Transcription
I've been doing personal retreats since 2017 when I realized that I needed a bit more clarity if I was really going to accomplish my goals. And since then, I've been doing a personal retreat every single quarter. And it's this quarterly practice that enables me to fully connect to my goals and eliminate the things that don't hit the mark so I can take consistent action on the things that do. Personal retreat gives me the clarity that I need to show up every day. And I believe that the clarity a personal retreat provides can totally transform your life. So, in this video, I want to help you get maximum clarity to consistently take action on the things that are important to you by walking you through my entire personal retreat process step by step. It's a lot. This video is going to be longer, but I'm going to keep it tight. So, here we go.
Okay. Now, first, I need to share a little bit about what the personal retreat can actually do for you. You see, back when he was CEO of Microsoft, Bill Gates used to do what he called think weeks. He'd go to a cabin in the woods for a week or two, and he'd disconnect from technology so he could just reflect and wrestle with new ideas. And that secluded location allowed him to get away from the busyiness of the day-to-day and just think about the future of the business. This is where some of his best ideas and his most important innovations came from is these think weeks. It was actually on one of these think weeks that he penned an email titled the internet title wave which sparked the initiative behind the development of Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Obviously the internet has become a really big deal.
Now I've adapted the think concept for myself and I've created a framework I call a personal retreat. Every 90 days, I get a way to reflect on the last quarter and then plan the next one. And the personal retreat is the thing that gives me the space that I need to think clearly about the big picture stuff like the direction that my life and our family is headed. It's kind of like a quarterly corporate off-site planning event, but there's not a whole bunch of people there. It's just me and it's out in the woods somewhere. So, I do this every single quarter and every single time I come back with clarity on what's truly important and that creates this heightened sense of motivation so I can show up every day and take consistent action on the things that really matter.
Before we get into the specifics of the personal retreat though, I do need to share a little bit of the thought process behind it and the problem that it's really solving for me. You need to understand this before it can really work. So, I actually first got this idea when I read the 12week year, which is a book by Brian Moran and Michael Lennington. The book is basically a planning framework that forces you to think in shorter cycles about the goals that you're setting so you can focus more clearly on the things that you want to do and achieve them faster. So the book talks in detail about why most annual goals fail. And TLDDR it's because we humans have a tendency to overestimate what we can get done in the short term and underestimate what we can get done in the long term. So when we set annual goals, what we do is we end up putting those things off for 10 or 11 months. Then we try to cram them through at the very end and we fall just short. So if we shorten that goal setting period to 12 weeks and we repeat that process four times, we can actually make significantly more progress on the things that are important to us.
So the 12week year system itself is actually pretty simple. First, you write a compelling vision of your ideal future and what you're working towards. Second, you plan what strategies and actions will move you closer to that future. And then third, you create habits to make taking regular action as easy as possible. Now, the fourth one is kind of optional. You can measure your execution to make sure that you keep yourself on track. I don't go too deep with this. I basically just try to track my habits. So, I'm doing the thing every single day.
Now, I don't follow that system exactly, but I do like the forcing function of focusing on what's important for just a short period of time. I really believe that life is not a marathon. It's a series of sprints. And 12 weeks is short enough to stay focused, but it's long enough to see significant progress being made on the things that are important to you. So, when I first came across this idea, the 12-week year, I was really excited to try it out. I shared the idea with some of the people in a local mastermind group that I was a part of, and we all decided we're going to give this a shot together. So, we set our goals, we shared them publicly, and we started tracking our results. But after a couple of quarters, I was starting to get discouraged because I wasn't seeing the results that I was really hoping for. Not only was I not achieving my goals, but I really wasn't even close. The promise of the 12week year at that point really felt like a lie and I felt like just chucking the whole thing.
