Press Pause for Transformation: Judy K. Herman on Retreats, Relationships, and the Risk of Growth

In this episode of Time To Press Pause, Ellen Williams speaks with Judy K. Herman, CEO of Relationship Wellness LLC, psychotherapist, author, and retreat facilitator who has spent decades helping heart-centered professionals step away from the noise of life so they can return transformed. 

Judy’s press pause story doesn’t begin in a boardroom.

It starts in a graduate school classroom, in the middle of a troubled 30-year marriage, when she realized something had to change, and that something was her. 

What followed was a decisive choice: to step away from her day-to-day life and invest in an individual spiritual retreat in Canada.

That quiet, intentional pause gave her clarity about her marriage, her identity, and the life she wanted to build next. 

From there, Judy: 

• Became a therapist to better understand her own story and help others with theirs
• Wrote Beyond Messy Relationships, blending her personal journey with client-centered insights
• Developed her A.I.R. framework for a “vibrantly authentic life”:
  • Awareness
  • Intentionality
  • Risk of growth
• Learned that you can’t change another person—you can only take responsibility for your own next step

She talks with Ellen about how retreats, body wisdom, and daily micro-pauses can become catalysts for major life shifts and why once you see something clearly, you can’t go backwards and unsee it.
 
In this episode, you’ll hear:
 

• How a single retreat became a defining turning point in Judy’s life
• Why partnership (or the lack of it) shapes both families and businesses
• What it really means to take the “risk of growth” in your personal and professional life
• Why well-intentioned pushback from others can’t be the final word on your decisions
• How to use body signals, journaling, and daily pauses to know when it’s time to press pause

If you’ve ever felt something in your life or leadership isn’t quite aligned, but you can’t yet name what it is, Judy’s story will give you language, frameworks, and courage to explore it.

 
Learn more about Judy: https://judycounselor.com

Learn more about Ellen: https://thesalientstrategist.com

 📩 Join the newsletter for updates: https://api.transpond.io/form?am=42668&fid=49041&host=true 
 

Transcript

I was able to change my perspective about my story and about my life and where I was, and I'd never change it. I'd never go backwards. 

Once you see something, you can't go backwards.

Welcome to Time to press pause, real life stories from the C suite. I'm your host. Ellen Williams, CEO of the salient strategist, and today we're talking about pressing pause, because you know, something needs to change about yourself, but you're not sure what it is. 

My guest today is Judy K Herman, CEO of relationship Wellness LLC. 

She is also an author, psychotherapist and retreat facilitator. 

For decades, she's experienced and led retreats of all kinds, including international immersions that took her out of her own culture, whether it was marriage retreats or individual spiritual direction retreats, each one contained turning points that changed the arc of her life. Her passion comes not just from her own turning points, but from the sacred space of assisting others in their transformation. For Judy, this work far surpasses what any traditional counseling or coaching program could ever do. 

That's why she loves serving heart centered professionals in this way, because when we step away from the noise of life, we return not only renewed, but transformed from the inside out.
Welcome Judy to time to press pause.

I'm glad to be here. Ellen, so honored to be on your podcast for sure.
Well, thank you. I'm really happy to have you here. Judy, you and I go back a few years for sure, and have had conversations about various different things, especially public speaking. And I don't know your press pause story, even though we've had conversations in the past. So I'm really excited to hear your press pause story.
Well, I'm so glad to share it, Ellen, because my press pause story, rather than coming from a corporate background, I'm sitting in a classroom, and it's in my graduate degree program. I am surrounded by those much younger than me. I'm about maybe 40, late 40s. At this point, I was a CEO of my family, at least I tried to be. But I'm sitting in this classroom trying to figure my life out, getting my master's degree, and it just hit me, because the professor, what he was talking about was spiritual direction. 

