Leading The Way: Laura Davis
You can’t meet a new situation with the same old strategies. It’s important to be creative and bold. To rise to the moment …
In June 2020, Laura Davis was planning to take a group of 20 writers to a villa in Tuscany. The retreat was her biggest money-making event of the year. But in March, as the number of COVID-19 cases in Italy began climbing, her students started forwarding alerts from the U.S. State Department, asking when she was going to cancel the trip.
At what point did you realize you were going to have to pivot?
At first, I just hoped that everything would calm down. Canceling the trip in early March felt premature plus I needed time to assimilate the realization that my dream of going to Tuscany was probably not going to happen. I pushed the decision down the road. I bargained with the universe. But the day Italy closed its borders, I knew I had to cancel. I wrote a letter to my students telling them I was going to postpone the trip for a year. They could leave their deposit with me and go a year later, or they could have a refund. Everyone wanted their money back. That’s the moment when I knew I had to do something else with my business.
A smaller portion of my income comes from teaching weekly classes. I responded early to the threat of the virus, asking people to wash their hands and use hand sanitizer right away, before most people were doing that. But as time went on, I realized that our kind of gathering is exactly how the virus spreads – a group of people in a room, talking in close-knit small groups, passing around pieces of paper from hand to hand. I have a number of students who are older or have pre-existing conditions – or both, and I didn’t want to put them in a vulnerable position.
How did you pivot?
First, I transferred my writing classes online with the help of a woman from Brussels. A book I wrote 30 years ago had changed her life. Unbeknownst to me, she’d been following me on Facebook. She reached out and offered to help me take my classes online. A week later, I was teaching on Zoom. Once my classes were online, I had a base income that freed me to experiment.
My whole business is working with people in groups, and most of the time, I’m working with people at retreat centers which would be such a hotbed right now. Germs spread easily and people get sick on retreat all the time anyway. I knew right away that it would be at least a couple of years before I could go back to what I was doing before.
I realized that I was going to need to cancel my retreat to Spain in September. I had another scheduled in Peru in 2021, and I could see that trip wasn’t going to happen either. Even if things were “better” by then, I couldn’t imagine people signing up for international travel. I could see that that whole part of my business, the biggest part, was gone. So I had to find another revenue stream.
What did you do next?
I created a three day virtual retreat called Coming Home: Building Resilience In A Time Of Uncertainty to help people find their equilibrium, tap their inner resources and find resilience during this time of change, uncertainty and loss. I wanted people to be able to attend whether they had money or not, to be of service to people for whom the rug had been completely pulled out from under them or who couldn’t afford to come to something I’d offered in the past. So I offered the retreat on a sliding scale all the way down to free. It was an experiment, a giant gamble.
The first two times I held the retreat, I found that I made some money, not a lot and not like I would have made for in-person retreat, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that my model of a sliding scale did bring in a profit. A lot of people signed up for free; other people paid the maximum charge which was $400. Many others paid $100, $150, $200. About a dozen people contacted me afterwards, having signed up for free, and said, “I didn’t realize how much value I was going to get. I want to send you some money.”
Before I offered Coming Home for the third time, I completely redid the curriculum. I had the feeling that some of it was stale, like I was bringing up issues people had already worked through. The first retreat dealt with anxiety and shock. Now, people are looking for ways to stop holding their breath and waiting for life to go back to the way it was. How to live a full life now. How to balance the desire to be safe and the intense need to connect with other human beings.
What allowed you to pivot this way?
That’s always been my business, my brand. In the twenty years I’ve been doing this, I’ve tried a lot of different things, and if they didn’t work, I moved on to something else. That makes it easier to pivot because if I try something, and it doesn’t work, I don’t do it again and instead, I try something else. I don’t have employees so it’s not like I’m trying to turn an entire organization. I’m forward-thinking, and I didn’t sit around longing for things to be the way they used to be. I didn’t waste time waiting around to see if things were going to go back the way they were. Instead, I began creating offerings that would both bring in some money right away and would also give me a feeling of efficacy, productivity and service.
My natural inclination is to be of service. I didn’t just want to take what I was already doing and move it online. I wanted to figure out how to add value. What I offer people can be of great help, especially during a time of great uncertainty and anxiety. I also have a strong creative drive which has been both a blessing and a curse. I always need to be generating something new. Right now, I’m on fire creatively, and I feel like I’m contributing something that is not just making my personal economic survival possible but is also providing resources for people who are having a hard time.
What's the appeal of writing, especially during this uncertain time?
Writing is incredibly healing. It’s a grounding force that helps people get in touch with what they’re thinking, feeling and needing. It helps people get underneath the surface, to get physical, get into their bodies, get under their anxiety. Writing helps people create a vision for themselves. It helps them understand that what they’re experiencing and feeling isn’t unique but it is universal. Holding Coming Home online allowed me to create a space where people from around the world could come together, get to know one other, write with each other and understand what’s happening in other places.
