offers for the year if you are still in the process of defining your emerging work?
How do you forecast your income for the year if you aren’t confident about your offers or your pricing?
How do you design your marketing strategies for the year if you aren’t sure what you are selling?
If your business is emerging and evolving, it’s impossible to come up with viable goals that make up a traditional plan for the new year.
You are likely aware of this intuitively. That’s why even the thought of embarking on a traditional planning process is enough to trigger a range of resistant responses from feeling anxious, worried, uneasy, frustrated, overwhelmed, and unable to make the decisions and choices required to lay out your next steps.
Listen and honor the messages
you are receiving.
Stop pushing yourself to
plan for “the New Year” using
a traditional planning process.
Reason 2: You are More Than Your Business!
In traditional planning programs, the focus is on your business. Pure and simple. What are you going to offer? How are you going to market it? and What income will you generate as a result?
I find this singular emphasis on business troubling.
To create a flourishing business, your business must align with and support YOU in being yourself and living your life.
I had chronic fatigue syndrome when I decided to leave the corporate work and start my own business. I knew from the start that I needed to create a business that gave me the spaciousness I needed to heal.
When I forget this key point, I get myself over-extended, overworked, and overbooked! If I get this far out of balance, nothing works particularly well, and I’m miserable on the path to a “flourishing” business.
As a result of the last few years, I know many of us are more aware than ever that our own personal health and our loved ones’ well-being must be a priority as we design our work with clients and our business systems and strategies.
There’s no long term gain in having a successful business if you are too tired, overwhelmed, and overworked!
Reason 3: The Uncertainty Baked into Our Times
The last three years have made us more aware than ever that we cannot always predict how the year will unfold.
Life happens - personally and collectively. Unforeseen twists and turns can appear without notice and our circumstances may hold uncertainties that are unpredictable and unknowable for extended periods.
When you know this and feel this, it’s really difficult to buy into the idea of creating a 12-month plan for your business. How can you predict what’s going to unfold?
Creating a vision for your evolving work and business for 2023 requires a different starting point than the traditional end-of-year planning process.
There Is Another Way to Prepare for 2023
By tracking my own evolution with my business vision over the years, I’ve discovered a far more satisfying, inspiring, and effective way to explore what’s ahead for you and your business in the coming year.
I’ve embedded several of my favorite practices into my work year round because they gently bring me into an inspired, motivated, and creative place with my business.
Best Practice #1: Design and evolve a business that aligns with who you are naturally and supports the life you want to live. With this inherent sense alignment, you develop an inner strength that allows you to be nimble and creative when you need to be.
Best Practice #2: Focus first on assessing where you are right now. Where do you feel clear and solid? Where are you feeling vague and unsure? Where are your blind spots and gaps that haven’t been on your radar? Be honest and forthright with yourself. Lean in to understand yourself, your life, your work, and your outreach in a deeper way. Be curious and open to seeing what you discover.
Best Practice #3: Use where you are now as a guide to point you toward your next steps. It’s quite likely that the gaps and soft spots you discover have been the key source of your discomfort when it comes to making plans and taking action. When you know what’s been missing in your business, it’s a lot easier to figure out the most productive ways to invest your time, energy, and resources to grow your business in ways that support you in flourishing — personally, professionally, and financially.
When you have
a Viable Foundation
—Grounded, Aligned, and Clear —
you’ll be able to Step
into 2023 with More Ease,
Commitment, and Confidence!
Join Me for the 2023 Boost Your Clarity Retreat
“Carol has a finely-honed ability to take her clients on deep yet productive dives into more clarity. This session with the clarity questions offered me a big-picture perspective and showed me specific places to put my focused energies for shifting and up-leveling to achieve the next level of clarity. (Full testimonial below.)”
The fastest, most effective way to grow your business is to spend time shoring up your foundation and testing the feasibility of your new ideas before you attempt to put big growth plans in place.
During this virtual group retreat I will guide you through a series of questions on four key themes (see schedule below) to help you discover:
Where you are confident about your foundation and vision
Where you feel shaky about your work
Where you have gaps in your foundation and vision
Your answers during the retreat will provide you with insights about the best ways to use your time, money, and energy to make progress with the emerging or evolving aspects of your work with clients and your business. At the end of the retreat I’ll help you connect the dots to see the next steps that will have the most impact for you and your business.
