You Become Her Because You Began

I was working in corporate, and I kept noticing the same thing in the women around me. They were capable, busy and incredibly good at looking after everyone and everything around them.

But they weren’t particularly good at recognising when they themselves were running on empty.

I eventually left corporate, studied personal training and health coaching, travelled, and started exploring health and wellbeing more deeply.

Somewhere along the way, I had this idea: what if I could create something that arrived at your door and actually encouraged you to stop, look after yourself and make your wellbeing a priority?

Not in an overwhelming, change your whole life kind of way.

Just small, achievable moments that helped you feel a little more like yourself again.

So, in 2015, I launched Retreat Yourself.

The first boxes were packed from the spare room of my beach shack in Torquay. I sourced the products, built the website, packed the orders and tried to figure out every part of running a business as I went.

My friend Kristy, who I’d originally met when we worked together in corporate, was my very first subscriber.

She believed in the idea from the beginning, long before there was much evidence that it was going to become anything substantial.

A few years later, I tried to get onto Shark Tank. It didn’t work out, and I reached one of those points where I had to decide whether I was going to keep pushing or accept that perhaps the business had gone as far as it could.

Instead, I pitched to Mum and Dad.

Their investment gave me enough breathing room to hire Kristy in 2018, and she eventually became my business partner.

From there, Retreat Yourself really became something we built together.

And it definitely hasn’t been a straight line upwards.

There have been years of incredible growth and years that have tested us enormously.

During COVID, Kristy and I both had baby boys only three months apart while trying to navigate a business through one of its hardest periods.

We had to strip things back, simplify, rethink what mattered and find a way forward.

We’ve both since had our second children, and in many ways, the business has grown up alongside us.

There have been plenty of mistakes.

We’ve taken risks that paid off and others that absolutely didn’t. We’ve outgrown systems, rebuilt teams, questioned decisions and had moments where everything felt much harder than it looked from the outside.

But we’ve kept going.

Today, Retreat Yourself has grown from those boxes packed in my spare room into an Australian wellness business and a beautiful community of customers, with more than 14,000 five-star reviews and hundreds of thousands of boxes shipped Australia-wide.

But strangely, the bigger the business has become, the clearer I’ve become on what we’re really creating.

I don’t actually think Retreat Yourself is simply about “self-care”.

For me, it’s about coming back to yourself.

Life has a way of filling itself with roles.

You become the business owner, the employee, the partner, the mum, the friend, the person remembering what everyone needs and what needs to happen next.

And somewhere underneath all of those roles is still you.

Sometimes coming back to yourself isn’t a week-long retreat or a complete life overhaul.

It’s five minutes with a cup of tea.

Going for a walk.

Putting your phone down.

Trying something new.

Saying no.

Resting without needing to justify it.

Or simply noticing, What do I actually need today?

That’s what I wanted Retreat Yourself to be when I packed those very first boxes, even though I probably didn’t have the words for it then.

And ironically, it’s something I’ve had to learn for myself over and over again while building the business.

I’ve learnt that you can create something meaningful without having the entire path mapped out.

You can change direction.

You can make expensive mistakes.

You can go through seasons where you question everything and still come out the other side with something stronger.

I think for a long time I assumed the people who built successful businesses were somehow different — more confident, more certain, more qualified, more naturally equipped for it.

Eleven years in, I don’t think that’s true at all.

Most of the time, you grow into the person the next stage requires.

You learn because you have to.

You make decisions before you feel completely ready.

You get things wrong.

You adjust.

You keep going.

There have been so many points throughout Retreat Yourself where I could have decided I wasn’t capable of the next thing.

When I was packing boxes from my spare room.

When I needed to ask my parents to back me.

When Kristy and I were trying to keep a business alive with newborn babies.

And even now, as we work out what the next version of Retreat Yourself looks like.

I still don’t have it all figured out.

But perhaps that’s the biggest thing building this business has taught me.

You don’t have to become her before you begin.

You become her because you began.

And that’s something I wish more women could carry into every part of their lives.

We don’t have to wait until we feel completely ready.

We don’t have to have all the answers, know exactly where we’re going, or feel completely confident that it’s going to work.

Sometimes we just have to start.

Because so much of life is lived on the other side of that first scary decision — and you’ll never really know what you’re capable of until you give yourself the chance to find out.