The Step Most Leaders Miss

I spent part of my summer on a 10-day fast in the Bavarian mountains. At the end of the programme I was offered the option of completing what is called the three day build-up (to help my body acclimatise to food again) or extending the fast and committing to doing it at home. I spoke to some of the pros (people who have done this many times) and was given the strong advice to complete the build-up on site. Of course I was tempted to skip it and squeeze more out of the fast, but in the end I followed their advice. 

Build-ups matter: they are transitional spaces we would rather skip because they don’t immediately appear to have much value. We presume ‘the doing’ is the value and are tempted to skip over the transitions, the spaces between things. This is true for my fast and it’s a concept I’m familiar with in my work. 

The build-up phase of my fast helped me get used to food again slowly and mindfully. It regulated my process, I formed new habits, and it gave me time to think about how I want to eat going forward, how to harness the experience to live better. 

The first thing I was given after the fast was an apple. Yes, a simple apple, and it was a feast! The apple acts as a symbolic transition. It signals a change going forward and is gentle as it awakens the taste buds, the digestive system and invites a contemplation of new habits and I discovered that I’m not a conscious eater.

Anyway, all this made me think about leadership and how we move from place to place without integrating where we’ve been and how it might impact where we are going next. 

A lot of the time we are on autopilot. We do something, maybe even something new, have experiences that might be beneficial to ourselves or our work, then we go back to what we did before, and wonder why nothing is changing. No learning, no integration. 

The build-up phase is a transitional space. A place where you can go slow, think about what you have learned, and how you want to let it shape the road ahead. When we skip the space between we slip straight back into the familiar: old habits, old energy, old patterns. Nothing integrates. Nothing changes. The neural pathways are well trodden and without a conscious pause we just follow them. 

The element that is missing is the formation of the new. Allowing the experience to shape you in a new way and the way you do things. New habits are often formed here. 

In my work with leaders I see this in the team events I run with executive teams. After an event a team often feels energised and excited about the frank conversations they have had, the insights they have generated and the desire to work differently going forward. They are confident that things will change. Back at work, the environment is exactly how they left it: the rest of the organisation is working under old assumptions, the pressure is on, deadlines are looming, and before they know it, they are back in the old groove. 

The build-up plays an important role in these events. It provides time for teams to design a conscious transition, to think about the elements they could change to help them adopt new behaviours and practises so they can continue to have the important but difficult conversations - from how they open team meetings, to the way the agenda is structured, to where they hold their meetings to who does what and how they can support each other when ‘tricky’ situations - situations that are likely to draw them back into old patterns - arise. 

As for my own build up? It made me reflect on so many things, including how eating mindfully transforms the experience for me. As a symbol of my transition, I bought myself some beautiful soup spoons, the ones we used during the fast.