Viram is a four-day executive retreat in India for senior professionals who have been carrying a question they haven’t had space to ask.
I want to tell you about someone I’ll call Vikram.
He found out about the Executive Retreat, Viram, through a LinkedIn post. Read about it. Went to the website. Spent two weeks deciding. Booked a Clarity Call, then rescheduled it twice. Finally had the call. Booked a spot. Then, ten days before the retreat, he sent me a message saying he needed to cancel. Something had come up at work.
We spoke. I asked what had come up. He described a situation that was real but not urgent in the way he was presenting it. After a few minutes, I asked him directly, “Is something coming up at work, or are you talking yourself out of coming?”
Long pause.
“Probably the second one,” he said.
He came. What happened over those four days is what this essay is about, but it is also about the resistance that preceded it, because the resistance is almost always the more interesting story.
The voice that says this isn’t for me is worth examining carefully.
It is usually not laziness. It is not cynicism, though it sometimes sounds like it. In my experience, the people who fight hardest to talk themselves out of pausing are the ones who, on some level, already know that the pause will be significant. The resistance is proportional to what is at stake.
Vikram had been in his current role for six years. Senior enough that the role had stopped asking anything of him that he hadn’t already mastered. Successful enough that the external signals were entirely positive—promotions, recognition, and a team that respected him. There was no reason anyone looking at his career from outside would see a problem.
From inside, he told me later, it had felt like wearing a suit that fit perfectly and being unable to remember why you were dressed up.
He had been carrying that feeling for about two years. Not acting on it. Not naming it. Managing it with busyness, with the next goal, and with the reasonable argument that this was just what career plateaus felt like and that the solution was a bigger challenge, not a pause.
The resistance to pausing is rational.
This is worth saying clearly, because most people who work with me eventually wonder why they resisted as long as they did. The answer is not that they were foolish or avoidant. The answer is that the resistance made complete sense given what they knew at the time.
To pause is to create space. Space means the question is given oxygen. When the question gets oxygen, the likelihood of the answer arriving is high. And the answer, the real one, not the career-planning version, might be inconvenient. Might require something. Might change something that has taken years to build.
From this angle, staying busy is not avoidance. It is risk management.
The mind is protecting you from a disruption you haven’t yet decided you want.
Vikram arrived on Day 1 with the particular alertness of someone who has decided to make the best of a decision they’re still not sure about.
He was engaged at dinner. Asked appropriate questions. Was visibly assessing whether the other participants were his kind of people. Doing what senior professionals do when they are in an unfamiliar environment—managing the impression and deferring the actual arrival.
Day 2, the painting exercise.
He told me afterwards that his first instinct when I introduced the exercise was to consider it slightly absurd. He was an analytical person. He built business cases. He did not draw things.
Within twenty minutes of starting, he had stopped thinking about whether it was absurd.
The left side of his canvas had a large clock. Many small boxes are filling the space—each one labeled with a meeting name or a project name. And he himself is in the middle, very small.
He stared at it.
“I’ve drawn myself small,” he said. Not to me. To himself.
This is the thing the painting exercise does that conversation cannot.
You can describe your life in language that is professional, measured, and defensible. You cannot draw a professionally managed version of your life. When the brush is in your hand and the canvas is blank, you draw what is true.
Vikram had not known, before he drew it, that he experienced himself as small inside his life. He had known he was overextended, overcommitted, and always on. But small? That was new. That was the word the drawing gave him that two years of private reflection had not.
Day 3 was the river ritual.
He told me on Day 4 that he had arrived at the river with his three stones and had been unable to identify what the first stone, for releasing, was supposed to represent.
He stood there for a long time. The other participants were already in the water.
Eventually he put his feet in the stream, held the stone, and stood in the cold.
What arrived was not a thought. It was a physical loosening in the chest that he had not anticipated and could not explain. He described it as the sensation of something he had been carrying without noticing he was carrying it.
He put the stone in the river.