But around the same time, I was also introduced to the concept of thinking time by author Keith Cunningham. He teaches that whenever we set a goal, there is always an obstacle between us and the successful completion of that goal. The problem is often we're in such a hurry we don't recognize the real problems that we're coming up against. But by creating the space to think and asking the right questions, we can identify the real problems and the answers usually become clear. So the job of thinking time is to uncover the real problems preventing us from creating positive changes that we want to see in our lives. And once we identify the obstacles standing between us and our goals, then we can overcome them. So the way to identify the real problems we need to solve is this concept of thinking time which is introduced by Keith Cunningham in his book the road less stupid. So in the book he shares this quote which sums up the concept of thinking time very well. I don't need to do more smart things. I just need to do fewer dumb things. I need to avoid making emotional decisions and swinging at bad pitches. I need to think.
I didn't just give up on the 12week year. Instead, I decided to implement my own version of thinking time in the hopes of understanding why the goals I was setting were not clicking for me. What were the obstacles that I was encountering that were preventing me from reaching those goals? So, I scheduled my first personal retreat to give myself some thinking time to unravel these problems and overcome the obstacles that were causing the 12week year framework to fail so miserably for me. Now, I have five kids at home, so I knew I was not going to get any uninterrupted time to think sitting around my house. So, I went away for an entire day to the family cabin just to think about who I was, what I was doing, where I wanted to be, those types of things. And I was amazed to discover that just a little bit of solitude provided exactly what I needed. Time and space for my brain to unravel things. And I was shocked at the clarity that I got as a result. Where I had previously had trouble picking things to say no to, I'm a recovering people pleaser, and I tend to say yes to just about everything. It became crystal clear to me what I needed to let go and what things were really important to me going forward that were in alignment with my ideal future. So I came back from that personal retreat focused, motivated, ready to get after it. And it worked because that quarter, my personal retreat, I had missed all three of my 12week year goals previously, but when I came back, I hit all of them. And I've continued to have success with this for roughly the eight years that I've been doing these. Now that I've seen the power of the personal retreat, I can't imagine not doing one. Now, I've refined the tools and the exercises that I use along the way, but the key idea is the same. You set aside the time to let your brain noodle on the tough questions and find the answers that you're looking for, creating the clarity to work on the right things and the motivation to follow through consistently on what really matters.
All right, I know that's a bit of a lengthy explanation, but I really wanted to talk about the why of the personal retreat because it's all about connecting to your why. So, hopefully now you understand a little bit about the purpose. Now, let's get into how to actually do a personal retreat for yourself.
Starting with planning your personal retreat. So, when planning your personal retreat, I recommend that you set aside an entire day. If you can get away to a place that you don't normally go, that's even better. It doesn't need to be a cabin in the woods. It could be your local library. But your environment does play a very big part in your ability to think and reflect. So, going somewhere unfamiliar allows your brain to enter this mode naturally. Now, lately, I've been going to postcard cabins, which are these tiny houses that are parked on these remote campsites in the woods. They're fully furnished. They have heat and AC, a private bathroom with a shower, great nature views. It's a great setting for thinking and reflecting, and the perfect place for a personal retreat. Now, typically, I get to the site around 400 p.m. and I do the first part of the personal retreat when I get there. I usually go to bed pretty early, and then I wake up rested so I can do the second part the following morning. If these cabins look familiar, they used to be under the name Getaway House. And I actually did a YouTube video on these a while back. So click here if you want a more in-depth look at what these cabins are all about. But if you don't have one of these near you, don't worry. I would just look for a cabin on Airbnb that looks comfortable, but it's fairly secluded so you can spend some time in nature. Like I said, you could also go to the local library or a state park. The ideal location is going to differ for each individual. But the point is, you need to make sure that the location you choose is conducive to focus contemplation. You need to unplug from your everyday routine and you need to just be alone with your thoughts. So, some people may prefer to stay inside while others may like to get out into nature. Some might like to stare at a crackling fire like me while they think about their future. Others may prefer the water. Just make sure that you do it alone.
