From the Beach

On rest, perspective, and what two weeks away from the work actually teaches you about how you lead.

There is a particular quality to the thinking you do when you are far enough from the desk that the inbox has stopped pulling at you. Not the absence of thought — the opposite. A different kind of thinking. Less reactive, less tunnelled, more willing to sit with uncertainty without immediately reaching for a resolution.

I spent two weeks last summer on the Dorset coast, mostly doing very little. Walking in the mornings, reading in the afternoons, the kind of slow evening meals that are difficult to justify when there is a full working week ahead. And I noticed — as I notice most years when I am away long enough — that some of the clearest thinking about work happened in the first week back. Not during the holiday, but just after it.

This is not a piece about the importance of holidays, although they are important. It is about something more specific: the connection between the quality of rest a leader takes and the quality of thinking they can bring to their work.

What depletion looks like from the inside

Most of the senior leaders I work with are not obviously depleted when I first meet them. They are performing, often well. The organisations they lead are functioning. They are in the room, engaged, asking the right questions. But over the course of a few coaching sessions a particular quality of thinking tends to emerge — a kind of compression, where the leader is working primarily in a small range of well-worn grooves. The same problems keep appearing, solved by broadly the same solutions. New information gets filtered through existing frameworks rather than genuinely reconsidered. Options that sit outside the established range rarely get a serious hearing.

This is not a crisis. It is how the brain works when it has been running without adequate rest for an extended period. The grooves are efficient. They worked before. The brain defaults to them because generating genuinely new thinking is expensive, and expensive is difficult when you are tired.

From the inside, this often does not feel like tiredness. It feels like certainty. The leader knows what they think. They have thought about it a lot. The possibility that the certainty is a symptom rather than a considered position is not easy to see when you are inside it.

The beach as a diagnostic tool

The beach — or the mountains, or the allotment, or the sustained absence from normal working conditions, whatever takes that shape for you — is not just a recovery mechanism. It is diagnostic. What surfaces when the noise stops tells you something about the thinking you have been too busy to do.

I have heard many versions of the same account from leaders I work with. A fortnight away, and by day ten they found themselves turning over a question they had been carrying for months without noticing it — a decision about the business structure, a relationship with a board member that had been quietly dysfunctional for years, a personal ambition they had been not-quite-acknowledging. The holiday did not create the question. It created the conditions in which the question could surface.

This is worth taking seriously. If you come back from a proper period of rest and nothing has surfaced — no unexpected clarity, no question that has been waiting for the quieter moment — it is possible that you did not actually rest. Productive busyness on holiday, the kind that fills the gap where real rest would be, is its own habit in senior leaders, and it produces its own form of depletion.

Perspective as a professional responsibility

There is an argument — not often made explicitly, but implicit in how many organisations run — that a leader's willingness to give everything to the work is a form of commitment, and that taking substantial rest is a form of selfishness or weakness. This argument is wrong in a way that is visible from the outside but very hard to push back on from the inside when you are surrounded by people who have internalised it.

The counter-argument is a practical one: you are more useful to your organisation, your team, and the people who depend on your decisions when your thinking is at full capacity. The leader who is three years into a cycle of chronic under-rest is not making better decisions by staying closer to the desk. They are making worse ones, more confidently, with a reduced ability to notice that something might be off.

This is why I think about perspective-maintenance as a professional responsibility, not a personal indulgence. The question is not "can I afford to take proper rest" but "can the people who depend on my leadership afford for me not to."

What to do with what surfaces

The thinking that emerges in the quiet — the question you had not quite named, the clarity about a decision you had been deferring — is worth treating seriously rather than letting the re-entry to normal working life bury it again. A few practical suggestions:

• Write it down before you get back to the inbox. The specifics fade faster than you would expect.
• Give it a week before acting. The perspective from the beach is valuable. So is the pressure-testing that happens when you bring it into contact with reality.
• Share it with someone who will engage with it honestly. Your coach, if you have one. A trusted colleague, if not. The clarity you have in quiet moments can be distorted by the emotional state of the holiday; an honest outside perspective helps.

If you found this piece useful, you might also want to read about what executive coaching actually involves, or look at the How We Can Help page if you are thinking about what the challenges you have been carrying might benefit from.

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