He didn’t know exactly what he was releasing. He knew something had been released.
Day 4, he built the right side of the canvas.
Not a vision board. Not a bucket list. A specific picture of a working life in which he was not small. In which the boxes were fewer but larger, things that actually required him rather than things that merely needed a senior person in the room.
He gave his canvas a title.
He chose a mantra.
He identified three habits that would move him toward the picture—one of which was a conversation he had been postponing with his CEO for eight months.
He had that conversation within three weeks of leaving.
He called me two months later.
The conversation had gone better than he had expected. Not because the CEO had solved the problem — the structural issue was still there. But because Vikram had entered the conversation from a different place than he had entered conversations before. He knew what he was asking for. He knew why it mattered. He had drawn the right side of the canvas, and the drawing had given him language that two years of private frustration had not.
He is still in the role. But the suit fits differently now. Not perfectly. He would not describe it as ‘perfectly.’ But it is his suit. He chose to wear it, and he knows what he is wearing it for.
The participant who almost didn’t come.
If Vikram had cancelled—which he nearly did, twice—he would have gone back to the role with the same private feeling and no new language for it. The resistance would have won. The busyness would have continued. The question would have stayed at the same low oxygen level that made it manageable.
The resistance to pausing is not weakness. It is the mind doing its job, protecting you from disruption before you have decided you want it.
The job of the pause is to help you decide.
If you have been circling this for a while, if you have read about Viram, thought about it, told yourself you’ll come next cohort, and found a reason why this particular moment isn’t right—I am not going to tell you that you’re wrong.
I am going to tell you that Vikram said exactly the same things.
The Clarity Call is thirty minutes. It costs nothing. Most people leave it with more honesty about the resistance than they arrived with.
That is usually enough.
The Sunday Scaries is what most people call it. But that phrase flattens something that deserves more precision.
Sunday evening has a particular quality that no other time of the week has.
The weekend is ending. The work week is gathering at the edges. The performance is about to start again. And somewhere between dinner and sleep, a feeling arrives that most professionals know intimately but almost never name out loud.
Not dread exactly. Not quite anxiety. Something quieter. A low-level resistance to what is coming. A heaviness that settles in the chest around 7pm on a Sunday and doesn’t fully lift until the week provides enough momentum to outrun it.
Most people manage this feeling the way they manage most uncomfortable feelings: by not looking at it directly. They reach for the phone. They watch something. They plan the week. They stay busy until they’re tired enough to sleep.
I want to suggest that this is a mistake.
It is data.
The question is not how to make the Sunday feeling go away. The question is, what is it trying to tell you? Because what it is trying to tell you is different for different people, and the difference matters enormously.
There are two kinds of Sunday scaries. They feel almost identical from the inside. They mean entirely different things.
The first is fatigue. The week was genuinely demanding. The body needs rest that the weekend didn’t fully provide. The heaviness is not about the work. It is about the energy required to return to it. The treatment is straightforward: genuine rest, better recovery, a different pace through the week.
This kind of Sunday scaries resolves. Take a real holiday, sleep properly, and protect your weekends for actual recovery rather than productive busyness, and it lifts. You come back on Monday, not exactly light, but willing. The work is still there, but so is the energy for it.
The second kind doesn’t resolve.
You take the holiday. You sleep. You protect the weekends. And Sunday evening at 7pm, the feeling returns. Not because you are tired but because the week stretching ahead holds nothing that feels worth the cost of returning to it.
This is the Sunday scaries that is not about energy. It is about direction.
I know this from the inside.
There was a period in my corporate career roughly two years before I left. When the Sunday scaries changed quality. It had always been there, that low-level resistance. Most people in demanding jobs have some version of it. But for two years before I left, it was different. Heavier. More specific.
It wasn’t that Monday looked exhausting. It was that Monday looked identical to the Monday before it and the Monday before that, and I couldn’t construct a version of the Monday five years hence that looked meaningfully different.