My students say that writing class is their anchor in the week. As soon as class is over, they’re just waiting for next Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday. There’s intimacy and connection. It’s a place where you can be really, really honest in a way that you can’t always be honest with the people who are actually in your life. Sometimes you can tell more of the truth with compassionate strangers than you can with your spouse, your sister, your mother, your child.
Tell me about your new Tuesday class.
I think this time should be recorded historically, that people should create a record of their experiences so I started Tuesdays With Laura: Writing Through The Pandemic. We write to prompts that are of the moment (e.g., “In this pandemic, what kind of person do I want to be?”, “Tell me a story that reflects the crazy contradictions of the world you’re living in right now” or “Write a letter to someone you can’t see in person right now – someone you don’t know if you’ll ever see again.”) and then read what we’ve written to each other in small groups.
Even after the world returns to some semblance of normal, I’ll continue offering this class and others online. It’s wonderful having someone from Australia or England or Canada come to my class. And they’re not having to spend thousands of dollars to get on an airplane to come study with me. I feel like the world has opened up in a way that’s exciting, and I don’t want to give that up.
What has surprised you?
Trying to create human, intimate interactive experiences in a two-dimensional medium is exhausting. The people who participate have the experience I want them to have, but I feel more drained. It’s partly the number of hours I’m spending in front of a device, and partly that I’m not getting back the same energy I used to get as a teacher in a room with people. I’m just whipped by the end of my Thursday evening class or on Sunday night after a retreat. I’ve maintained more productivity that most people, but I also feel the impact of living in this time of intense uncertainty and grief. I have a strong will and a great capacity for work but I can’t do as much as I did before without paying a serious price for it.
How nimble I am. A few years ago, a friend told me I was the most nimble person she knew. I thought that was cool, but I didn’t know what she was talking about. Now I understand that what she meant was that I’m flexible, and I’m creative. I did grieve, but I let go of what was past pretty quickly, and I adapted to the new environment which requires you to experiment, make short-term plans, get your pulse on what’s happening right now and find a way to address it.
I’m surprised to find that in some ways, I’m thriving. I feel stress like everyone else, and everything feels askew, but my creative juices are bubbling, and I’m living my life purpose fully. I’m thriving on being of service and meeting a need in this environment. It doesn’t mean that I don’t feel exhausted or that I’m not grieving over what’s happening in the world. I wonder if I’m ever going to see my daughter again. I worry if we’re going to survive as a species, as a nation. If the wounds this nation was formed on will ever heal – if this is the moment finally for real social justice. I worry about our country. I’m not anticipating a happy ending, and sometimes I get going in apocalyptic predictions, but I try to stay in the moment. It’s the only way to survive this.
How are you able to stay productive?
The only way I’ve been able to keep operating at this pace is to match my output with my self care. I’m absorbing a lot of people’s grief and anguish and witnessing a lot of distress, so I have to take care of myself right now.
What have you learned so far?
–You have to grieve your losses. I do this a lot – palms open. Let go, let go, let go. Lots of self-care. And stay flexible.
–I am creating such goodwill for myself and my future business. I am being generous, and people see that. They’ll remember that I showed up, and I was offering useful resources for free or low cost. That I was putting positive energy out into the world at a time when there was so much fear and negativity. That while so many people were spreading fear, I was sharing resources that help people become more resilient, grounded and strong. I’m showing up in a way that I can be proud of and that others can respect. Because my events are free for those who can’t afford them, a lot of people have been willing to post notices or send promotions out for me.
–It’s important for me to be vulnerable and transparent in what I write, what I put online, in the little videos I produce and in how I check in in class. Because I’m modeling that for my students, people are telling me the real truth about what their experience is like.
–You can’t meet a new situation with the same old strategies. It’s important to be creative and bold. To rise to the moment.
–Self-care is extremely important. My output and capacity to put out in the world is directly relational to my own spiritual practice. It feels good to be of service, to have something valuable to offer and to offer it freely.
–I have the freedom to be generous as well as the life experience and a certain amount of wisdom that I have accrued through suffering. I believe that anyone in my position has the responsibility to step up and offer.
–You have to approach the whole situation from a place of generosity with your palms open instead of a place of clutching. I’m not sure why I was able to do that, but this whole time, that’s been my approach. During the 2-3 week period when I was holding on to the trip to Italy, that was the only time when I was clinging on to the way things used to be. But once I let go of that, I let go of all of it.
Laura Davis, author of seven bestselling non-fiction books including "The Courage to Heal," "I Thought We'd Never Speak Again," and a forthcoming memoir, "Wholehearted," teaches writing workshops in Santa Cruz, California and leads transformative writing retreats around the world. In this time of pandemic, Laura sends out daily resources and facilitates a weekly international writing class, Tuesdays with Laura: Writing Through the Pandemic.