It's also important that when you go on your personal retreat, you eliminate as many distractions as you can. I recommend that you do not bring any work projects or reading material. So, I'm different than Bill Gates and his think weeks in this respect. You don't want to be distracted by everyday problems. So, as you think about the ideal place to host your personal retreat, remember it doesn't have to be a 2-hour drive from your home. It just can't be your home. It has to be someplace that you don't go to often. If you're too familiar with your surroundings, you will be easily distracted. So, you don't have to go far. You just need to get away and think for an extended period of time. And I can't overstate the importance of solitude here enough. The location that you choose should give you time away from everyone and everything, allowing you to cut out all the noise and be alone with your thoughts. That's critical for the types of questions that you're going to be wrestling with on this personal retreat.
Now, by the way, if you follow the full personal retreat process, it's going to take about 8 hours, and you will be tired by the end. It's pretty exhausting wrestling with these big questions for that long. But you'll also have the motivation that you need to consistently take action on what's really important. And you'll have the clarity to cut the things that aren't those distractions. That will provide an exponential return on the time and the money that you invest in your personal retreat as you make consistent progress on your goals over the next 90 days. So, it is a little bit of an investment, but it's going to pay big dividends down the road.
Okay, so let's dig into the personal retreat process. There are several steps to this and I'm going to break them down one by one. I'm going to share everything here. So, let's dive in.
Let's start with the first step, which is to review your vision and values. There's a couple pieces to this, including a one-sentence personal mission statement for me that I call my life theme. I actually lead a life theme cohort inside of my community to help people dial in their own life theme. But what this does is it gives you something that you can use as a filter when you're deciding what you're going to engage with and what you're going to say no to. So for example, my life theme is I help people multiply their time and talent so they can leave a bigger dent in the universe. Everything I do gets filtered through that life theme. And if I don't see a way that it connects, then it's an automatic no. So during this part of the personal retreat, which takes about 30 minutes, I consider my life theme and see if I want to make any changes. And I obviously don't mess with this too often, but I do give myself permission to modify this if it's no longer resonating. And also during this step, I will also review both our family core values and my personal core values. These are things that are extremely important to my identity. And I adopted this from an exercise in Jim Collins Good to Great called the mission to Mars. So this exercise is often completed by leadership teams and organizations. You basically answer the following question as best you can. If you could send five people who embodied everything that was best about your company to an alien world, who would they be? and what would they embody? So, while the book and the exercise obviously have their roots in establishing a corporate culture for large teams and organizations, I believe the principle can be applied on a smaller scale to your family and even yourself as an individual. So, I review both of these alongside my life theme, which are all individual notes and linked to in my personal retreat template file so I can reference them easily.
The next step in the personal retreat is to review your journal entries. I believe daily journaling is very important and it's a critical part of the personal retreat. So I actually journal every single day by capturing some specific things and then I review them when I do my personal retreat. So first I capture my responses to my daily questions. This is a form of journaling where you answer specific questions based on your intentions not on the outcomes. So I first heard about this when I read the book Triggers by Marshall Goldsmith. And in that book, Marshall talks about the daily questions that he uses to measure his engagement with the things that really matter in his life. The key is just to ask yourself, did I do my best to? And then fill in the blanks. So, for example, Marshall uses questions like, did I do my best to set clear goals today? And did I do my best to find meaning today? I've modified these to things like, did I do my best to love my wife? And did I do my best to learn something? The important difference here is that these prompts focus on the effort, not the result. So instead of using words to answer, he uses a 10point scale where 10 is great and one is terrible. Now, if you want to get into the details of how I implement this and the shortcut that I use to capture my scores, check out this video here where I walk through setting everything up and I provide the link to the shortcut itself. But the end result is a dashboard like this where I can visualize these scores that I've logged over the last several months. This is what I review in my personal retreat.
