Have you ever buried a dream because it didn’t go perfectly the first time? When my first official wellness retreat for business owners didn’t go as planned, I almost walked away entirely, even though it was a vision 10 years in the making.
In this mini episode, I share what it’s like to pour your heart into something, face disappointing results, and find your way back through a simple but powerful reframe: seeing your work as a draft, not a final product. That perspective shift turned last year’s disappointment into this year’s sold-out retreat, with more joy and ease than I ever expected.
What you’ll discover in this episode:
How binary thinking keeps us stuck in success or failure mode (01:13)
The story behind my first-ever wellness retreat for business owners (04:31)
The reframe that brought my creativity and energy back (06:28)
The unexpected path to selling out this year’s retreat with ease (08:57)
A guided reflection to help you pick your dream back up (10:53)
If you’ve been holding back because of a past disappointment, I hope this episode reminds you that progress comes one draft at a time.
[00:00:26] I know exactly how that feels. Today, I wanna talk about failure, or more specifically, I wanna talk about what happens when something we really care about doesn't go well, and how quickly we can spiral into these failure narratives. These stories that we tell ourselves about how we have unrealistic dreams, about how we're not capable of the kind of success and impact we want for ourselves.
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[00:01:13] But all of that work has revealed something deeper and truer. That I'm working on internalizing, and it's that the whole idea of failure is a fallacy. Failure implies a pass or fail grade, a good or bad outcome. Failure is a signal that I'm defaulting to binary thinking, which has literally never served me.
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[00:02:06] Let me share a real-life example of a recent failure that got me all twisted up. First, I need to zoom out and give you some context. So let's travel back in time, way back to 2014. This was the year I attended my first-ever retreat. It was a mindful self-compassion retreat with Kristin Neff, and it changed my life.
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[00:02:53] I loved it all throughout the retreat. I found myself wondering, how can I do this? The vision wasn't formed, but I could feel in my gut that there was something here for me. So the following year, I decided to co-host a peer retreat. I didn't get paid, which was great because it lowered the stress, and it gave me a chance to experience what it was like to plan and facilitate a retreat.
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[00:03:42] I was also, during that time, attending tons of different personal retreats for myself, which was great for me personally, and it was also great for me professionally because it gave me so many ideas about what I did and what I didn't want to incorporate into my own gatherings. So for those five years, I was really unearthing my vision and giving myself permission to own that.
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[00:04:31] This retreat was going to be all about wellness and personal work for business owners without any of the productivity sessions, strategy coaching, and hot seats that I found terribly distracting. I'd never seen anyone offer something like this, but I knew in my heart that it was needed, and I felt like I was ready to do it.
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[00:05:11] Crickets, ooh, I was devastated. The speed with which I vacillated from so confident and excited to completely deflated and hopeless was truly remarkable. I felt like I'd invested years, my whole heart and soul into this vision, and nobody really wanted it. I was deep in a failure spiral. I wanted to cancel the whole thing.
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[00:06:03] And once I climbed off that ledge and re-grounded myself, centered myself back into my spiritual practice, I was able to access a reframe. What if instead of viewing this retreat as the grand reveal of my big vision, I thought of it instead as the next draft of this masterpiece that I want to create?
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[00:06:51] We did have to lower the price, and we didn't make any money from this retreat. So we didn't get paid for it, but we covered our costs. We had an amazing time, and we gathered so much data about how to improve for the next draft of my retreat vision. That perspective shifted everything. This experience taught me that we need to stop putting pressure on our offerings to be final products.
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[00:07:44] This curiosity creates excitement, and it opens up possibilities for how our ideas can be even better next time. If I had held on to the failure narrative, I would not have had the energy to offer the retreat again. I would've given up, but because I chose to view it as a draft, as an iteration, as a research and development opportunity, I felt excited and motivated to reiterate the retreat and launch it again this year.
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[00:08:36] That's the sales page. It's literally a Google Doc. I decided to share that sales page with my clients. My past clients, retreat alumni from past gatherings, all before opening registration to the public, and within just a few weeks, we had sold out all 12 spots, and my mind was blown. My mind's still blown, to be honest.
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[00:09:17] This year, there was so much ease, so much ease, and it's all because I implemented what we learned. Last year's draft from the quote failure that I experienced last year, when I loosened my grip on that, when I changed my perspective, and instead opened myself to learning, receiving notes, and making edits.
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[00:10:06] And we're already preparing another iteration of this retreat for the spring, which is really exciting to me. I'm embracing my vision of hosting retreats full time, and I'm also embracing that that vision will never be complete. There will never be a grand reveal because we will always be evolving, no matter what happens.
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[00:10:53] Now is the time to go back into the archives and to pull to the foreground. All of the visions and the dreams your heart and soul are asking you to bring forward. Then I want you to ask yourself, what draft are you on? Maybe you're on the very first draft and you're bringing this idea forward for the very first time, or maybe it's your fifth draft or your 500th draft.
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[00:11:41] Track all of that mental garbage. Write it down, and then when you're ready, I want you to crumple that up and throw it in the trash. This is how we practice changing our perspective on the failure stories that stop us from iterating our ideas, in my humble opinion. Finally, I want you to give yourself permission to feel really excited about the potential of your new idea.
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[00:12:27] And if you would like to join the waitlist for our Spring Equinox retreat in March 2026, check it out at deeplyrested.com/retreat. That's deeplyrested.com/retreat. I would love to share that with you. And know when you look at it that it isn't perfect. It definitely isn't final, but it did prove itself to be a good enough next draft.
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[00:13:04] Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Deeply Rested. If you enjoyed this conversation, I would love to invite you to join the deeply Rested Weekly newsletter. You can sign up at deeplyrested.com/newsletter. I hope to meet you in my inbox very soon.
