I ran a 'team retreat' for my housemates
And I've shared the process so you can do it too...
Good afternoon, Carousellers!
It’s been lovely to welcome a few more of you over the last week or so!
I’ve been a Carouseller (self-employed / creative multi-passionate) for over 10 years. Over that time I’ve explored various sectors, started (and quit) a whole bunch of ventures, written on many different topics, and flexed my creative muscles through multiple mediums (including writing on actual Medium).
From now on, I’m going to start each newsletter by sharing three things I’ve created as part of my Carousel, so you can both get to know me, and also see the varied ways a Carousel career can take shape.
THIS WEEK:
👀 Wearing my Dry Robe (2024) - probably the thing I’m most proud of making - a comedy song / music video about moving to Brighton and instantly becoming a cold water swimming cliché.
🎧 Grounding Sounds - I love making playlists and have been collecting calming songs on this one since 2016. I recommend putting it on shuffle for focused work, when having a bath, when you need to chill. I’ve heard it’s even been used during labour!
📖 The Quitting QuadrantⓇ (2018) - a framework I created to help you understand what’s really going on when you want to quit. It’s all about re-finding balance in your life (perfect for this week’s Libra New Moon if you’re into that shiz.)
We did a house team retreat!
On Tuesday it was my 1 year anniversary of living in Brighton. When I originally put the call out in August 2023 for The Creative Residence-sea, I had a clear idea of the sort of house I wanted to create, the values I wanted to live by, and the people who might live there.
But as we moved into our second year, with 50% change in the housemates, I thought it was time to reset the vision of the house. What did we want the 2024/25 year to be about?
I’m lucky enough to live with a very experienced facilitator / meditation teacher and so between us we’ve put on our fair share of team retreats for companies. Over a cup of tea one day we pondered whether we put on a team retreat for the house to explore all this? We put it on the agenda of our next house meeting.
Bar a couple of weeks in peak festival summer season, we’ve had a house dinner every week. We take in turns to cook, share our ‘Highs / Lows / Prouds and Gratefuls’ from the previous week, and discuss anything going on in the house (who is away, any requests about the space, anything we need to know going on in each others’ lives in the coming week).
We put aside an afternoon 2-6pm on a Sunday a couple of weeks ago. Two housemates cooked a nourishing lunch, which we shared in the garden, and Vicky and I designed and held the retreat.
I’ve told people about this retreat over the last couple of weeks and everyone has said how useful it sounds, and how much they’d love to run it with their house / partner/ friendship group. So here’s the process we went through! If you do use it, I’d love to hear how it goes.
OUR HOUSE TEAM RETREAT
Meditation + check-in
After a yummy lunch, we made cups of tea, and moved to the sofas to begin our ‘retreat’.
Vicky led a meditation to ground us in the space and with eyes closed we were guided to consider three things:
What’s your internal weather (how are you feeling right now, and what might that be in weather form? A sunny day? A rain storm?)
What might you need to best take care of yourself this afternoon? (Any requests from the group, or anything in advance that could help the afternoon go well for you?)
A favourite memory of us all living together so far
We took turns to share these three things with each other. It was a great way to acknowledge the different emotions we were bringing to the retreat, anticipate anything that we might all need, and also bring positive energy about us living together through the favourite memories.
How best to live with me manual
A few work places / projects I’ve been in have asked us to fill in a ‘how best to work with me’ manual, which you give to your colleagues. I adapted this as a ‘how best to live with me’ manual.
I put on some beautiful music and invited people to journal on the following prompts:
❤️I feel safe and relaxed at home when...
🫂 I feel loved when…
😬 I feel on edge / frustrated in the house when...
💞 When I'm ill / low / sad this is how I like to be supported…
🎖️When something good happens this is how I like to be celebrated…
🔥You might know I'm stressed if...
😬 When I'm stressed I need...
💪The chores I enjoy / don't mind are...
😭The chores I avoid are...
😀 I hope I bring.../ am
😬I'm worried I might bring.../ am
Anything else we need to know about living with you.