I also have a couple different headers in my daily note template file where I will capture journal entries, gratitude entries, and wins. I try to capture journal entries about everything that's important. And I capture wins to remind myself of the things that I've actually accomplished. But I try to capture a unique gratitude entry every single day as I believe that that helps me keep a positive focus. So I capture each of these under the appropriate header and I add an inline tag of journal/entry, journal/gratitude, or journal/win. When it comes to the personal retreat, I now have three separate notes that each have a single query where it rolls up all the entries of that type in reverse chronological order. So, this puts the most recent journal entries at the top and it makes it easier to review all of these entries from the last quarter. So, at this point in the personal retreat, I'll review all three of these lists as well as my daily questions dashboard to just look for general themes or takeaways. I don't really log anything formal here. I'm just trying to refamiliarize myself with everything that's happened in the last 90 days. And reviewing all of this usually takes me about 60 minutes.
The next step in the personal retreat is to review your ideal future. This is a detailed description of what a day in the life of future you looks like. And it's important for a couple of reasons. First, it gives you a north star as you move towards the type of life that you want to live. And second, it can provide encouragement as you discover ways to live out elements of that ideal future here and now. So Steven Cvy taught that things are created twice. First in your mind and then in reality. You need to be able to see your ideal future before you can actually achieve it. And that's what this step in the personal retreat journey is all about. So when thinking about your future, you want to pick a time period that's far enough out into the future that you have time to actually achieve it. So, I recommend you start by thinking about your life 5 years from now. That's enough time to make some pretty significant changes, but not so far that it seems like you'll never get there. And it may be difficult at first, but try to think best case scenario. What would your life look like if you were wildly successful? Remember, you need to be able to see it before you can achieve it. Now, as you think about your future, picture what a typical day looks like and imagine all of the details associated with that. What kind of home do you live in? What kind of car do you drive? What are your relationships like? What kind of work do you do? And include as much detail as possible. You want to paint a mental picture of the kind of life that you want to live. The more specific you are about your ideal future, the stronger that image gets imprinted in your mind and the more you will believe it is possible to achieve, the more motivating it becomes. This will be very important in helping you to follow through and take consistent action to create that ideal future. So again, I have a note in my Obsidian vault that has a bulleted list of a bunch of specific details about what a day in the life of future me looks like. And on this list are things like the type of work that I do, who I work with, what my schedule is like, and how involved I am in my kids extracurricular activities like coaching soccer and basketball. The important thing here is to be ultra specific. The more detailed you can be as you describe your ideal future, the more motivating it becomes. And during the personal retreat process, I usually spend about 30 minutes reviewing and updating this.
Now, the next step in the personal retreat is one of my favorites, and that is the wheel of life. So, this is where you rate your current satisfaction with your life on a scale from 1 to 10. One being the lowest, 10 being the highest. And as you rate the different areas, you color in the slices of the pie like this, giving you a visual representation of where you are at personally at this exact moment in time. You can pick your own areas for this, but I use a slightly modified version of the areas that Ali Abdal defines in his book Feelgood Productivity. I use spirit, mind, body, friends, family, significant other, career or work, mission, and money. Now, as you complete the wheel of life, the key is to rate your current satisfaction within that area. It's not subjective. It's based completely on how you feel. So, here's an example of a wheel of life from one of my own personal retreats. I do this in Obsidian using the Obsidian Charts plugin, and then I modify the code for each area to reflect the score that I gave for each. Now, I've linked to the Obsidian Charts plugin below this video, and the personal retreat template file is actually in my Obsidian Starter Vault, so you can download those for yourself if you want to use the template and the plug-in. But the important thing is that you have a visualization here for how you feel about the different areas of your life. And then later on in the personal retreat process, we'll take the lowest area and we'll set goals or intentions to help us move the needle and bolster that specific area. This actually gets into a very important concept from the 12week year, which we need to unpack here, and