retreat Archives | The Glasshammer

By Jessica Darmoni

Executive wellness retreats are often judged by their immediate costs: time away from work, financial investment, and short-term disruption. But their real return on investment shows up in longer-lasting gains such as clearer thinking, personal growth, and greater resilience. This makes them powerful tools for leaders operating in complex environments.

Below are a few takeaways when considering an executive retreat including: how participants can become some of your best friends, introducing you to new ideas and concepts as well as how retreats help you take action and strengthen a part of your brain called “the willpower muscle.”

A Social Media Algorithm IRL

In an era where algorithms shape what we read, watch, and believe, executive retreats offer something increasingly rare: a human algorithm designed for growth. The people you meet at retreats introduce you to new programs, ideas, books, music, leadership frameworks, and ways of thinking, but without the advertisements or agendas. Instead of being fed what reinforces who you already are, you are exposed to perspectives that gently, and sometimes uncomfortably, stretch who you might become.

Most leaders seek out retreats based on interests they already have, which immediately creates common ground. Whether it’s leadership development, wellness, strategy, or personal growth, you arrive knowing that everyone in the room has chosen to invest time, money, and attention into becoming better at something that matters. This shared intention accelerates trust.

Retreat Friends Can Be Some of Your Best Friends

What makes retreat connections particularly powerful, however, is not the similarities, but the differences. Retreat participants often come from outside your industry, geography, or social circle. They are people you would not naturally encounter in your day-to-day routine. That distance from familiarity creates space for impact. These individuals can influence not just what you think, but how you think and feel about your everyday life. Their questions land differently, their observations bypass internal defenses and their stories linger.

Over time, retreat friends often become some of your most meaningful relationships. They occupy a unique category, separate from family, colleagues, and long-time friends. There is little overlap, which creates a rare psychological safety. They can offer a clean perspective during moments of career inflection because they don’t know your boss, your board, your team or your history. It can be easier to share ambitions, doubts, and fears with people who hold no preconceived narrative about who you are supposed to be.

For executives, this matters because leadership can be isolating. The higher you rise, the fewer places exist where you can speak openly without consequence. Retreat relationships provide a neutral ground and one where insight is not filtered through politics or expectations. In those conversations, clarity often emerges not because someone gives advice, but because they listen without agenda.

Nothing Changes If Nothing Changes

Beyond relationships, retreats catalyze change in a more fundamental way. Awareness alone does not transform behavior. As comedian Theo Von succinctly put it, “Nothing changes if nothing changes.” Many leaders already know what they want to improve whether that be better health, stronger presence, clearer priorities or more balance. The challenge is not knowledge; it’s execution. Retreats create a structured interruption to routine that makes execution possible.

By removing leaders from their habitual environments, retreats disrupt autopilot thinking. They introduce friction, reflection, and intentional practice. Whether through guided discussion, physical challenge, or skill-building exercises, participants are asked to do something different and that is where growth takes place. Retreats provide a container where discomfort can feel purposeful rather than punishing, and experimentation can feel safe rather than risky.

Importantly, effective retreats do not exist in isolation from real life. The goal is not escape, but integration. The most impactful retreats help leaders translate insight into daily practice; how to bring a new habit, mindset, or leadership behavior back into boardrooms, meetings, and home life. Change becomes tangible when leaders leave with both inspiration and a practical path forward.

The Willpower Muscle

There is also a neurological dimension to this process. Addressing hard things quite literally grows the brain. Research points to the Anterior Mid-Cingulate Cortex, also known as the “willpower muscle,” as a key region involved in resilience, effort, and decision-making. This area increases in size when people engage in productive struggle, such as intense physical exercise or learning new skills. In other words, leaning into difficulty enhances cognitive agility.

Executive retreats often create precisely this kind of productive struggle. They ask leaders to confront limiting beliefs, test physical or mental endurance, and practice unfamiliar ways of thinking. The result is not just emotional insight, but biological reinforcement. Leaders who repeatedly choose to challenge themselves strengthen the neural pathways associated with persistence and adaptability, which are two traits essential in complex, fast-changing environments.

Choose Challenge Over Comfort

The value of executive retreats is not necessarily found in luxury locations or curated schedules. It is in the connecting of people, perspective, and purposeful discomfort. Retreats act as a living algorithm, introducing leaders to ideas and individuals they didn’t know they needed, accelerating self-awareness, and making change unavoidable.

For leaders committed to growth, retreats are not a break from real work. They are the work. They sharpen the mind, expand the network, and create the conditions where meaningful transformation can occur. In a world optimized for convenience, choosing a challenge and choosing people who challenge you, may be the most strategic decision of all.

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Evolved Wellbeing – the new executive wellbeing coaching and retreat company, brought to you by Nicki Gilmour, the Founder of theglasshammer.com. This is part of the Evolved People portfolio of offerings – that connects professional development to executive sustainability. Wellness is the cornerstone of high performance.

You know the first things you are quick to sacrifice when it comes to meeting all the demands of work (self-care, well-being, downtime)? Well they are the last things you should.