That is the Sunday scaries that is worth paying attention to. The feeling of a week that is a repetition rather than a progression. Of motion without direction. Of performing a role that is no longer asking anything of you that you haven’t already given.
I didn’t have the language for it then. I just knew that Sunday evenings had become the most honest moment of my week. The moment when the performance armor was down, the week ahead was real, and the question I had been too busy to ask was audible.
The armor is the key thing.
Most high performers are extraordinarily good at performing well-being. The Monday morning answer to “how are you?” is always some version of “good, busy.” The performance is not dishonest exactly. During the week, the momentum of the work is real, and the engagement is real, and the tiredness is real, and there is genuinely not much space to feel the thing underneath.
Sunday evening removes the momentum.
The week hasn’t started yet. The performance hasn’t been required. The armor is down. And in that gap. Between the weekend that is ending and the week that hasn’t started, the actual feeling has room to arrive.
Most people spend Sunday evening preventing that gap from opening.
I think that is the most expensive thing a professional can do.
What do you do with the Sunday feeling if you are willing to look at it?
Not analyse it. Not solve it. Not immediately translate it into a career decision.
Just sit with it for long enough to hear what it is saying.
Is it fatigue? The reasonable request of a body that needs more recovery than it is getting?
Or is it direction? The quiet insistence of a person who has been performing someone else’s version of success for long enough that the performance no longer feels worth the effort?
The answer to the first question is logistical. Rest more, protect more, recover better.
The answer to the second is not logistical. It is the question I work with in every coaching engagement, every Viram cohort, and every Clarity Call.
What would you need to feel, on an ordinary Sunday evening, that the week ahead was worth returning to?
Not just tolerable. Worth it.
Most of the people I work with have been managing the Sunday feeling for years.
Some of them have become very skilled at not feeling it—the calendar so full, the phone so available, and the weekend so productively occupied that the gap never opens.
I understand this. The gap is uncomfortable. What arrives in it is not always what you want to hear.
But the thing arriving in the gap is not your enemy. It is probably the most honest part of you, speaking in the only slot it is ever given.
Sunday evening at 7 pm.
The performance armor is down. The week hasn’t started. The question is audible.
What are you doing with it?
The Missing Blueprint is where that question gets a structured answer.
Why good employees leave is one of the most expensive questions organizations consistently fail to answer honestly.
In twenty-two years of HR leadership, I sat across from roughly two hundred people who were leaving.
Not being let go. Leaving. Voluntarily, with a resignation letter, having decided that somewhere else or something else was better than here.
I sat across from junior analysts and from managing directors. From people who had been with the organization for two years and from people who had been there for eighteen. I sat across from people who were relieved, people who were scared, people who were angry, and people who had decided so long ago that by the time we were in the room together, the leaving had already happened internally.
Over two hundred conversations. Two decades. What follows is what I actually learned, not what the HR textbooks say people leave for.
The form says one thing. The conversation says another.
Every resignation comes with a stated reason. Usually something clean and professional. A better opportunity. Career growth. A role that aligns more closely with long-term goals. Compensation.
All of these are sometimes true. None of them are usually the whole truth.
In my experience, roughly 80% of resignations had the same real reason underneath the stated one. Not money. Not title. Not even the new job.
They had stopped feeling like they mattered.
Not in a dramatic way. Not in a way they could necessarily articulate in a resignation meeting. But somewhere in the months before the letter was written, something had shifted. A decision was made without them. A contribution was acknowledged with a standard reply. A conversation that should have happened never did.
The technical word for it is disengagement. That word does not capture it.
What it actually feels like from the inside, because I have been on the other side of it too, is a slow withdrawal. The person is still there. Still performing, often very well. But a part of them has already left, quietly, without announcement. The resignation letter is just the paperwork.
The best people leave first.
This is the thing that used to keep me up at night, professionally.
The people most likely to leave are the ones the organization can least afford to lose. Not always because they are the most talented, though often they are, but because they have the most options. When something shifts for them, they do not stay and become gradually more miserable. They leave. Usually within six months of the shift.