that is intentional imbalance. A lot of people chase this mythical idea of work life balance, but I don't really like that. Maybe this was feasible when it was impossible to connect to your work via the internet, and you had a very specific place that you went to work every single day. But since we're always connected, we have to fight a little bit harder nowadays to protect our focus and intention in the moment, no matter where we are. You can be at dinner with your friends and be distracted by an email from work or playing with your kids and be interrupted by a Slack message. The bottom line is that the distinction between work and life is largely artificial. There's just your life and it's up to you to manage all aspects of it well. And that in a nutshell is why you need a personal retreat. It helps you get clear on the things that really matter. And in this step where we're filling out the wheel of life, we're identifying the areas of greatest need so we can do something to bolster those areas. So even if all the scores are low, we're not going to try and address them all. We're going to focus on the lowest area. We're going to make progress there. And the next quarter, we can re-evaluate and set different intentions for a different area. I find it helpful to have separate sections below the wheel of life in my personal retreat template where I show the score and then I also create a quick bullet list of the things that went into the rating that I chose. So remember this is not quantitative data that's determining this score. It's based completely on gut feel for how things are going. We don't need any justification for the scores that we give when filling out the wheel of life. These are just some of the reasons for the feelings and the ratings that I choose. And again, the whole process of filling out this wheel of life takes about 60 minutes.
So after the wheel of life, the next part of the personal retreat is the retrospective. And this is where we start to ask some of those questions that I talked about at the beginning of the video. Now, I break my retrospective up into two parts. And the first part takes about 60 minutes. This is where I jot down bullet points for anything I can think of as it pertains to three specific prompts. What did I accomplish? What went well? and what could have gone better. Now, each of these questions serves a specific purpose. The first question, what did I accomplish? Helps me recognize and celebrate my wins. This is actually a lot harder for me than it sounds. In fact, the first time I did a personal retreat, I went away in September thinking I hadn't really done much that year. But when I started making a list of all the things that I had accomplished, I realized I'd actually done quite a bit. So the problem is that we tend to immediately move on to the next thing that needs to be done without taking the time to celebrate our wins and after a while we start to feel discouraged and overwhelmed like nothing we're doing is really working. So this question helps me realize that those feelings aren't true and it helps me recognize the things that are actually working. Now that actually leads to the second section, what went well? I'm a big fan of systems. I believe that the systems in your life are designed to get you the results that you have. And all systems have three parts. There's an input, there's a process, and then there's an output. Now, many times we get upset about the output. But the way to change the output is to modify either the input or the process. So, when I'm considering what went well, I'm recognizing what parts of my current workflow processes are producing the results that I want. I simply try to recognize these so I can do more of them. And the last question, what could have gone better? Helps me recognize the broken pieces of the systems in my life so that I can make modifications and hopefully get better results. The trick here is not to get upset about the results that you've gotten. But keep experimenting and keep tweaking things until you get the results that you want. The results that you're after should be in alignment with that ideal future that we described earlier in the personal retreat process.
Okay. Okay, so for the first part of the retrospective, I just jot down as many things as I can think of in response to these three questions. And at the end, I have three different lists. And the whole process again takes about 60 minutes. So if you're keeping track, that's about 4 hours so far. And at this point, I find it helpful to take a break before I shift into thinking about the future. So if you're trying to do your whole personal retreat in a single day, this might be when you want to go get lunch. As I mentioned earlier, I like to go to the postcard cabin. So, I'll do the first part here before I go to bed, and then I'll pick up with the next part in the morning after I'm rested. But the important thing is you need to give your brain a break before the second part of the retrospective, which we'll talk about in just a minute, because this kind of thinking doesn't come naturally for a lot of people, myself included, and it can be very mentally fatiguing. So, you need to take a break and come back rested before the next part of this, which is, in my opinion, where the real magic happens.
