As we immerse ourselves in vacation, a dubious sensation may develop: shouldn't I be using this time better? Truth be told, our notion of profitability, productivity and time usage, seems intimately linked with seeing things happening, with building, with changing the world...

I believe that a great part of our thinking is dedicated to mobilizing resources to change the world. We want to bring it closer to what we believe are the right circumstances that will then allow us, in that built future, enjoy amazing sensations. So, making things happen, looking for deficits and corrections all around us is the natural food of that powerful control machine.

Diving into vacation and suppress this machine is not easy. In particular, for those with lots of accumulated work, there is a certain threat perception that doing nothing can be risky… and also that it would be interesting to catch up on things. If so, to access states of effective relaxation can be challenging, at least.

My suggestion, for those who want to "build" something during vacation, is to focus on what has been granted less airtime: the plan. Instead of putting half < dozen more bricks in the "building", revisit the project in its essence. Instead of taking care of one or two more specific matters, rethink your business and what you want to obtain. Revisit your functional profile and the added value you represent in your organization. In the back of an envelope, make a simplified tree of your life, which main branches are there? Health, People, Growth, Diversity, Systems…?

These vacation, if you decide to work. Consider to invest in your master-plan. Take time to make that "zoom out" that keeps getting forgotten day in day out. Make those cliché type question like: where do I want to be in 10 years? What would become possible if everything went right? And what is now possible, from what I wanted to make happen 10 years ago? In what way am I enjoying nowadays, of what was an ongoing project, and in what way will I enjoy it if the current plan is accomplished? Where do I measure my current life quality? Can I give it a number? From 1 to 5, how much is it? And what would be a half point increase in this scale? Which vectors do I want to improve?

This reflection will demand from you a different reasoning machine. It's a processor that lives in a more decelerated intellectual velocity, less executive, calmer, less inclined to construction, more tuned into listening. It lives on the ability to immerse yourself, and that's only possible if it seems safe enough. To your other mental "pain in the ass" to think slowly may sound like a waste of time…just remind it of Séneca: "When a man does not know what harbour he is making for, no wind is the right wind."

To this other slower machine, more connected to our higher intelligence, the time passing notion is quite different. It is now, it is sensory, it is already happening, and the more we abandon the frenzy of wanting to build things on the outside, the more we dive in, the more each dose of life around amplifies an intense unit of experience. This slower machine scores aptitude and intensity. It punctuates the feeling of every instant, it is turned to the attention to the savory details. And it has an intelligence that sees further away, creator of alignment. Hence the importance of working it on leaders that get easily lost in the muscles of the intellect and of the efficient execution, setting aside the direction.

As paradoxical as it may seem, to cultivate direction is only possible if we let go, even if only for a small amount of time, of blindly centering ourselves in building a tomorrow on the abstract and quietly revisit our deepest direction. So, while on vacation, take time to appreciate this other intelligence. Let a certain intellectual void stretch a little bit farther than seems comfortable. Let that executive processor of yours slow down, in order to be able to hear and feel the necessary great corrections to your master plan.