The recovery we demand from pilots (but not from CEOs)
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I made the Australian age-group triathlon team in 2004 and competed at the World Championships that year.
If there had been a most-unlikely-to-succeed award for that, my name would have been at the top of the list. My method was simple and stubborn. Show up to training twice a day, work hard, repeat. The 100km swim weeks were met with 100km run weeks. As far as I was concerned, recovery was not being at training.
That thinking didn’t start with sport. Not being outworked was etched into me from my military years, and I carried it straight into corporate roles and then being a CEO. Recovery never featured. It never had to, until age and health decided to slow me down and I ran out of ways to argue with them.
And I understand the idea of not taking recovery seriously or not knowing where to start when life is as busy as it is for you today. I’ve lived with that mental model for most of my working life.
But let’s contrast elite athletes with senior leaders.
Elite athletes train for four to five hours a day and actively recover for the rest of the day. They sleep, eat, stretch, and receive treatments to help improve sustained output, all in service of the training time that counts.
A CEO performs for ten or twelve hours and recovers approximately never. Then, when judgement starts to slip, we reach for the wrong diagnosis and tell ourselves we have a discipline problem or there isn’t enough time in the day.
We also have a strange relationship with the term ‘recovery’. We often equate recovery with a holiday or retreat or the sporting version of recovery (like a massage) that we once knew in the heyday of our long-lost athletic careers.
Reframing recovery
Recovery isn’t the reward you collect once the performance is done. It’s the precondition for the performance being any good. We’ve inverted it. We treat rest as what you earn after the decisions are made, when it’s the thing that determines whether those decisions are worth making.
Put it in terms nobody would argue with. You would never board a flight knowing the pilot had been awake for nineteen hours. You’d get off the plane. And yet that’s the condition many CEOs are in when they price a deal, restructure a team, or decide who to let go. We accept a state in ourselves that we would find disqualifying in anyone we hand our safety to.
Easier said
It’s easy for me to prescribe recovery from here, because I learned the hard way what ignoring it costs. But I know it’s different in your seat. An athlete’s year has an off-season built into it. The calendar does the work. Yours doesn’t. Nobody hands a CEO fifteen hours of recovery time. The pace is relentless and there’s always a reason this quarter is the one where rest has to wait.
This isn’t a lecture about balance. Balance implies a steady state you get to settle into, and that state doesn’t exist in leadership. What does exist is design and the frame the CEOs I coach find useful is oscillation, not endurance.
Endurance is what I did for two decades. Grind, hold on, hope and outlast.
Oscillation is different. It’s the deliberate switch between full effort and full recovery at intervals you set. Here are three examples:
Daily: One genuine off switch. Not a lighter version of work, and not the phone in the other room while your mind stays in the meeting. A real stop, where the machinery of the day powers down for a defined stretch. For me it’s early, before anyone needs anything. For you it might be a walk with no audio, or an hour after dinner that the business has no claim on. The specifics matter less than the switch being real.
Weekly: One block nobody can book. A recurring window that doesn’t move for family, a client, a board member, or an opportunity. The test of whether it’s protected is whether it survives a good excuse, because a bad week will always supply one. If it collapses the first time something important lands on it, it was never a block. It was a preference.
Seasonal: One full disconnect a year. Not a working holiday with a nicer view. A genuine step away, long enough that the business has to operate without you. And here’s the test that matters. Does the business flinch? If it can’t run for two weeks without you, you haven’t found a recovery problem. You’ve found a dependency you’ve been calling indispensability, and it’s worth more to fix that than to feel needed.
If you want to know whether any of this applies to you, don’t audit your calendar. Audit your decisions.
Think about the worst call you made last quarter. Not the one that went wrong through bad luck, the one you’d take back if you could. Now ask what state you were in when you made it. How much sleep. How many consecutive weeks without a break. How long since you’d had a day where nobody could reach you. In my experience the answer is rarely a mystery once you look. The decision you regret and the state you were in tend to sit right next to each other.
None of this makes you slower
That’s the assumption underneath, that oscillation is a tax on ambition, that the people who rest get overtaken by the people who don’t. It runs the other way. The degradation is the tax. You just can’t feel it, because tired judgement rates itself as fine. That’s what makes it dangerous. It quietly lowers the quality of your decisions while telling you you’re operating normally.
The resistance to taking recovery seriously usually comes down to one fear, that recovery means caring less.
It doesn’t. I’m as ambitious now as I was at thirty, and I wouldn’t ask you to be any different.
I have a narrower ask. Build in the recovery you need that your life will never hand you on its own, so the ambition has something to run on.
Because there are two ways to lead a company. You can survive it, holding on and treating the exhaustion as proof you’re taking it seriously. Or you can enjoy it and show up to do the work, have energy left over to invest in the relationships that matter and when the time comes, leave the company in great shape for the next leader before stepping into the next arena with energy and excitement.
Your call. What’s it going to be?
PS If this essay helped, Episode 227: Why some decisions need speed while others need time from my podcast is worth a listen. Tune in on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
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