That was the class I was taking, preparing to go on a retreat with 20 other students. But something went on with me. I knew that something needed to change in my personal life. You see, my first profession is homeschooling for children in a very troubled marriage, and we're coming upon 30 years and we had been to several other like marriage retreats and therapists, but something wasn't clicking. Something just wasn't right. I couldn't put my finger on it, and I needed to get clarity. I made a decision in that moment Ellen, something had to change, and something had to change with me. I was really living, I will say, financially, in our family system, but we were living in an attitude of scarcity. So I was saving up every penny that I could to go on a retreat the next year. That was a huge turning point, and it was an individual spiritual direction retreat, just trying to figure my life out. So living in the South, I traveled to Canada to a retreat center, and now I remember my children, some of them, they were adolescents. I know they felt the tension for sure, and I explained to them, Mom's going to go on this retreat. I'm going to be gone for four days. I did have a cell phone, but it was one of those flip phones. One of my younger sons said to me, Mom, can I go with you? And I said, No, son, this is just for me. I need to get some clarity. I said, Do you remember that movie that we watched The Sound of Music, when Maria went and got wisdom from the nun there? And I said, That's what I feel like I'm going to do. And so sure enough, I drive up to Canada, and my car drives through these iron gates, just like in the movie, The Sound of Music. And I rented a little cottage. I met with my spiritual director, who was also my professor, but he was now my spiritual director, and just those days of silence, really paying attention, I told him on the front and I said, I want to make sure, I want to get some clarity about this marriage. Do I divorce? Do I leave and start a new life? And he encouraged me, let's just put that on the back burner and live in this present moment. I. Had to be very intentional to do it. When I was intentional, and I spent time walking the trails and journaling, I became and I became more aware of the present moment, exactly where I was then. That was my press pause, and it changed the arc of my life in a huge way. I was able to come back. Not an immediate legal divorce took place after that, but I got clear about what my situation was. I began to increase my awareness. I began to be intentional. And the rest of the story is I actually became a therapist trying to figure out my own life, because we were spending gobs of money on marriage therapy. That didn't work, and to this day, it has really given me a passion, because I totally do therapy outside of the box. I do therapy outdoors, but I offer my clients packages and I do retreats. That's the place where transformation really happens, and I'm all about my own transformation, which my life is totally different now. My four kids are now grown. I now have five grandkids, and I don't see that marriage, that first marriage, is a failure. It was a success, but it had a natural completion. So I was able to change my perspective about my story and about my life and where I was, and I'd never change it. I'd never go backwards. Once you see something, you can't go backwards and unsee it.

Ellen, absolutely once, once you see something, you can't go backwards. Once you've turned that corner, once you've made that change, change to perspective. Not only does the world look different, but you are a different person. You have to continue down that path. Is even if you want to do the things you used to do, you're going to do them from a slightly different point of view. So I appreciate everything you said that was really interesting, that it was an intentional I have to go do something different. Something had to change with me, was what you said, and I am totally supportive of that. I have a couple questions for you so you slipped in the I tried to be
a CEO. Yes,
that's a really important concept. If you are in partnership, if you are a business owner and you have a business partner or and you own a business, you need to have a partnership. I tried being the CEO of my family. There was no partnership with my spouse and I had been swimming upstream as the kids got older, as the kids were playing sports, and former husband was the coach, I felt like I was the opposing team. In my own family was the coach. The kids were the players, but we were all losers because we were not partnered. And I'm sure you've heard this saying that a house divided against itself can't stand that comes in business and other areas of your life, it's not even the divorce. I know there's a lot of statistics about divorce and how it leaves kids with all these issues and problems, but if you look deeper into that research, it is the house divided against itself, whether it's in in quote, unquote, intact legal marriage, or whether it's trying to co parent after a divorce, you need to have partnership. I'm glad you picked up on that.
I totally agree. I I am on my second marriage as well, and my first one sounds like it was similar, that it just it just wasn't working out, obviously, because we got divorced. So my question now is with the self identifying, something has to change, and then taking action to make that happen, and then coming back from your pause to take more action based on being intentional and being present. 

How have those lessons related to your business?

Great question. 

