Make wellbeing a priority and let someone else take care of YOU for a change. Awarded New Zealand’s Best Wellness Retreat, Resolution Retreats offers life-changing support for women in need of a recharge.
Whether you’ve been burning the candle at both ends for too long, or you simply need time to reset, Resolution Retreats, New Zealand’s best wellness retreat, offers a safe and encouraging place to work on your personal health and wellbeing goals, whatever they may be. Set back in nature on the shores of Lake Karapiro in Cambridge, a few days or even a few weeks of you-time, surrounded by other women and a wealth of professional knowledge, might be just the ticket for reigniting the fire inside. We chat to Resolution Retreats founder Joelene Ranby about her own wellbeing journey and what to expect from her world-class, five-star retreat packages.
Resolution Retreats sounds like such a special place. Where did the idea for the retreat come from and have you always had an interest in women’s wellbeing, health and fitness?
I haven’t always been ‘healthy,’ in fact there was a time when health was not at all a priority for me. Somebody asked me when I was ‘expecting’ and I decided I needed to make some changes. While on my own weight-loss journey, I realised there was nothing like what we have now with Resolution Retreats where women could go to refocus on themselves and have the sort of support that I needed when I was improving my own health.
In 2012 I ran my first retreats to help women while working as a financial accountant at a large NZX corporate. Resolution Retreats grew organically as more and more women became aware of how we were helping women transform their health. I made the decision to leave my corporate life and focus on Resolution Retreats full time in late 2015. We ran retreats for seven years exclusively from the Bay of Plenty before we outgrew our venue and in 2019 finally opened the Resolution Retreats Lakeside Health & Wellness Centre on Lake Karapiro. It’s a purpose-built centre providing world-class, five-star retreats exclusively for women, and competes with some of the world’s best retreats such as Gwinganna in Australia.
What aspects of life and wellbeing can women expect to work on while participating in a retreat?
Some guests come for weight loss, some for stress, time out, inspiration in the kitchen, a health reset, better sleep or to break bad habits. It is our job to help our guests to solve their health puzzle, to inspire them with a refreshing approach to overall health and wellness, but also to provide insights into the psychology behind ‘why we do what we do, when we know what we know’, and how to work on changing whatever it is that underpins their individual health challenges.
What’s the best way to prepare oneself for a retreat like this?
I like to think we take care of the whole package so there isn’t any need to ‘prepare’. However, of the women who come on our retreats, it is the ladies who are ready to make some changes in the way they approach their health who get the most out of their retreat.
How does the retreat cater to everyone’s individual needs?
Our speakers and workshops cover many areas of women’s health: nutrition, breathing, sleep, gut health, hormone health, habits and mindsets to name a few. With so many health trends coming and going, and so much information and opinion out there on health, it can be overwhelming to know where to start. Sometimes getting away from the day-to-day grind to get back to basics, focus and prioritise realistic changes, can help you to become clear on the best path forward for your particular health challenges. Having an inspiring, supportive and encouraging environment to do this in, surrounded by others who are doing the same, is key.
What are the different types of retreats offered?
We offer all-inclusive women-only programmes ranging from three days to three weeks. The length of retreat can depend on how much time a guest is able to take away from their day-to-day life to focus on their health and happiness, and their individual health goals.
How can guests continue the work in the real world, post retreat?
It is our role to give guests a toolbox full of realistic and pragmatic strategies they can use to improve their health. In order for those tools to be realistic, we avoid ‘extreme’ and focus on ‘sustainable’. That is why the women who attend our retreats leave feeling like they have a clear picture of priorities and how they will continue what they have learned on retreat at home.
We love to keep in touch with our guests post retreat. For the majority of us, accountability is a key motivator to continue health changes. For our guests, knowing we’re going to be following up with them and keeping in contact helps to keep them motivated to continue what is learned on retreat. It’s great to have someone to call or to lean on when you have a question, you feel like you’ve varied off track, need a pep talk, or a bit of motivation.
Do many women return for more than one retreat?
What the majority of our guests have in common is that they spend so much of their time taking care of everybody else’s needs that they themselves very much look forward to being taken care of for a change! Some of our guests choose to return to the retreat because they have enjoyed the process of re-focusing on their own health and happiness, and got so much out of their retreat with us. We have a number of guests who return to us, sometimes annually, for a ‘top-up’ when they need it, or when they need to be inspired to put themselves first.
What are your best tips for finding balance in our day to day lives and working on our own wellbeing?
Our to-do lists can get so long; it can be a big ask to then add a heap of daily expectations to improve our health on top of everything else. Most of us have the impression that to be healthy we need to be perfect. As a result, we set the bar too high, have unrealistic expectations of ourselves, maybe fall short, then feel let down, not good enough, lose motivation and give up because it all gets too hard.
We would prefer you focus on progress, not perfection (one of our mantras on retreat). You don’t have to be perfect to be healthier than you were yesterday, last month or last year. Think of health as a doing word, rather than a destination, and do some health every day.
1002 Tirau Road,
Lake Karapiro, 3494
resolutionretreats.co.nz
0800 473 873