We then took in turns to share our lists with each other. I found it particularly interesting to understand people’s preference for introversion / connection when stressed (eg. ‘I will need to go to my room’ or ‘I usually need a hug/chat!’) I also loved finding out that we all had different chores that we enjoyed and that across the house we were covering most things! (No-one wanted to take the bins out though…) Feeling loved by cooking for each other (mostly receiving) featured highly!
The two last ones were also a chance to anticipate the next section about feedback - saying to the house ‘I know I might be a bit like this, and I’m working on it!’
‘What I love / find hard about living with you’
Next we paired up and gave each other feedback about what it was like to live together. Before we did this, Vicky led us in a compassion exercise where she reminded us that receiving feedback can be a gift and encouraging us to hear any feedback with a generous open heart.
We swapped 3 times so we spoke to each housemate 1:1. We started with the things we loved about living together, and then moved on to any requests, things we found difficult, or anything we wanted to clear that we’d never talked about. Most of the ‘even better ifs’ were total blindspots for people and I’ve heard that things have improved in the past two weeks since the feedback was given. It just shows, people aren’t always doing things to be difficult, they might just not know it’s happening (especially things around noise).
30 second dance party
To shake off the energy from the feedback session, everyone shared a song they wanted to dance to and we had mini party playing each song for 30 seconds. The other 3 housemates all chose Disco tracks. I chose Musical Theatre, which in retrospect was not a good vibe to sandwich between the Disco vibe, but hey, gotta be authentic.
Future conversation
This is one of my favourite coaching tools for visualisation. I asked everyone to close their eyes and imagine that we were on the final day of living in our house (currently 31st August 2025). We’d ‘‘just had loads of people round’’ as a leaving party and we were chatting to them about what they’d loved about our community home. I asked people to look back over the year and remember all the things that had happened. When we opened our eyes I said, ‘it’s still 31st Aug, everyone’s just left - let’s share all our favourite memories from the last year.’ And so we had an improvised ‘future conversation’ - sharing our memories from ‘the past year’ (that have not yet happened). We then wrote down all the things that came up.
I find it 100 times more powerful to discuss what’s ‘already happened’ than to ‘imagine what will happen’. We use a totally different part of our brain and different energy. It’s the difference between ‘I’d like to get fitter’ and ‘I feel so fit!’, or ‘I’d like to have a new job’ and ‘I love my new job!’ When I do this with my coaching clients people often come back in session 2 and say ‘woah, it’s already happened!’
House values
Taking into account everything that we’d already discussed we all put forward what we felt the house values were - things that were important to live by.
We started by writing down values that felt relevant on post its, then we grouped similar ones together, and then voted for our top 5.
These were the ones we came up with:
🫂 SISTERHOOD- We make time for each other, assume the best; and are supportive, kind and loving.
🧘 SANCTUARY - We care for the space, ourselves and each other .
💪 BRAVE SPACE - We encourage each other to grow, through honest conversations and supporting each others’ creative endeavours.
🏠 WELCOME HOME - Our house is place where people feel at ease, and have gain a deeper sense of community and belonging.
🥳 FUN! - We add a sparkle of silliness and playfulness wherever possible.
✨ TRUST - We trust that this house is a conduit for magic, and for our expansion.
In the past two weeks I’ve already seen us refer to implement these values. I even referred back to them to think about how to approach one of my housemates about something that had come up, checking in with which values I wanted to honour in the conversation.
Cup of Tea and closing circle
We ended with a final meditation and a check-out, all sharing one word of how we were feeling following the house retreat.
Yesterday we opened up our house once more for a community event as Vicky ran one of her Happiness Circles. It nourishes me so much to know the house is being used in this way, not only to support the housemates, but the wider community.
We’d love to hear from you if you do use any of these tools. Vicky and I are also available to run these retreats externally. If you would like support designing something bespoke for your home or work place, do get in touch. And if you use these tools yourself and find them useful, consider buying us a coffee (this is my account but I’ll make sure Vicky and I share the flat whites between us…!
Sending love and wishing you all a sunny weekend,
Sarah x
This is SO GOOD. thank you for sharing - definitely inspired to try it out! I use tools like this so much at work but almost never in my personal life so this is a very exciting provocation xx
Sounds like an amazing workshop! Thanks for sharing Sarah 🥰