Your retreat will be tailored to meet your personal issues, goals, and circumstances. Working with John will give you new clarity, and increased effectiveness in communication to get your needs met and achieve the positive results you want.
In a retreat, he will coach you to overcome stuck places, make new agreements, renew positive appreciation and connection, and develop a deeper sense of shared vision. John will give you the key tools and strategies you need to get your relationship moving in a positive direction.
Just as importantly, you will learn exactly how to keep it growing positively once you return home. Unlike one-size-fits-all marriage seminars, marriage counseling retreats, or religion-based marriage encounters, John’s program will be tailored around your specific agenda. It is aimed at meeting your particular needs, goals, and circumstances. And to do so by working with your unique personality styles.
Typical Goals & Results for a Retreat
Here are some of the common relationship skills, tools, and results that couples typically acquire at an intensive retreat with John:
- Change patterns that do not work — Learn why relationships get stuck, how couples polarize over differences, and why issues build up over time. Find out how your specific personality patterns interact, and recognize the key challenges and paths for positive growth in your relationship. Learn what to say or do to avoid getting stuck, and to keep things on a positive track.
- Transform the core distress cycle — Learn about an unconscious pattern that erodes your ability to connect and be happy. It makes solving issues impossible, and leads to blaming, attacks, withdrawal or shutting down. See how this cycle is your mutual enemy, and get tools to exit its painful grip. Discover you can get your needs met, reconnect and share positive feelings together.
- Effective positive communication — Learn a set of key strategies to prevent poor communication under any circumstances. Know how to communicate very well, even with difficult matters. Gain tools that enable you to have your views heard, to make effective requests, to set healthy personal boundaries, to avoid emotional gridlock, and to truly resolve issues.
- Get tools to heal negative feelings — Emotions are at the root of relationship problems. Learn tools to resolve emotionally charged issues, to develop new choices, and to release old baggage. Gain tools for inner peace, self-confidence and healing. Learn to center yourself in any situation, to soothe your feelings, and to more easily support your partner to work with their feelings.
- Start collaborating instead of fighting or separating — See the big picture and get a broader perspective on how to move forward. Establish a solid foundation that gives vital strength to your relationship, one which creates a sense of shared purpose, and helps you work through challenges. Make specific new agreements to support increased harmony and positive growth.
- Build trust and positive connection — Gain essential tools to be proactive in your relationship — with constructive behaviors that increase trust, mutual understanding and satisfaction. Rediscover positive shared feelings that got buried behind unresolved issues or emotional walls. Learn to strengthen appreciation and positive heartfelt connection on a daily basis.
The work in the areas above, and the focus that is held will be tailored to match your personality styles and agendas.
Each couple and each person is different. What works for one person does not work for another. That’s why standardized approaches, found in normal therapy and group workshops, so often fail to produce results.
John’s coaching is flexible and skillful enough to address the particular wants and needs of each unique individual.
Overcome Blocks & Transform Your Marriage
Your retreat is devoted to going into depth with regard to your goals and issues. And doing so in exactly the way that best supports you to succeed. Depending on your specific goals, you might acquire tools and strategies to achieve any of the following — or even more:
- Gain clarity and take positive action
- Increase positive feelings and satisfaction
- Turn problems into opportunities and solutions
- Communicate skillfully and effectively
- Change unsatisfactory interaction patterns
- Break impasses and get unstuck
- Gain new strategies to resolve differences
- Build trust and a strong foundation
- Handle charged issues without sinking into negativity
- Make effective requests and agreements
- Release and heal old emotional baggage
- Renew appreciation and affection
- Gain tools to soothe and heal upset feelings
The above is a list of possibilities. Working with John will go wherever you want or need to go, to help you acquire the tools and strategies to make whatever breakthrough that would serve you, and move your relationship forward in a new, positive direction.