All right. So, the second part of the retrospective again focuses on three specific questions, but this is really the important part. Make sure you're paying attention. These three questions. What should I start doing? What should I stop doing? And what should I keep doing are magical. If you take only one thing away from the video, make it this. These three questions are so powerful. The reason they're so powerful is that they aren't very specific. When I ask these questions, they could be applied to any of the areas of my life that I rated in that wheel of life part that we just talked about. And that gives your brain permission to think about things a little bit more broadly. So again, at this point, we're just making bullet lists of things that fit under each one of these lists. These aren't things that I'm committing to. I'm just jotting down all of the possibilities. Now, this part of the process actually takes longer. It takes two hours. And I really want to stress, you cannot rush this part. Every single time I do a personal retreat, I get to this step. I start making these lists. And after about 30 to 40 minutes, I've got several things under each prompt. And at that point, your brain lies to you and it tells you, "You've got enough. It's time to move on and do something else." We're just so used to completing things and moving on to the next item on our to-do list that this type of thinking makes our brains uncomfortable. But if you stay with it for long enough, in my experience, it's usually about an hour and a half, you force your brain into a different mode and it gets to a whole different level when you're thinking about these types of things. So the things that you add after minute 90, those are really the good ones. So if you stick with it, don't rush this part. This is where you start to get the really good stuff. This is critical if you really want to create the motivation to take consistent action on the things that are truly important to you and the clarity to help you cut the things that aren't.
Now, one of the things about this part of the retrospective, I always pick at least one thing to stop doing. I tend to get excited about new projects and opportunities. It's really easy for me to just keep saying yes to those things that I'm excited about. And we do want to follow our energy to some degree. The things that we're excited about are probably the things that are worth doing. But if all we do is say yes to new things, very quickly, we're going to reach the point where we can't keep up with it all. So, we need to learn to say no. And by forcing myself to pick one thing every time I do a personal retreat to stop doing, I create some systemic margin for myself to try new things without being completely overwhelmed. This is difficult sometimes as I am a bit of a recovering people pleaser. So if I say I'm going to do something, I don't want to let anyone down. But I have learned that the things that I said yes to 5 years ago would not necessarily be a yes if I was asked to do them today. And then once I recognize that, I've learned that it's worth having the difficult conversation and telling the person that this just isn't the right thing for me anymore. And often what I find is they feel the same way. But the story that we tell ourselves in our heads is that they're going to be really upset. They're going to be mad at me. Often that's not true. But even if it is, it's worth protecting our limited time and attention for the things that really matter. Unfortunately, no one is going to work towards your ideal future for you. So, we have to make sure that we are the ones taking consistent action.
Now, after we've completed the retrospective, it's time to set our intentions or goals. Remember, we want to embrace the idea of intentional imbalance here. So, even if all your scores were low back in the wheel of life part, pick one or at most two goals for the next 90 days and define them here. When you set your goals, you want to tie them to the things that you can control. So, for example, let's say I want to grow my YouTube channel. Setting a goal of 20,000 YouTube subscribers is not a good goal. I can't control that outcome. It's a lag measure. That number is not one that I can directly influence. But if I set a goal of publishing a YouTube video every week, that's something I can control. That's a lead measure, and that's eventually going to produce the results that I'm after. But it's important when you're setting your intentions here that you pick things like those lead measures that are completely under your control to complete. Once again, this part of the personal retreat process takes about 60 minutes.
Now, once you identify your goals, then you want to break them down and figure out what milestones you have to hit in order to achieve those. These are kind of like mile markers on the way to your ideal future, which can help you make sure that you stay on track. And then from there, you want to break this down even further into daily actions that you can complete to consistently make progress on your goals. These daily things, if you did these, you want these to be so connected to the outcome that if you followed them, the score would automatically take care of itself.
