could you disappear for 2 weeks and your business wouldn’t miss a beat? because i just tested it.
in September, right before our busiest season, i took my first real unplug since May 2019. two weeks. no slack. no emails. no “just peeking.”
and here’s what happened: clients were fine, my team not only handled it but felt proud of what they ran without me, and i came back with energy and ideas that wouldn’t have surfaced if i’d stayed in the grind.
on the flight home i kept thinking about italy. they have aperitivo every evening. it’s not about the spritz. it’s about the pause. a ritual of closing out work and easing into life. a built-in reset.
meanwhile, here in the U.S., time off still feels like a guilty indulgence. the numbers back it up 🚨 almost half of Americans take 10 or fewer vacation days a year, while most europeans take 21 days or more. and Americans report feeling more guilt about stepping away, while europeans simply… don’t.
Italy isn’t perfect either. locals will tell you that plenty of industries there still demand long hours and extra shifts, and cost of living adds its own pressures. but the cultural posture toward resetting is just different.
and that’s what i’ve been chewing on. i didn’t plan this two-week reset as some big leadership experiment. looking back though, i realize i’d been pressure testing pieces of it for years without naming them: making sure clients felt supported with proactive work, creating clearer ownership on the team, slowly trusting that things could run without me. by the time i finally stepped away, the reset worked.
so now i’m wondering: what if we treated the reset as part of leadership instead of a guilty luxury?
not just about vacation, but about creating the space for fresh thinking and making sure you’ve built the kind of team and process that can actually carry it forward.
i’m curious — have you ever tried a full reset like this? what happened?
can micro moments like grabbing a coffee with the team or taking our dog for a walk around the block serve as an aperitivo reset?
and how can we lead by example so teams can do the same when things scale …
