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.
What Actually Happens at an Executive Retreat in India
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.