How Does the Virtual Group Retreat Work?
Each hour we’ll focus on a theme that contributes to the strength of your foundation and your vision.
To create a clear vision for your business, you must have a grounded sense of yourself, your needs, and your desires for the coming year.
Hour 1 - Deepen Your Alignment with YOURSELF: We start with strengthening your connection with who you’ve been in 2022 and who you are becoming in 2023!
Life happens. Some years more than others! To grow a business that flourishes, your business must support your life.
Hour 2 - Honor YOUR LIFE with Inherent Compassion: Being clear about the realities of your life -- responsibilities, constraints, and dreams -- creates a strong foundation upon which to design a viable vision for 2023.
The work you do with clients is at the core of your vision for your business.
Hour 3 - Claim YOUR WORK with New Commitment: Reflecting on where you are now with your client work and where you want to be will open up new pathways and opportunities for 2023.
Feeling comfortable and confident with your outreach strategies makes marketing so much easier.
Hour 4 - Design YOUR OUTREACH with Enhanced Confidence: Discovering the most aligned ways to share your work with others supports you in creating a flourishing business in 2023.
Closing: During the final gathering, you’ll have the opportunity to synthesize what you’ve discovered about your inner foundation and your business vision. I will also share several guidelines to help you confirm you are on the right track with your next steps.
After the retreat I will help you use your answers to create a road map for resolving the gaps you discovered so you can successfully and effectively develop your work and your business. To make sure you are clear about your next steps, I’ll offer a way you can be in touch with me about what you discovered during the retreat so that I can give you some personalized insights about your next steps. This follow up conversation is included in the price of the retreat. Watch the deadlines so you don’t miss the opportunity to receive confirmation about your next steps!
Knowing the current state
of your Inner foundation
and Business Vision Will Show
You exactly where to invest your
time, energy, and resources
to create a flourishing year
for you and your business.
The Details and Registration Links
Choose your Retreat Date:
Friday, January 13, 2022
Each retreat begins at 10 am Pacific | 1 pm Eastern and continues through to 2:30 Pacific | 5:30 Eastern.
All sessions will be recorded. If you are unable to attend all of the sessions live, you are welcome to register and listen to the recordings after the virtual retreat.
At the top of each hour we will gather for a 20-minute conversation on Zoom to explore the theme and a short tip or strategy to give you a new context for the questions you’ll be answering privately during the rest of the hour.
Join the Retreat Here
4.5-Hour Retreat = $80.00
What Clients Are Saying…
The questions I’ll be sharing with you in the Boost Your Clarity Retreat come from my private Clarity Boost Sessions. As you’ll discover in these testimonials, the questions open the way to deeper clarity and understanding of exactly where these clients were and their next steps.
“Carol’s system for guiding you to clarity is simply brilliant. She deconstructs aspects of your vision in a way that helps you see how the different layers lead one into another. She highlights what is clear and spots what is fuzzy, what is missing and what is dominating. You end up seeing how the whole can flow, how to find the next steps, how to build from a place of clear authenticity and solid authority.
I am gobsmack-thrilled at what a single session has yielded. Her yin and yang marriage of insights and intuition, together with that uncanny layered approach, was like a journey of discovery into past and future, ending in a grounded self. I am excited and looking forward to evolving a more soul-centered business. Thank you Carol for this new clarity, my heart thanks you, my business thanks you, my life thanks you. ”
““Carol has a finely-honed ability to take her clients on deep yet productive dives into more clarity.
The clarity questions she asked during our session together allowed me to verbalize both new insights about how much more clear I’d become from earlier conversations, but also to articulate certain points where I was “stuck” or didn’t feel like I was 100% clear.
One of the greatest gifts of this session was that, in the container that Carol and I co-created and held, I was able to speak in terms of percent of clarity that I now felt on what had been long-troublesome issues. Most importantly, I could do it matter-of-factly and without feeling the guilt and shame that previously had been wrapped up with those issues and my lack of clarity around them.
This session with the clarity questions offered me a big-picture perspective and showed
me specific places to put my focused energies for shifting and up-leveling to achieve the next level of clarity.
The questions elicited, together with Carol’s insightful commentary, a way for me to recognize and speak about things that I had long experienced as complex, tangly, and rambling. Finally I could articulate them unapologetically with a new level of streamlined simplicity and clarity.”