What if you could reduce stress, improve your quality of life, and strengthen your team just by taking the right kind of business trip?
This was the challenged posed to Well Balanced Nutrition, a Durham-based nutrition practice, and they gladly accepted. Their wellness retreat was held in Costa Rica in 2019.
The definition of a wellness retreat is traveling intentionally to grow your health and well-being. Rather than confining learning to a conference room, wellness travel incorporates planned healthy activities directly into the meeting agenda.
Activities that include moving the body and clearing the mind, time to relax and recharge, as well as providing nourishing healthy food options. Thus, creating opportunities for promoting teamwork and enhancing creativity, while supporting the growth of overall health.
Wellness travel includes the following daily components for travelers: • Exercising in different manners, ( think of hiking in the forest, gentle yoga at sunset, and/or body weight strength training) • Meals that are healthy, delicious, and made with local food, • Opportunities to expand your knowledge personally and professionally, • Cultural immersion with the locals to learn about their way of life and their country.
At Well-Balanced Nutrition, they optimized their physical and emotional health with excursions and hands-on activities that created a lasting impact long after the trip was completed. This was created with stress-reduction techniques and mindfulness training to help the team stay focused on the present.
They improved team their communication with trust-building exercises that took them out outside the office and into the Costa Rican paradise. Demonstrated by cutting down sugar cane and grinding it up into a fresh drink, rappelling down waterfalls, and sharing stories over dinner.
As a group, Well Balanced Nutrition had time to relax and recharge by taking in the beautiful views right in front of them from a hammock or while soaking in the thermal hot springs that were heated to 100 degrees by an active volcano.
Finally, Well Balanced Nutrition was able to fully customize how they wanted their retreat to look based upon the needs of their team and the abilities of the group. For them, this meant time to provide education around meal preparation, mindful eating, and how to eat healthy while in a foreign country.
Business Benefits
By investing back in your team by choosing to offer travel-based education and sales trainings, you’re demonstrating a commitment to their well-being both inside and outside of the office while strengthening the overall business.
Additional benefits to organizations and teams include:
• Renewed energy and drive for performance • A more intuitive and productive team • Aligned team focus • Boosted morale and loyalty to the business • Enhanced creativity for thinking outside the box • Strengthened company culture that can keep and attract great talent.
If you are wondering how such a trip with Wonderment can help you grow, let us tell you more. The benefits of a wellness retreat that is hand-crafted for your team includes:
1 Stress-Free Planning All aspects of the travel process are planned for your business and team, including intimate accommodations, healthy meals, excursions, and guided wellness experiences. We even handle the merchant services and credit card processing, if needed. Allowing you to remain hands-off and relaxed during the creation of this retreat.
2 Personally-Guided We are not a company that only plans certain aspects of the trip and ultimately lets your team leads themselves on the retreat. Rather, we are there every step of the journey to guide your team towards health. From leading them to add in more productivity into the work-day to training the body to build up endurance, Wonderment is your partner throughout the whole process.
3 Customizable Program We design experiences for your team with the understanding that education and awareness are two of the greatest tools for handling the negative beliefs and patterns that cause the lifestyle choices that make us sick. This means that not all retreats look alike. If you desire a focus on impactful sales practices that get your reps thinking creatively, we have got you covered. Or would you rather direct your time around techniques to reduce stress and burnout? We can customize this as well for your team as well.
Business Retreat
We will leave you here with a testimonial from Kristen N., one of the co-owners of Well Balanced Nutrition.
“Lucy and I, co-owners of Well Balanced Nutrition, recently partnered with Wonderment to take a small group to Costa Rica for a week-long Wellness Adventure. As nutritionists and nature-enthusiasts, it was fascinating to learn about the food, culture, animals, and intricacies of the rain forest. Our days were full of adventure, our afternoons were relaxing and our evenings were full of delicious food and good conversation. Wonderment offered wellness and fitness activities that enriched our time together in the evenings and allowed for personal reflection and growth.
Wonderment took us off the beaten path to truly experience the culture and life in Costa Rica in a way, that I believe, could not be done on our own or with a typical tour group. Wonderment found ways to introduce us to the most genuine and kind people who shared their table, their stories and their knowledge with our group. While no one can deny the breathtaking beauty of Costa Rica, it was the opportunities to be welcomed into a new community, if only for a day, with the local people and learn about their lives that made this trip extra special.
Overall, I’m pleased to say that Wonderment planned a Wellness Adventure that lived up to our business values. We are playful, friendly, curious and community-minded and so was our trip. We had a blast and I think you will too.”