If you have been able to reach and stay at the executive level, then you are more likely to have learned that self-care is inextricable to leadership. You have ideally dropped the cultural self-sacrifice story a long time ago in your leadership journey.

A study of self-care among executive leadership in healthcare organizations found that “Leaders’ with high self-care ratings were likely to be from an organization with a high profit margin, while leaders with low ratings were likely to be either in their role for less than a year or from an organization with a lower profit margin.”

How much leaders practice self-care has a trickle down effect within organizations, and especially, in your own life and ability to show up.

Sacrificing Self-Care Benefits Nobody

We already know that playing the long hours game has a strong adverse impact on women’s short and long-term health relative to men. We know that a female-skewed over-conscientious approach to work can lead to emotional exhaustion. And research has shown that high work-related fatigue is even stronger for highly educated women.

Mindfulness researcher and author Jacqueline Carter shared with theglasshammer, “it was amazing to see how basically the higher you got in an organization, the higher the level of the executives, they all took time to exercise, they slept well, even despite ridiculous travel schedules and ridiculous scopes of jobs,” says Carter. “It was really clear that if you don’t start taking good care of yourself and setting good boundaries and saying no at an earlier level of your leadership journey, you’re gonna burn out.”

According to Harvard Business Review, “burnout cuts across executive and managerial levels…the major defining characteristic of burnout is that people can’t or won’t do again what they have been doing.” Identifiable characteristics include: “(1) chronic fatigue; (2) anger at those making demands; (3) self-criticism for putting up with the demands; (4) cynicism, negativity, and irritability; (5) a sense of being besieged; and (6) hair-trigger display of emotions.”

When in burnout, you lose your heart for where you’ve come to and where you’re at and what you’re doing.

Investment: Healthy You, Healthy Leadership

“I think there’s a mind-set shift that happens when people start to take this seriously, which is to go from seeing the investment of time in sleep, exercise, and mindfulness as a cost to thinking of it as an investment,” says Caroline Webb, senior adviser to McKinsey and author of How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life.

“In fact, it’s not just an investment that pays back long term, it’s an investment that pays back, all the evidence suggests, rather immediately,” says Webb. “The idea of that shift—that this is not down time, it’s simply investing in your ability to have more up time—is something which I’ve seen at the heart of everybody who makes a difference in the way that they’re living their lives, and also in the way that their teams around them are living their lives.”

The Value in Reset and Renewal

There are many ideas for how to incorporate self-care into your daily routine – such as meditation, being in nature, spending pockets of time in silence, drinking more water, starting a gratitude practice, scheduling your day to include work and non-work activities, practicing affirmations, getting massages and more. The thing is when you approach these things as something else on the task list to fit in when you’re already at overload, self-care can feel like yet another chore.

Research shows it can be valuable to step away from it all, take a bigger breath and dedicate attention for yourself to reset and renew. The right health-related vacation can shift things – it can bring you back to yourself, to open perspectives and return to a center of clarity and expansiveness, with benefits that last long beyond the time you spend away.

Research has shown that “individuals who attended a spiritual retreat for 7 days experienced changes in the dopamine and serotonin systems of the brain, which boosts the availability of these neurotransmitters” that relate to positive psychological effects. Additionally, meditation retreats have shown “large effects” on anxiety, depression, stress, mindfulness and compassion. Studies have also shown improvements in physical health, tension, and fatigue.

“A one-week wellness retreat (including many educational, therapeutic and leisure activities, and an organic, mostly plant-based diet),” according to a scientific study, “resulted in substantial improvements in everything from weight to blood pressure to psychological health – and sustained at six weeks (the last check-in point of the study).”

Beth McGroarty, director of research at the Global Wellness Institute, said to Travel Weekly, “in a wellness retreat, therapies/experiences often happen in concert and over multiple days, and combining them may have unique outcomes.”

As the research report states, “Retreat experiences provide a unique opportunity for people to escape from unhealthy routines and engage in healthy practices and activities that lead to immediate and sustained health benefits.”

For transparency, the writer of this article hosts women’s retreats, and my direct experience in facilitating a space in which a woman can connect with other women in vulnerability, return to her own center, show up from this place, and impact her own life trajectory is the inspiration for my personal commitment to this work.

No Matter How You Do It…

The bottom line is that no matter how you start or improve self-care – whether taking small moments for big impact changes in your daily routine or taking a bigger break away from it all to truly reset and renew – what’s most important, on all levels, is that you do.

Writer Bio:

Aimee Hansen, freelance writer for the theglasshammer, is the Creator and Facilitator of Storyteller Within Women’s Retreats, recommended by Lonely Planet Wellness Escapes. Since 2015, she has hosted nearly 150 women across 18 intimate retreat experiences. Her Journey Into Sacred Expression Retreats involve meditation, yoga, self-exploratory writing and sacred ceremonies, all in beautiful natural surroundings. She’ll be hosting two upcoming women’s retreat events this summer – in late June and late July – on the stunning Lake Atitlan in Guatemala, for women seeking self-renewal.

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The Return on Investment for Executive Retreats