‘Best job? Holidays.’ What that sentence is actually saying.

A senior executive. 50 years old. Fifteen years of career still ahead.

Worn down by shifting priorities, projects that never land, P&L reviews that keep coming back like tides.

“Best job? Holidays.”

Do you laugh quietly — or do you recognise yourself?

Because we’ve all had those stretches when what we’re living no longer feels like us. When we’re waiting for some perfect future to arrive on its own. Retirement. The lottery. Permanent vacation.

This isn’t laziness. It’s a signal.

A signal that something in what you’re doing today has drifted from what you actually want to be living.

What I’ve learned — with him and with others — is that you don’t get out of this through willpower. You get out of it through direction.

Not a five-step plan. A direction.

What you no longer want, named clearly. What you actually want — not the fantasy, the real thing. And then one action a day, however small, that points that way.

Why direction changes everything — the neurological mechanism

This isn’t positive thinking. It’s cognitive discipline.

The brain looks for evidence of whatever you’re focused on. Focus on what you’re running from, and it finds more reasons to run. Focus on what you want to build, and it starts detecting opportunities — even ones that weren’t visible before.

The mechanism: the reticular activating system (RAS), a structure in the brainstem that filters the millions of inputs your brain receives daily. It selects what aligns with what you’ve chosen to pay attention to.

Focusing on a direction reconfigures what your brain perceives as possible.

What I work on with executives

Holding that direction when daily pressures pull in every direction. That’s precisely where sparring partner work earns its place: not to provide someone else’s vision, but to help clarify their own — and not let go of it at the first obstacle.