The people who are most likely to stay, sometimes for decades, are not always the ones you would choose to keep. They stay because leaving is harder for them. Because the organization has become their identity. Because the thought of starting over is more frightening than the unhappiness they have learned to accommodate.
I watched this pattern repeat across different companies, different sectors, and different leadership teams.
The organizations that kept their best people were not the ones with the best compensation packages, though pay mattered. They were the ones where people consistently felt that what they did had visibility, that their development was being actively thought about by someone, and that there was a human being — usually their direct manager — who treated them as a person and not a resource.
Person versus resource.
I have never found a better predictor of retention than that single distinction.
Gallup’s research on employee engagement consistently shows that the manager accounts for at least 70% of the variance in team engagement scores.
Most managers have never been taught how to have a real conversation.
This is not a criticism. It is an observation from the inside.
The professionals who rose to management did so largely on the basis of technical competence. They were good at the work. They were promoted into roles that required them to be good at something else entirely: understanding what people actually need, creating conditions where people can do their best work, having conversations that go below the surface.
Nobody taught them this. The organization assumed it would happen. Usually it didn’t.
What most managers know how to do is manage performance. Set targets. Track deliverables. Have the difficult conversation when something goes wrong.
What most managers do not know how to do is notice — early enough — when something has shifted in a person who matters to them. And then do something about it. Not a formal review. Not a one-on-one with an agenda. A genuine human conversation that asks one question: How are you, actually?
I have seen careers saved by that question, asked at the right moment by a manager who meant it.
I have seen entire teams hollowed out because nobody thought to ask it.
What the great leaders I watched actually did.
Twenty-two years gave me a small number of leaders I would describe, without qualification, as genuinely good at the human part of leading. Not perfect. Not universally liked. But consistently able to hold the trust and engagement of people over long periods in a way that most leaders cannot.
What they had in common was not charisma. Not any particular framework. Not the number of hours they spent with their teams.
They noticed people.
They remembered what someone had told them three months ago about a situation at home. They followed up—not as a management technique, but as a human instinct. They understood, without being taught, that a person who feels seen by the person above them will work differently than a person who feels invisible.
And they were honest. Not brutal. Honest. They told people where they stood. They did not let a person live inside a story about their performance that did not match reality because they understood that the gap between what the organization thought and what they told the person was a form of disrespect, whatever the intention.
The thing I wish I had said in more rooms.
In two hundred resignation conversations, I was operating within constraints. The person had decided. My job, formally, was process. Notice period. Handover. Reference.
There were things I wanted to say that the role didn’t easily allow.
I wanted to say the reason you are leaving has probably less to do with the new job than something that happened here eight months ago that never got addressed.
I wanted to say, the organization will spend three times your annual salary replacing you, onboarding someone new, and watching that person reach productivity in twelve months. It would have cost almost nothing to have one honest conversation six months ago.
Studies by SHRM estimate the cost of replacing a senior employee at between 50% and 200% of their annual salary, not counting the institutional knowledge that leaves with them.
I wanted to say, please tell the next organization what you couldn’t tell this one. Not to hurt anyone. Because the best thing that can come from a difficult exit is that the person leaving learns to say, earlier and more clearly, what they actually need.
I left my last corporate job in late 2022.
I did not have a resignation conversation. I was the one holding them, and then I was done holding them.
What I know, having been inside the machine for twenty-two years and outside it for three, is that the patterns I watched repeat are not inevitable. They are the result of organizations optimizing for output and consistently under-investing in the thing that makes output possible: the sense that the work matters and that the person doing it is seen.
That is not a soft observation. It is the most practical thing I know about leadership.
People who feel seen work harder, stay longer, and bring more of themselves into the room.
Everything else is secondary.
If you lead people, the question is not whether you are retaining your best. You probably know the answer.