So my business now I am, is called relationship Wellness LLC. It's in Georgia. I'm a licensed therapist in Tennessee and Georgia. How that's impacted me is that I have realized that when you're in this container, whether it's a mental health system and you're a therapist or whether it's an organization, your soul may be calling you to a bigger place. And so therefore I I'm just doing things a lot of therapists wouldn't dare do. And I wrote my story in my book, beyond messy relationships, I chose to be a client in my own book, show up as a therapist at the beginning of each chapter, so that people are not just reading my story, but they're making sense of their own. And it does cover some universal factors that so many of us go through. You may not have had a story like mine. I. May not have a story like yours, but you read something like this, and you can have so many ahas. Oh, I get it. I say all that to say that one of my life lessons, I think this comes from living, just living life. Gary zukov calls it Earth school. What are those life lessons that are knocking at your door, whether it's in a troubled marriage from the past or a new marriage from the present, or a business currently going on. What are those life lessons? Paying attention to the patterns Ellen and so one of the life lessons that is so true to me and you cannot do for another human being, what only they can do for themselves. I can't think another's thoughts. I can't motivate another to do what I want them to do. Change is hard anyway, even in our own lives, in what we want to do, but you cannot change another person, even our newborn babies. When we birth our children and and then we raise them, we can't breathe their breath, but that's been a life lesson of mine, is to realize I cannot do for another human being what only they can do for themselves, and whether that's a client sitting across from me and they're just saying to me, Judy, tell me what to do. I really can't tell you what to do. I can't motivate you. I can help you see some things that you won't be able to unsee, and that's raising our level of awareness.
Yeah, you can't get people to do what they should do for themselves, even if they're paying you for that, because as a consultant, that's a lot of times we explain, here's the process and here's what you need to do, and they still don't do it. So even when they're paying you to give them that advice, it's still up to them to take those steps and do what you're guiding or suggesting or flat out documenting that they should do. But yeah, that's a very important life lesson, and it does cross all aspects of life. I totally agree. That was a lesson I learned as well through my first marriage.
Well, you know what to Ellen, I think is really important, because we don't know that. I mean, if you're, if you're my client, or if I'm a client, your client, and I think I have to know that, okay, I am fully 100% responsible, and I am not a victim either. I can choose your advice and follow through with it, because I want this thing that you're providing for me on the back end or not so reminding others, because what came out of that is a formula for life. It's a formula for your vibrantly authentic life. And what that is, is something that every one of us need in order to live, and that is air we need air to breathe. I do lead my clients in this deep breathing exercise and learning how to do that, how to regulate the nervous system, because we'll go quickly, but the A represents awareness. The A is the acronym for awareness, raising our awareness. The I is intentionality, and the R is the risk of growth. We don't know what's on the other side of doing the things that we, quote, unquote, should do, because we've never done them before, perhaps, but it's a risk of growth. We do them and we don't know what the outcome is, and we can always look back and make sense of how we got to where we are, but if we just continually take those deep breaths of air, awareness, intentions and risks of growth, you will go into busting through what's so automatic in our brains and our automatic lives. I love
the phrase risk of growth. There's a lot of conversation around growth. There's a lot of growth minded. That's a hot topic. Are you growth minded? But definitely businesses understand that there's risk. So from a personal perspective, it's an interesting connection. I've never really thought of risk. I've only thought of growth. So when you talk about risk of growth, can you dig into that a little deeper? Yes.

