CPL Retreat Leadership Tracks
Throughout the retreat, you'll have opportunities to explore leadership through a variety of lenses, including:
Track 2: Art of Convening CoLab
Track 3: Making Sanctuary in Troubled Times
Whether you're leading an organization, a classroom, a congregation, or your own life, you'll find ideas, practices, and relationships that strengthen your leadership.
Leadership Track Schedule & Info
Tuesday, September 22
1:00-5:00 pm CT US
In times of transition, growth, and uncertainty, many leaders find themselves standing at a threshold between who they have been and who they are becoming. Aligned with the Center for Purposeful Leadership's retreat theme of creating space for renewal, reflection, and emerging possibilities, this session invites participants to explore a powerful question:
"What is being asked of me now, in light of everything I know and everything I am becoming? How does this help me lead more fully?”
This Leadership Track offers a sanctuary for honest self-inquiry and meaningful connection with fellow leaders. Participants will leave with greater clarity about their current leadership journey, renewed awareness of their next developmental edge, and practical insights for leading with purpose while still in the midst of transition. In the spirit of purposeful leadership, the session encourages embracing the threshold itself as a place of growth, wisdom, and possibility rather than something to move through as quickly as possible.
Learning Objectives
Participants will:
Recognize personal and professional transitions currently shaping their leadership.
Surface recurring questions, themes, and emerging possibilities.
Identify beliefs, roles, or narratives they may be ready to release.
Reconnect with or Develop their Purpose Plan and assess what remains true and what is evolving.
Develop one meaningful commitment for leading more intentionally from their present threshold.
Tuesday, September 22
1:00-4:30 pm CT US
Why a Colab?
This is not a lecture on convening — it's a working laboratory. Using the Convening Wheel as our shared map, you'll bring a real gathering, meeting, or conversation you're currently leading (or need to lead) and rebuild it in real time, aspect by aspect, alongside other practitioners doing the same. No prior Art of Convening experience is required — you'll get grounded in the Wheel quickly, then spend the rest of the afternoon in applied lab work: designing, testing language on your peers, and leaving with a concrete plan for a real convening in your own life or work.
A workshop teaches a framework. A co-laboratory puts the framework to work on live material, in the room, with peers as thinking partners. This design borrows directly from CPL's existing Applied Convening methodology — each participant develops a real case study and works it through the Wheel with structured peer consultation — compressed into a single sophisticated afternoon rather than a multi-week course.
Because the group will include people brand-new to the Art of Convening alongside more seasoned practitioners, the lab groups should be intentionally mixed: newcomers bring fresh, unfiltered cases; practitioners bring pattern recognition and can informally mentor within their small group. Naming this explicitly at the start prevents newcomers from feeling behind.
Learning Objectives
By the end of the session, participants will:
Understand the Convening Wheel and its core Aspects — Heart of the Matter, Clarifying Intent, Invitation, Setting Context & Creating the Container, Hearing All the Voices, Essential Conversation, Creation, and Commitment to Action
Bring a real, current gathering or conversation into the lab and rework it through the Wheel
Practice peer consultation as a convening discipline — asking questions that open rather than advise
Leave with a concrete, actionable redesign of a real meeting, gathering, or conversation they lead
Lead Conveners: Craig Neal, Founder, The Art of Convening Trainings, Kim Kristenson-Lee, Certified Convening Leader
Wednesday, September 23
1:00-3:00 pm CT US
Most of us lead in forward mode — identify what needs to happen, gather what's needed, move toward it. That mode has real dignity. It also cannot stay. This track is for conveners who sense that forward mode has reached its limit somewhere in their work or relationships — not because it failed, but because what's being asked of them has changed. Using the nine Aspects of the Art of Convening as our technology, we'll move together through the full arc of sanctuary-making: naming the Heart of the Matter, Setting Intention, Creating the Container, Hearing All the Voices, and into Essential Conversation, Creation, and Commitment to Action. We will not be fixing anything. We will be staying with what is difficult, together, long enough to see what we have not yet seen.
Pre-retreat reflection
Bring one place in your life — work, relationships, or your sense of what we're doing here — where you've been leading in forward mode, and where something in you suspects that mode has reached its limit. Not where it failed. Where it may simply not be sufficient to what's actually needed. We are not going to fix it. We are going to stay with it together long enough to see what we haven't seen yet.
This reflection is the material every participant carries through the entire afternoon — the session doesn't work without it, so the pre-retreat ask matters as much as anything in the room.
Learning Objectives
By the end of the session, participants will:
Recognize forward mode as a formation with real value and a real limit, and notice where it's operating in their own leadership
Practice wisdom's constraint — staying present to something unresolved without converting it into a task
Move through the nine Aspects of the Convening Wheel specifically in the register of difficulty and uncertainty
Sit with the retreat's three guiding questions in relation to their own carried material
Leave with a commitment not to a fix, but to a practice — a different quality of attention they'll bring forward
The Three Guiding Questions
Return to these explicitly at multiple points across the afternoon — they are the spine of the day, not a one-time prompt:
What must I release in myself before I can hold space for what is difficult in others?
Where is sanctuary genuinely found — inside us, between us, or in the world we are making together?
How do I tend the conditions for something true to emerge, rather than manage the conditions for something comfortable to persist?
Conveners: Rev. Dr. Terry Chapman, Certified Convening Leader, CPL Leadership Team, Author, Sabbath Pause: Seven Weeks of Daily Practices, Elizabeth Becker, AoC Trainer
The Retreat Schedule
Every part of the retreat has been intentionally designed to balance learning, reflection, relationship-building, and personal renewal.
The Participant Journey
