Every 90 days, I facilitate quarterly client community sessions, bringing all of my 1:1 clients together as a group. In our recent one, we reflected on where we are one month after our Create your Restorative Summer workshop in early June.

I thought I’d share the four step process I led them through with you. You can use this process and reflection questions to take stock of summer so far and see what may need shifting.

Assess.

Developing our self-awareness skills helps us better be able to assess the current state of things more accurately. This skill set is critical in our own personal and professional development. Self-awareness is a continuous journey of knowing yourself and how others know you. Since humans are relational and communal, this self-awareness supports our relationships and effects with how we lead, teach, mentor, guide, etc.

What were your stated goals or intentions for this summer?
How close are you to that vision for summer?
Where have you stepped away from those goals or intentions?
What has distracted you? Or where is your attention?

Access.

We access our greatest and truest wisdom through practices of embodiment, creativity, and interconnection. In working with clients, my practice includes somatic, embodied tools to find answers from within while connecting out. I believe we each know what we need and we can access it through our bodies while being connected to nature and spirit. These deeper assess and access embodied skills can be hard for those of us who spend most of our time in our thinking brain.

What is summer asking you to embody? (Or what feelings and sensations in your body is summer asking you to pay attention to?)
Where can you pause to feel more embodied and present this summer?
What feels stuck in your body that could be blocking answers to these questions and how can you move through it?

Align.

Intentional embodied alignment to your why and higher goals resets the nervous system to calm. Your why and impact is BIGGER than your j-o-b. And remember that work is a j-o-b even if it overlaps with your passion.

What do you want more of? What do you want to grow or bring into your life?
And how do your summer intentions and goals support these?

Action.

Take embodied action by nudging your mindset and behaviors with restorative hacks, grounding tools, and spacious planning is how you show up and keep moving forward even when it feels like you’re not.

Where are you being asked to shift this summer? Which parts of your life, your routines, your relationships need adjustment?
How could you show up and take aligned action more consistently?
What’s one small thing you can do today that would be in aligned action with your earlier assessment?

One of my clients talked about wanting summer to feel productive yet restful. In the assessment of how that had gone thus far, that client realized they had made great progress on the productive part, but, due to self-overscheduling, wasn’t yet feeling the restful part in the ways they hoped. However, by accessing their embodied wisdom, they realized how many restorative practices they had kept in their schedule, like exercise and no-meeting blocks.

They assessed the current state of things (with self-awareness), accessed and listened to their body’s wisdom, re-aligned with their intentions for summer and refocused on those bigger values, and can now take action–moving forward with what shifts are needed to make the rest of summer more restful.