The question is, when did you last have a real conversation? No, I am not talking about a performance review or a one-on-one with a prepared agenda but with the person on your team who matters most to you, where the only thing on the table is “How are you, actually?”
If you can’t remember, that is the starting point.
Not a new framework. Not a retention program.
One conversation.
The best career advice for senior professionals helps them climb faster. My 2020 book was built on exactly that premise. I now disagree with it.”
It is a good book. It has helped a lot of people move faster in their careers, get better roles, earn more, and build stronger professional reputations. I know this because they write to me and tell me.
I still recommend it.
And I now disagree with its central premise.
The book is built on a simple idea: most professionals are not strategic enough about their careers. They work hard but don’t work smart. They don’t manage their visibility; they don’t build the right relationships; they don’t position themselves for advancement. With the right approach, you can move twice as fast with half the wasted effort.
This is true. The advice is sound. The frameworks work.
What the book doesn’t ask and what I didn’t think to ask when I wrote it is whether moving faster is the right goal.
I wrote it at a particular moment in my life.
I was still inside corporate HR. I was proficient at my job. I was moving forward. And somewhere in the background, a question was forming that I wasn’t ready to look at directly: what am I actually moving toward?
The book helped people climb the ladder more efficiently.
What it didn’t do and what I wasn’t equipped to do at the time was to ask whether the ladder was leaning against the right wall.
I have since sat across from hundreds of senior professionals who followed exactly the kind of advice in that book. They climbed efficiently. They got the titles, the compensation, the teams, the respect.
And somewhere between 42 and 52, they found themselves at the top of a very well-climbed ladder, looking out at a view they hadn’t chosen, wondering how they got so far from where they actually wanted to be.
Not all of them. Some people climb exactly the right ladder and arrive exactly where they want. Those people don’t come to Viram. They don’t book Clarity Calls. They are genuinely content.
But the ones who do come, and frankly, there are many of them, are often people who took career advice seriously. Who were strategic. Who moved efficiently.
They did exactly what books like mine told them to do.
And it got them somewhere they didn’t entirely want to be.
Here is what I understand now that I didn’t then.
Career advice, all of it, and that includes mine too, operates inside a set of assumptions that it never questions. The assumption that advancement is the goal. That more responsibility, more income, and more seniority are the direction. That efficiency in climbing is what you need to optimize for.
These assumptions are so embedded in how we talk about work that most people never notice them. They feel like facts rather than choices.
But they are choices. And they are not the right choices for everyone.
The question I should have asked, the question the book should have started with, is this:
What are you optimizing your career for?
Not which company. Not which role. And not how fast. But what for? What end? What life.
Most people have never seriously answered that question. They have inherited an answer: success, security, status, and the next level without examining whether it is actually theirs.
I know this because I was one of them. I was climbing efficiently for years before I stopped to ask what I was climbing toward. And when I finally stopped and looked at the painting I made in 2013, I realized I had been running in roughly the right direction but without the clarity that would have made every step more intentional.
I don’t regret writing Double Promotion Half the Effort.
I regret that I wasn’t ready to write the chapter that it was missing. The chapter that starts with “Before you optimize anything, figure out what you’re optimizing for.”
That chapter became The Missing Blueprint, the book I published in 2026, six years and one major life transition later.
It is a different kind of book. It doesn’t tell you how to climb faster. It asks you to sit with a harder question first. And then, once you have an answer, to build a career and a life around that answer rather than around the inherited assumptions of what success is supposed to look like.
If you have read Double Promotion Half the Effort, read The Missing Blueprint next.
Not because the first book was wrong. Because the second book asks the question the first one forgot to ask.
And if you haven’t read either, start with The Missing Blueprint. It is the better starting point. The other one assumes you already know what you’re building toward. Most people don’t. Most people need to figure that out first.
The Clarity Call is where that conversation often starts. Thirty minutes, free, no pitch. Most people leave with a clearer sense of the question they’ve been avoiding.
Book it. Or don’t. But ask the question.
What are you optimizing your career for?