When the Vacation Didn’t Recharge You

Thoughts on reorienting toward work, and minimizing the whiplash when you’re coming back from OOO.

Last week, I returned home after taking 9 flights, 3 rental cars, and 1 ferry in the last 30 days. As I write that sentence, it hits me how exhausting it was (and how delusional I was to book that amount of travel, in hindsight!)

Vacation is a true privilege, and travel for pleasure even more so. And yet even in my immense gratitude for that privilege, I cannot deny the deep depletion that only shuttling to and from airports can initiate.

I’m ironically more tired after my vacation than before.

The fatigue was obvious to me last week. My focus was like the sputtering sprinkler in our back garden: Trying to spray haphazardly at everything but also not getting at any one thing fully in particular. All my internal gears grinding, not gliding, against each other, trying to find some rhythm.

I found myself tempted to plan another vacation, this time more relaxing, of course…

But that too is a farce. I remember coming back from my honeymoon, a few years ago — likely the most relaxed and truly recharged I’d ever felt on a trip — and finding the reentry into work like a slap in the face. The whiplash of changing context so quickly, from barely checking Slack for a few weeks to facing a mountain of DMs and to-dos once I returned. It was disorienting.

Yes, I had rested, but I sure as hell was not recovered.

In reflecting on all of this, I’ve realized: Vacation, travel, time away from work, no matter how relaxing or non-relaxing it might be, is simply that — time away. True restoration comes in our orientation when we return.

Someone much wiser and thoughtful than me once remarked that the reason we go away from work and travel is usually not just pure escapism or needing to turn “off” etc. But in fact, it’s usually to learn something. To gain some distance on your life as it was, and to find a different point of view. A new perspective.

To learn that the flamenco music you heard in Granada rekindles your interest in dusting off your old guitar. Or to have the conversation with your mom in the kitchen childhood home in Rhode Island reminds you why you’re extremely partial to stargazer lilies.

Or, as I did recently, you revisit your old high school and realize it’s smaller than you thought… and that a lot of things you thought were important then were also much smaller as well.

This perspective, this capture of a new angle, a new discovery is, in a way, sacred. It likely couldn’t have come about any other way. It anchors into us, and then expands, like a growing seed, nourishing other parts of us.

Take note of this, and dare to widen the aperture and bring that new perspective into your work life. Ask yourself: What can I look at differently today?

Perhaps it’s the project that you felt needed to be solved in one way, actually might have another way of tackling it. Or the direct report you were very frustrated by before you left on this trip, you now see a different approach to try in your conversation.

For me, personally, I came back from this most recent vacation and changed up some staffing in our company in a healthy way, that I’m not sure I would have done with as much conviction, prior to this.

The power of the time away isn’t necessarily the experience in itself, but the new vantage point we gain and can apply once we return.

If we don’t expect renewal, we can perhaps find what is even more rare: Perspective.

I hope you find a slice of that perspective as I did, in writing this for myself.

-Claire

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If you found this helpful and you’re looking for ways to deepen your growth as a leader, here are ways you can work with me, Claire, directly:

• 🧭 Explore 1:1 executive coaching with me personally, as you navigate a new leadership role or new organizational dynamics. (I’ve had the privilege of coaching leaders at Apple, Uber, and fast-moving organizations, and have helped over 50,000 managers grow through Canopy’s trainings.)

• 📣 Invite me to deliver team keynotes and workshops, remotely or in person on this very topic of coaching + developing your team.

• 🚂 Partner with me to roll-out a leadership training program for your managers.

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