I Want More Time for Me
They Keep Asking for More Time
Last week I finished teaching Navigating Midlife for Women for the third time through Stanford Continuing Studies. Each time I modify it based on the feedback from the previous students and regardless of the changes, overwhelmingly, I get the same response: I want more time.
Do they want more time with me? Yes and no. What they really want is more time to spend thinking about what they want and how they want to live their lives moving forward. One hour fifty minutes once a week for six or eight weeks isn’t enough. The course is a combination of lecture + exercises/reflections + discussion. It’s crazy how fast this time goes.
Each time I teach this class I think about how to give them more time for discussion without compromising the lecture material and the exercises. At 8:20 PM, I turn off the recording and keep the Zoom meeting open for anyone who wants to stay and chat until 9 PM.
In response to a request last year, I created a makeup discussion session during the day, initially for the East Coast participants and then opened it up for anyone who wanted to attend. This became a favorite for the women who showed up. It was a super small group never exceeding five of us.
I’ve had multiple requests to keep the conversation going with a regular check-in Zoom. With and without specific agendas, these didn’t work. These events weren’t created within a structured course and therefore were easily dismissed.
These women are busy, juggling multiple and competing demands, mostly being in service to other people. They’re squeezing in those two hours between work, childcare, taking care of parents, partner needs, and everything else.
There’s just not enough time in a regular week to do the real work of deciding what we want out of our lives…to design and live the lives of our own creation.
What If We Actually Made the Time?
And this was the inspiration for Piloting Your Life Retreats.
What if I created the time and space for women to do the deeper work of figuring out what they want from midlife? The Stanford Continuing Studies program was really well received. I could expand on it, create a beautiful space for 8 women, and make them feel loved and supported while they did this work.
And that’s how my friend and retreat facilitator, Christy Nichols of Venture-Within, and I landed on Hacienda Iguana, Nicaragua, as the place to host the inaugural Piloting Your Life Retreat for midlife women.
I’ve been to Iguana in March several times visiting Christy who lives there full time, and it’s a great time to be there. It’s not too hot, definitely not too cold. Not too many bugs, and definitely not crowded. It’s also beautiful, peaceful, and has really great energy.
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The agenda came together easily. So did the beachfront villa, activities, and little luxuries and surprises that will make the week feel special.
And now we’re looking for 6 more women who want the time to do some exploration of their own.
Why Nicaragua?
If Nicaragua seems far away to most women, it is, and this is by design. It’s far too easy for us to set aside our own needs when someone else needs something. I wanted to create enough distance that, for one week, it would be difficult to do that. No squeezing this work in between meetings, childcare, aging parents, partner needs, errands, and everything else competing for our attention. For one week, the women attending get to be the priority.
What Will We Do with All That Time?
For seven days, we’ll have the time we never seem to have enough of in my Stanford course. Time for reflection. Time for conversation. Time to dig deeper into our values, our relationships, our work, our identities, and what we want our lives to look like from here.
There will also be plenty of time to do absolutely none of that.
We’ll eat great food, spend time at the beach and pool, get massages, take a catamaran trip, explore, laugh, and enjoy being in Nicaragua. This isn’t seven days of intensive self-examination. That sounds terrible. It’s a week designed to give eight women the space to focus on themselves while also having a really great time.
I don’t know what each woman will discover during the week. That’s kind of the point. I’m not going into this retreat with an idea of what anyone’s life should look like when she leaves.
I want each woman to leave with a better understanding of what she wants.
I’m Creating That Time. Come Join Us.
We have six spots remaining for the inaugural Piloting Your Life Retreat, March 7–14, 2027, at Hacienda Iguana in Nicaragua.
If you’ve been wishing you had more time to think about what you want from this part of your life, come join us.
