WriteHere, RightNow Retreat

Live Coaching Writing Retreat

Experience dedicated, focused and productive writing time
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Gain confidence, motivation and skills to manage your mood
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Develop greater awareness of what gets in the way and how to overcome it
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Craft strategies for consistent and productive writing practice in balance with your life
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Learn from the collective wisdom of the group

Creating a productive writing habit is a challenge for many writers, often leading to frustration and a feeling of never having done enough. That can develop into anxiety and a sense that ‘I’m not good enough’ or ‘I shouldn’t be here’. It’s easy to find yourself putting off writing until it starts to feel too late. While some people respond well to the pressure to write to a high standard, for others it can be the main hindrance to their writing.

1. Establishing an effective writing practice while getting writing done. WriteHere, RightNow offers a structure designed to enable you to write, to approach editing in an effective way, and to hold up a mirror to your own habits and strategies in order to establish an intentional approach that works for you.


2. Sustaining motivation and overcoming barriers such as self-doubt and ‘the imposter’. In response to the challenges felt by many participants, our group coaching engages with issues around core motivation, overcoming fear and insecurity, finding inherent confidence, and establishing effective intentions and goals.


3. Who are you as a writer? Letting go of assumptions of who you are trying to be or thinking you should be. We work with what matters to you, with your strengths, with your vision of your writing's purpose.

The process of WriteHere, RightNow is powerful for those who feel stuck in a rut, are struggling to fit writing into their schedule, lack motivation, need more confidence, are inhibited by fear, find it hard to prioritise, feel overwhelmed by writing, have lost the habit, or simply want to find their writing mojo.

The combination of retreat and live coaching means that, while working on a current piece of writing, participants also engage in a series of coaching-based experiments. These experiments are designed to embed motivation, instil confidence and generate productive writing habits beyond the retreat itself. The retreat combines the power and wisdom of group learning, individual provocation and writing practice. Participants engage in personal reflection, focused writing time, group sharing and, when appropriate, individual interventions from the coach.

The retreats have been attended by writers of all kinds – it’s wonderful when novelists, bloggers, PhD students, researchers, lecturers, and professors, all come together and realise the common challenges they face.

I regularly offer WriteHere, RightNow live coaching retreats as one-day events, or as mornings over a week.

What's involved?

The WriteHere, RightNow process enables participants to move forward with their writing, generate insights about their writing practice, and identify strategies to create their own productive writing habits.

Key elements of the retreat are:

• Setting up: developing a group agreement; introducing a coaching approach and the relationship between performance, potential and interferences; sharing current experience of writing and how participants would like it to be; establishing what participants want from the retreat; setting intentions
• Applying the method: when it’s writing time, write (‘Write it. Write about it. Write about you.’); separating drafting and crafting (writing to generate and editing to share); being curious with a beginner's mind; warming up and warming down
• Live coaching experiments: reflective exercises that lead to insights to be applied to focused writing time. Themes include: setting intentions; realigning with vision and purpose; managing fear (the inner critic, the saboteur, the impostor); being present; mood as perspective; writing with joy, confidence, creativity, focus, and rhythm; being with your writing
• Developing strategies and commitment: applying the principles (write here, right now; draft and craft); setting the conditions; developing writing habits that sustain momentum; identifying personal commitment to writing practice

Beyond the retreat

Participants identify personal strategies for their writing and are challenged to put those into practice. Approximately six weeks after the retreat participants are invited to a webinar to review their progress since the retreat. I use a coaching format for this webinar, working through the themes and issues that the participants bring.

In the past participants who wanted to go further have:

• Formed their own writing club (meeting online regularly, or arranging regular ‘check-ins’)
• Joined a facilitated virtual writing club, providing shared commitment, accountability and continued learning
• Extended their reflection and commitment to change through one-to-one coaching

Find out more

If you’d like to explore how a WriteHere, RightNow retreat could work for your organisation, please get in touch.