All right, so once you have your intentions set, the last part of the personal retreat is to carve out the space in your calendar in order to show up every day and take consistent action. And the way to do this is to create a template of your schedule that I call planning your perfect week. It's basically a time block plan for your week, but instead of having individual tasks or projects that you're working on, you're blocking time for the different modes that you're going to be in. So, for example, here's my perfect week calendar in my calendar app. I use different colors for the different areas of my life. You might see green, that's personal, yellow is family, purple is creating, red is thinking, orange is exercise, brown is planning, etc. And when you do this, you're making sure that you have the time set aside for taking consistent action on the goals that you just set. This also makes sure that you have time for the things that you want to do as well. So, for example, I have a weekly one-on-one with my kids on my perfect week, as well as family time, coaching, soccer, etc. The important thing is to make sure the things you really want to do get on this calendar, which significantly increases the chances of you following through and doing them when it's time to plan your individual day. And again, this last part of the personal retreat typically takes about 60 minutes.
So, as you can see, the whole thing takes about 8 hours. And while it might be possible to do an abbreviated personal retreat, I actually recommend you do as much of this as you possibly can. I recognize it's a significant time investment, but the productivity benefits provided by the clarity it gives you will yield exponential returns if you don't rush the process. While you can muscle through the whole thing in one day if you really want, as I mentioned before, I prefer to split it up and go overnight when I can.
Now, for a long time, I've done my personal retreat on my laptop using an Obsidian template, as I mentioned earlier. And if you want to use that template for yourself, then it is actually in my Obsidian Starter Vault. The link is below this video if you want to download that. But there is something to be said about analog tools. So, I've actually partnered with Jesse Phillips at New Year to create a personal retreat planner that you can use for this purpose instead if you'd like. I've been a big fan of New Year for a long time. They make these big wall calendars that break the year into quarters where all of the months run together. I've actually been working with Jesse to create a custom branded wall calendar for the focus podcast I do with David Sparks. And I've been talking to him about building this planner for almost two years. This planner has an example personal retreat in the front, which is an actual personal retreat that I completed so you can see what it looks like. Then it has blank pages where you can do your own personal retreat. Then weekly and daily planning pages that you can use to make sure that your daily, weekly, and quarterly attentions all align. It's basically an analog tool for the multiscale planning concept that I described in this other video. And that alignment is the thing that helps you make progress on your goals. The daily plans have space for time blocking your most important tasks, logging your daily gratitude, and more. And if you want to see a walkthrough of the entire planner, I actually have an explainer video on the sales page, which is linked below this video. Now, obviously, you can do this in a blank notebook as well, but I like having my quarterly plan in the same place as my weekly and my daily plans, so I can review these easily. And if you like this approach, then you might like this planner. It cost $29, and again, the link is in the description below the video if you want to check it out.
So, to wrap up this deep dive, I highly recommend you try out a personal retreat for yourself. You don't need to buy my planner. You don't need to follow my process exactly if you don't want to. Though, I do think it's a great place to start. I wholeheartedly believe though, if you get a way to think about the last quarter and plan the next one like this regularly, you will be exponentially more effective and make much greater progress on your goals. And if you could use a little bit of accountability with your personal retreat, regardless of what process you follow, we actually have weekly accountability calls inside of my private community. I've recently revamped it, so there are a couple of membership tiers. But if you just want to join other sense makers using PKM to learn and grow together, you can actually do that now for only $10 a month. I've had a couple people ask if I have a Discord, and I don't really want to do something like that, but I do want to have a place where people can ask me questions. And I do want something for people who don't care about all the courses and cohorts, but still want that community and the accountability. So, at $10 a month, you can get access to the library, join the Q&A calls, post your questions in the private forum, and you can find out more about the library right now by going to library.practicalpkm.com. And also, if you want more PKM resources to help you get more out of your notes and ideas, check out my free Obsidian starter vault. I mentioned I added my personal retreat template file to that vault. So, you can actually get that plus a bunch of other templates and tips right now for free by going to vault.practicalpkm.com. Thanks for watching and we'll see you in another.