above the noise

21 Mar

Why a day in the mountains can completely shift how a leader thinks, feels, and decides

Perspective changes everything. I saw it again yesterday.

I took Juliet into the mountains for a Trailblazer day.

She is a CEO in a scaling business, two kids, a lot on her shoulders, and like so many business leaders, she has been in it for a while. You know that feeling where everything is important, everything needs you, and your brain never quite switches off? That was the inspiration for the day out.

We did not sit down and try to fix the business.

We walked. We climbed. We ended up wild swimming, twice, ending up in a tarn that looked like an infinity pool dropped into the top of the world, the mountain perfectly mirrored in the water.

The Lake District was completely alive. Lambs everywhere, frog spawn in the shallows, that early spring energy where everything feels like it is waking up again, and your heart feels like it’s bursting with sheer joy of feeling alive.

And somewhere across the day, you could feel her come back to herself.

I see this a lot, and it still stops me every time.

Because nothing in the business has changed. The same challenges are still there. The same decisions are waiting. The same pressures exist.

But the way she is holding them shifts.

That is the bit people underestimate.

When you are inside your business, you are too close to it. Your attention is constantly being pulled. Emails, messages, people, decisions. Your brain is working flat out just to keep up, never mind think clearly. There is a term for it, directed attention fatigue, but you do not need the term to recognise the feeling.

You just feel full.

Out there in the wild, something different happens.

Your brain gets a break from that constant demand. There is compelling research showing that even short periods in nature improve focus and decision-making, which makes complete sense when you feel it happening in real time.

Then you add movement into the mix. Walking, climbing, being in your body. That alone has been shown to significantly increase creative thinking.

So you have space, and you have movement, and things start to loosen.

But the biggest shift yesterday came in the water.

We were stood in this tarn, looking out across the mountains, and she said:

“I just feel like there is no problem in my business I could not conquer being out here. I feel alive. I feel invincible. I feel brave. I used to look at things and think ‘I can’t do that’. But now I know I can. I might be scared, but I know I can do it.”

And I just let that sit for a moment.

Because that is the work.

That is what changes everything.

There is a word for that feeling as well. Awe.

It is what happens when you are somewhere that makes you stop. When the view is bigger than you expected. When everything goes a bit quiet for a second because your brain cannot quite process what it is seeing.

And it turns out that feeling is incredibly powerful.

It slows you down. It gets you out of reactive thinking. It helps you make better decisions. It even changes your sense of time so you stop rushing everything.

You can feel that without needing the research, but I find it fascinating that it is all there in the data as well.

Standing in that water, her world got bigger again.

And when your world gets bigger, your problems get smaller. Not irrelevant, not gone, but back in proportion.

That is perspective.

And perspective is everything in leadership.

Because the quality of your decisions is not just about how smart you are or how good your strategy is. It is about the state you are in when you make them.

If you are overwhelmed, everything feels urgent.

If you are tired, everything feels harder.

If you are buried in the detail, everything feels bigger than it is.

Give someone space, give them distance, give them a moment of awe, and suddenly they can see clearly again.

That is what I watched happen yesterday.

And then there is a deeper layer to it, which is harder to put into neat language.

When you spend enough time out there, you start to hear yourself again.

Not the version of you that is responding to everyone else.

The actual you.

There is research that talks about this as well, around authentic leadership and how time in nature increases self-awareness and alignment, but again, you do not need the paper to feel it.

You can see it in someone’s face when it lands.

That is what came back for her yesterday. The certainty. The belief. The sense that she can handle what is in front of her, even if it is uncomfortable.

Nothing external changed.

Everything internal did.

That is why these days matter.

Not because they are a break from the business, but because they change how you return to it.

If you are deep in it at the moment, and you know you are too close to see clearly, this is your reminder that you do not have to solve it from inside the noise.

You can step out for a day and get that perspective back on a Trailblazer.

Or, if you want to go further, there are just two places left on this year’s women’s Rewilding retreats. One in April and one in September, and a handful of places on the inaugural men’s Rewilding retreat in November. They take place in landscapes like this, where this kind of shift is not a moment in the day, but something you get to properly settle into.

Sometimes nothing changes until your perspective does.