The Night the Lights Kept Going Out

I'm in the office. It's late. And for the third time that evening, the motion sensor lights have switched off because no one else is moving around the building.

I get up, wave my arms, and sit back down.

What I find funny about that memory, is that it’s the lights going out that I remember most. 

Not the 12-hour days, not the transformation project, not the big four consultancy (yes – that one) with their slides and their frameworks and their relentless energy. Also (slightly off topic) – where did all their people come from? Every time I went on a call it was another ‘senior sector partner for transformational deliverism’ or some such nonsense. 

No wonder it was costing us millions. 

No, what I remember is just me, getting up every twenty minutes to convince the building I was still there.

In hindsight, I'm not sure that I was.

The project that had everything - except me

This was five years ago. I was part of the senior leadership team during a major transformation. There was a lot of excitement about it in the building and endless momentum. For many it was the kind of project that looks brilliant on a CV and feels, for a while, like exactly what you've been working towards.

But four weeks in, I was doing these 12-hour days. Exactly what I had promised myself I wouldn’t do after the relentless pace during the Covid pandemic. Everything I had put in place – the running, the lunchtime walks, the gym bench and weights (admittedly still sitting in the garage in their packaging six weeks after I'd bought them) – had gone out the window. Completely.

I sat there that night and thought: I'm not even sure what I'm getting out of this.

It wasn't a dramatic moment. There was no thunderbolt. Just a low-level, unsettling suspicion that carving out a “successful career” wasn't really the full ambition I had for myself. That I needed something else.

What it was actually costing

I want to be honest about what that period looked like, because the LinkedIn version of this story would skip straight to the insight. But life isn’t a LinkedIn post.

My health started to suffer – problems that have since gone away, but that I know were connected to that period of sustained pressure and neglect. I was grumpy, and I knew I was grumpy. Relationships were strained. I was the person who'd achieved a lot and was miserable about it, which is one of the more confusing places to find yourself.

The gym equipment stayed in the garage.

If you're reading this and any of it sounds familiar, I'm not here to tell you you're doing the wrong things. I'm not sure my answers are your answers. But I'd invite you to ask yourself some better questions.

Why are you still there at 7pm? What's it giving you? What are you giving up?

Because everything has a price. If you want the career that takes you to the top, you're paying for it with something. Time, almost certainly. Relationships, quite possibly. Health, more often than people admit.

That's not a reason not to want it. It's just worth knowing what you're buying.

What actually shifted – and what didn't

It took me the better part of four years to make the changes I started thinking about that night. 

This wasn't a moment of sudden clarity followed by a clean transformation. It was slow, uncertain, and at times I wasn't sure I was moving at all. In fact, I made a big step backwards only two years later – that’s a whole separate blog.

And I want to be clear: I haven't got it sorted now either. Running my own business, I sometimes make choices to work at weekends and evenings that I wouldn't have made in my corporate career. The cycle doesn't disappear. 

I’ve just got better at recognising it – knowing the signals, knowing when it's becoming unhealthy, knowing when to stop and go outside and walk.

The bike helped. Not metaphorically at first – literally. Getting out on the road, sometimes alone, sometimes with others, for proper time rather than a Sunday hour squeezed between the diary and the guilt. That's where something started to shift.

And that's where the idea for Breakaway Andalusia came from.

Why a retreat isn't a holiday

September 2026: five days in Ronda (in Spain – no “H”: like the Welsh Valleys). Six senior leaders, riding in the mountains, working through a facilitated coaching process, supported by your peers. People who understand the weight you're carrying because they're carrying their own.

I want to be clear about what this is and isn't.

It isn't five days off. It isn't a holiday with a couple of workshops bolted on. The movement, the outdoors, the physical challenge of riding in the mountains – those things matter because they help you think differently. They give you fresh eyes on problems that have started to feel immovable.

But the real work is the coaching, the peer conversations, the facilitated process of working through what's actually going on and what some of the answers might look like. That's what makes it a reset rather than a rest.

If you're sitting in that office tonight, wondering how you ended up back here, this might be worth a conversation.

Drop me a message and I'll share what the week looks like.