Across five days at Verdesana, you will engage in two expert-led sessions designed not just to teach you, but to change how you show up.
The soul-full way to fill your retreats.
Many retreat leaders struggle to fill their retreats not because they lack passion or expertise, but because they lack a clear enrollment process — and the mindset required to confidently invite people into transformation.
This session is designed to help you develop both the mindset and the practical skills needed to fill your retreats through authentic, trust-based conversations.
You will leave with a practical enrollment framework, greater confidence in sales conversations, and a deeper understanding of how mindset influences every stage of the enrollment process. The goal is for you to leave with a new way of thinking about enrollment, one that allows you to lead with connection, communicate with clarity, and sell out your retreats.
The story beneath the story.
Imagine leaving this immersion knowing, in your body and not just your mind, exactly what your retreat is for, who it is for, and why you are the only person who can lead it.
Imagine being able to say that out loud, to a stranger, without feeling salesy or inauthentic. To write it in a post without second-guessing every word. To get on a sales call and feel the conversation shift, not because you learned a better pitch, but because what you are saying is finally, completely true.
Most retreat leaders know what they offer. Far fewer know how to make others feel it. The gap is almost never a technique problem. It is a story problem. And the story problem is almost never about craft. It is about owning what is actually true in you, so that everything you say about your retreat carries the unmistakable weight of someone who has lived what they are inviting others into.
When that happens, you stop chasing clients. You begin drawing them.
Weeks had passed, and there was a small whisper in my mind that was persistent and kept echoing her words back to me: your story is medicine. What I found was that my story had new layers that I had been unwilling to unlock until she coaxed the courage and voice out of me.
Elizabeth Kalevitch Owner, Meko Yoga and Wellness · Retreat Leader
Story does not settle into the bones in a single sitting. It needs room to breathe. It needs solitude. It needs to be spoken, then listened to, then spoken again with what you have learned.
You go beneath the surface pitch. Through guided process, you will identify the lived experiences, values, and turning points that form the true, irreplaceable foundation of your retreat. You will share your story in pairs. Your partner will reflect back not just what they heard, but the values they recognized, the meaning beneath the words, and how your story might serve as medicine in their own life.
You will be given specific prompts to work with on your own. Time to sit with what surfaced, to write, to speak your story out loud in private before bringing it back to the group. Community holds the container. Solitude does the deeper work.
You bring your story back to the room with fresh eyes. Now you work on how it lands, in real time, with real feedback. You will experience firsthand how your story moves another person, and learn to shape and modify it for different contexts: a sales call, a video, a written bio, a social media post, a conversation over dinner. You will leave with a living story library, not just one polished pitch, but the three to five stories from your own life that carry your why and can be used across everything you create.
One of the most common and costly mistakes a retreat leader can make is designing entirely from their own vision without deeply understanding what their guests are actually longing for. Your story matters. And so does theirs.
In this session you will learn how to engage in the kinds of conversations that reveal what people truly want from a retreat experience. Not just what they say they want, but what lives underneath that, the unspoken need, the quiet longing, the transformation they are hoping for but may not yet have words for. When you can hear that, and then connect it to what your retreat actually offers, enrollment stops feeling like selling. It becomes recognition.
At first, my story didn’t want to come out. It was locked in my fascia. Eventually my story came out, beautifully, clear, long, and raw. The medicine is in the thing we often don’t want to tell. I feel like that medicine freed me. And now I’m going to use my story to free someone else.
Shalece Daniels Executive Rest Coach · Retreat Leader & Public Speaker
If you are still figuring out your niche, your offer, or who you are as a retreat leader, this session is especially valuable before you finalize your retreat design. The stories you uncover here, and the conversations you learn to have with potential guests, will shape what you build before a single detail is planned. A retreat designed from that depth of self-knowledge, and that quality of listening, is a retreat people recognize as exactly what they have been looking for.