So it was a risk of growth in the first place for me to actually write my book. The catalyst for me to write this was something else that was very traumatic in my life, and I knew that I could not continue on. Well, I had done a lot of private writing. I had done a lot of journal writing trying to make sense of my life, but the risk was actually writing a book with the intentions of it being published and out there in the world. So when you put yourself into a vulnerable. Position that you've never been in before. So just an example is I that the book went out and I, in my mind, was thinking, oh my gosh, my clients are going to read it and they're going to say, why are we seeing her as our therapist? So that was my thinking about that what it actually has done is launched me into an A place that I'd never been before, because I've never been that transparent. We're supposed to keep our, you know, professional personas, but there's a lot of people coming to me as a result of reading the book first. But I didn't know that. And honestly, I didn't know, am I, am I going to cause some trauma in somebody? I mean, I'm just so trauma informed as a therapist, and I'm thinking, Am I going to lose my license because of writing this book. Am I even going to have a practice because of this? So that's a perfect example of what I mean. Risk of growth. I would never go backwards, and I would never not write it. But I didn't know that at the time, because I even had family members. Judy, are you sure you want to write this book? You know? So you get all that pushback from others with any level of growth that you go through, and that that's certainly true in business and personal life,
pushback when you're trying to grow that is definitely something that needs to be navigated and maneuvered. It really depends on where the pushback is coming from, and I think also the relationship to you and their experience. I get a lot of advice from friends and family, as you did, and it used to weigh more than it does now, because now I look at it as well intentioned, but not always well informed. My path is different than theirs. My experience is different than theirs. My data is not something they have access to. So and data can be anything. It's not just numbers. It's experience, it's information, it's market research, it's where you want to go and why so understanding your motivations for growth and then understanding other people's true motivations, which I would say 90% of the time, are to help you, Not to undercut you. But you have to take that kind of pushback and identify where there's true weight and where there's maybe a little fear on your behalf.
You know what? That's so true. I have a mentor of Michelle Villalobos, and she shared this with me. She probably got it from someone else, but make a list of the people who would be considered the engines in your life, like they will encourage you to keep on growing, to take that next level that you don't know what's going to be like, or the ones that are the anchors in your life. They love you, but they they're fearful for you, and they're only can you know in their frame of reference, only concerned about you not getting hurt, which makes sense.
So Judy, I have one last question for you. What advice would you give other leaders to when they would identify it's time to press pause
body wisdom, and we need to pay attention to it. So if your body is like filled with dread, and that's a vibration that's likely going to hit organs and cause some pain, maybe headaches, maybe ulcers, other things, fibromyalgia, whatever you name it, whatever shows up as a symptom is a really good idea to press pause and ask, what is my body telling me here? I think the best case scenario is to have a habit of pressing pause, maybe not going to Canada for an individual retreat with a spiritual director for four days, but to have some kind of place in your life on a daily basis, for me, I'll have a cup of coffee, and I will actually set the timer for 10 minutes, and I will do what you call flow writing for 10 minutes, and I use the same meditative music every time I just pour out whatever's in my heart at the moment, it's usually in the mornings. And then I'll take another 10 minutes and read something that will nurture my mind so pressing pause on a daily basis is certainly important, but certainly if you're going through any kind of trauma in your life, any kind of transition, and then listening to your body is so very vitally important. And that's those, what I call divine invitations to your authentic self. It's getting your attention,
getting your attention. And that's not always easy. You need to be present for that to get your attention. And that can be something that takes practice as you and I think we were trying. Adding before the podcast. As far as practice makes progress, not perfect.
You know, it's pain that gets our attention. Ellen, I will say that we're more likely to instead of taking a vitamin, instead of taking that time on a daily basis for 10 or 20 minutes to do a journal, right, or whatever, that's the vitamin. But the pain is when it shows up in your body and you cannot ignore it, or the pain might be the divorce, or the pain might be the child that is in rehab. All of that going to get our attention.
Judy, this has been wonderful. I really appreciate you sharing your press pause story and
all your wisdom with us today.

Thank you so much. I'm very pleased to talk with you about it, and you're doing a great work. I love your podcast and getting these stories. It's amazing. Thank you, Ellen,
thank you. I appreciate it. Thank you for listening to this episode of time to press pause. If you want to learn more about Judy, please visit Judy counselor.com if you want to learn more about me, visit the salient strategist.com and be sure to sign up for my newsletter to receive updates about my new book creating time, which includes many of my life lessons about being present. And please listen again wherever you listen to your podcasts you.