Why I Take My Clients On Retreats

A few years ago, I took myself on a personal retreat. Just me. Three nights at an all-inclusive, tech-free resort.

Deciding to go was the hardest part.

I wasn't stepping away to take my kids somewhere. I wasn't leaving for a work trip or a conference. I was leaving for me — which, as a mom, a partner, a business owner, and a former nonprofit executive who had spent her whole life striving and doing and being responsible to and for everyone else, felt almost transgressive.

Deciding to do something like this for myself felt selfish.

And that's exactly why I knew I had to do it.

Because if taking time for myself felt selfish — if that required so much internal negotiation just to justify — that told me everything about how far I had drifted from myself. Taking time to pour into yourself shouldn't require that much convincing. It shouldn't feel like something you have to earn or explain.

So I went.

I wanted to give myself two things I almost never had: physical space to spread out, and mental space to not have any responsibilities or decisions to make other than the ones I was making for myself.

My only agenda was my own.

And something happened in that quiet that I hadn't anticipated.

I could hear myself again.

When you're always moving, always producing, always being what everyone else needs — your own voice gets very quiet. Not gone. Just buried under everything else. The retreat gave me enough stillness to hear it. To sit with what I actually wanted rather than what I was supposed to want. To get reacquainted with myself in a way that felt almost like reunion.

I left with a clearer vision of who and how I wanted to be. And that clarity — that was the greatest gift I could give not only to myself but to my children, my partner, and my work.

In that moment, sitting by a pool somewhere, I knew I wanted to help other people get in on this goodness.

That was the beginning of the retreats.

What I know now, after years of hosting them, is that the retreat isn't about the location or the luxury — though I do believe you deserve to be held beautifully while you do this work. It's about what happens when you remove the noise.

What typically takes months of squeezing in a little time for yourself here and there, in between all the responsibilities and the striving — can happen in days when you give yourself actual space. Not stolen time. Real, uninterrupted, sacred time where you are the only thing on your own agenda.

I've watched people unfold in those three days in ways that genuinely amaze me. I've watched complete strangers fall into each other's arms like they've known each other their whole lives. I've watched women hear themselves for the first time in years — hear what they actually want, not what they've been told to want or what they've been responsible for wanting on behalf of everyone else.

And I've watched what happens when they go home.

The retreat isn't the solution. It's the beginning of the evolution. But it's a beginning that's very hard to manufacture any other way — because most of us can't get quiet enough in our regular lives to hear what we actually need to hear. The noise is too constant. The responsibilities are too immediate. The habit of putting ourselves last is too well-practiced.

The retreat interrupts all of that.

It gives you a taste of what it feels like to be free — genuinely, unhurriedly, uncomplicatedly free — and once you've felt that, it is very hard to go back to a life that doesn't make room for it.

That's why I take my clients on retreat.

Not because the spa is lovely, though it is. Not because Lisbon is extraordinary, though it is. But because I know from my own experience that you can read about this work, you can understand it intellectually, you can nod along to everything I say — and still not fully believe it's possible for you until you've lived three days of it in your own body.

The retreat is how you believe.

And believing is where everything begins.

I'm Aisha Crumbine, a life coach and the founder of Beyond Success — a program for high-achieving leaders who've accomplished everything they set out to achieve and are ready to live an expansive life beyond it. I work with individuals and couples through private retreats in Lisbon, one-to-one coaching, and intimate cohort experiences.

If something in this piece stirred something in you, the retreat might be where you start.