Hiking, haikus and hand-rolled pasta: How a life coaching retreat in Tuscany transformed one writer’s sense of self

I’d read that life coaching is like having an ally in the small war with your irrational, imposter-syndromed self – someone to help dismantle the scaffolding of self-doubt and design your dream life. “But isn’t that therapy?” I asked Guinness. “I like to think life coaching is more forward-looking, more solutions-based,” she replied. In her 20s she worked in film but felt rudderless, lost, a bit lacking. “But then a life coach changed my life,” she said, lighting amber-coloured candles as the last of the day’s light spilled through the window. “And so I gave myself a mission: to make people understand that life coaching really can work.”

Downstairs sitting roomMonica Spezia/Living Inside

Making pici pastaAlexander Barlow

Next door in the sitting room I made myself a gin and tonic, sat by the fire and slowly turned the pages of a photo album as Chet Baker played quietly. The Guinnesses are a family of overachievers, it turns out. Claudia’s sister, Amber, is a food writer and cook based in Florence; her mother, Camilla, is an in-demand interior designer who, with husband and self-taught landscape architect Jasper, acquired this house in the late ’80s. Villa Arniano is still the family home and not just a monument to magnificent taste, but also to hard graft: a photo dated 1989 shows it as an inglorious ruin that no sane person would bet on. No wonder Claudia is an optimist, I thought.

The Pink RoomMonica Spezia/Living Inside

Hiking the hillsAlexander Barlow

The next morning we lined up in the garden for yoga, dandelions and daisies slowly opening in the rising sun. My tendons said a firm and unforgiving no to anything close to an acceptable downward-facing dog. After breakfast we sat around a large shaded table for our first proper meeting, a “values session” where we mapped ourselves out. It was an odd feeling; I’d never put down on paper who I was before, much less discussed it in a group. But as we began to join the dots between who we were and who we might want to be, traits emerged and it became clear how they could be organised to create a more trim and tailored version of ourselves. The chat was just as nourishing: there’s a strongly adhesive quality to comparing life notes with intelligent, sensitive people, and trust formed surprisingly quickly as our inhibitions eroded and our conversation became loose and unguarded.

Malfatti dumplings on the kitchen counterMonica Spezia/Living Inside

Enjoying white wineAlexander Barlow

Later that afternoon, after a second session and hike to a nearby village that ended with a spritz, we sipped wine in the garden and someone suggested a game: “Act out your favourite pasta shape.” In the silence of Tuscany, there was a thunderous roar after the first successful guess (bucatini). I didn’t know I had a version of myself that could successfully charade rigatoni, but I liked it.

Writing and reflecting by the fireAlexander Barlow

The villa’s exteriorMonica Spezia/Living Inside

Our weekend passed like this: slow reflective meetings punctuated with delicious food, a group activity or nothing at all. On Saturday we rose for a silent sunrise walk and were led through a darkened, gently swaying olive grove and past a makeshift road sign that seemed to whisper its single Italian word: adagio (slow). At breakfast someone recited an impromptu version of a Kobayashi Issa haiku: “The morning dew / The morning dew / And yet, and yet.”

That afternoon in the kitchen, a wood fire popped and cracked as we gathered around the table to make hand-rolled pici (a kind of ugly spaghetti) while sipping chilled Vermentino from old Parisian glasses. Doors open to crisp air, the whole space glowed in soft late-afternoon sunlight as our teacher, Grazia, an Italian woman in her late 50s with a broad forgiving smile, gently steered us without a word of English. In the evening more wine flowed as we ate our al dente efforts by candlelight, and the conversation sparkled with smart questions and thoughtful – and often very funny – answers.