From Doing to Being
Silvia Lago on the inner dynamics of corporate sabbaticals and the quiet transformation of modern leaders
A quiet exodus is underway in the corporate world.
High-performing executives are stepping away from their careers—not to retire, but to rediscover themselves. What they find in that space between ambition and rest is changing how we understand work, identity, and human fulfillment.
The statistics tell part of the story. In 2025, burnout among professionals hit a record 66%, with three-quarters of employees reporting moderate to severe stress. Meanwhile, Gen-Z workers began championing a new concept to battle workplace stress and find a way out—the “micro-retirement.”
But statistics only scratch the surface. In boardrooms and C-suites around the world, people once defined by perpetual motion are pausing—sometimes for the first time in their careers. These sabbaticals are not indulgences. They are acts of self-preservation, even self-discovery—an urgent search for the person buried beneath years of performance and productivity.
The conditions that led here have been building for decades. Remote work blurred the borders between professional and personal life. Economic uncertainty eroded the promise of linear careers. A generation raised to optimize every minute has finally reached its limit. And in that collective exhaustion, a new movement is taking shape—one that prizes being over doing, presence over performance.
When Achievement Becomes Identity
Curious about this emerging phenomenon, Silvia Lago, an executive coach and Affiliate with Russell Reynolds Associates, undertook a study of corporate sabbaticals, and a disturbing pattern was exposed. Of the 20 executives who participated—all of whom had taken extended sabbaticals—the majority had allowed their identity to become dangerously fused with their sense of professional achievement. They had become, in Lago’s words, “human doings” rather than “human beings.”
“I was becoming more and more of a dark, tangled mess,” one participant said of her pre-sabbatical state. Another recognized the danger signs: “My life was all about work. If I stayed like this I would definitely burn out.”
Keep in mind—these weren’t struggling employees or deadweight. They were stars rising through their organizations at breakneck speed, accumulating accolades like trophies.
The modern workplace creates what psychologists call an “achievement treadmill.” The faster you run, the faster it moves. Social media amplifies this effect, transforming professional networking into performance art where every career move is curated for maximum impact. LinkedIn has become the new keeping-up-with-the-Joneses, except we’re comparing job titles instead of lawns.
This culture breeds executives who measure their worth in metrics: revenue generated, teams managed, deals closed. But what Lago’s research demonstrates is that those metrics make a poor foundation for human identity. When self-worth depends on quarterly results, what happens when those results inevitably falter?
The Triggers
The catalysts that drive successful people to abandon successful careers are remarkably consistent. Lago identified several patterns: chronic stress approaching burnout, significant personal loss, or a deepening sense that work lacks meaning. Sometimes it’s a values clash—discovering that the corporate culture they’ve thrived in no longer aligns with who they want to be.
“The toxic environment was changing me. I didn’t recognizing myself anymore,” one executive explained. Another developed physical symptoms: “I had an anxiety crisis, with insomnia and irritability.”
These weren’t dramatic midlife crises or sudden epiphanies. They were gradual realizations that the life they’d built wasn’t sustainable.
The corporate world’s traditional response to these breaking points has been to ignore them or treat them as personal failings. Take a vacation. Get therapy. Learn to manage stress better. But Lago’s research suggests something different: these aren’t bugs in the system, they’re features. They’re natural responses to unnatural pressures, healthy reactions to unhealthy environments.
What makes this particularly urgent today is the acceleration of these pressures. The pandemic didn’t create burnout culture, but it stripped away many buffers that made it tolerable. Commutes that provided transition time disappeared. Office friendships that offered emotional support became Zoom squares. The thin line between work and life didn’t just blur—it evaporated.
The Power of Unstructured Time
The most counterintuitive finding in Lago’s research: the participants who planned their sabbaticals least were often transformed by them most.
Those who approached time off like another project to optimize—scheduling every day, setting ambitious goals, treating rest like another form of productivity—missed the point entirely.
“I planned every single minute of it,” one executive admitted about his company-sponsored sabbatical. “I went back to the company, and ended up leaving after one year.” The irony wasn’t lost on him: he’d tried to solve over-optimization by over-optimizing his solution.
The executives who experienced genuine transformation shared a different approach: they learned to surrender control.
They traveled without itineraries, lived without schedules, and—perhaps most importantly—existed without achievements to validate their worth. In that space of uncertainty and unstructured time, something shifted: they began to remember who they were before they became what they did.
“I didn’t plan my days. I tried to do everything differently than when I’m in my working mode,” one participant explained. “I enjoyed the small things; the spontaneous moments.” Another described learning to “float” instead of constantly swimming: “Before I would swim from side to side of the pool, fearing that I would sink. The best part of my sabbatical was learning how to float.”
This surrender isn’t just philosophical—it’s practical. Modern neuroscience confirms what ancient wisdom traditions have long taught: our brains do their most creative work when we’re not actively trying to solve problems. The default mode network, active when we’re daydreaming or at rest, generates insights and makes unexpected connections. But this network only functions when we stop forcing it to perform.
Three Stages of Transformation
Through her analysis, Lago identified a consistent pattern in how people experience sabbaticals—and by extension, how they navigate major life transitions. She calls these stages “Fitting In,” “Being,” and “Belonging,” drawing from psychological theories of adult development and identity formation.
In the “Fitting In” stage, people conform to external expectations and social rules. They become what their organizations need them to be, often at the expense of their authentic selves. Most corporate high-achievers spend years or even decades in this stage, climbing ladders that may be leaning against the wrong walls.
The “Being” stage is the sabbatical itself—a liminal space where old identities are suspended and new ones haven’t yet formed. This is often the most uncomfortable phase, filled with uncertainty and anxiety. “In the beginning, I cried every day,” one participant recalled. “It took me months to start enjoying my sabbatical.” But it’s also where transformation becomes possible.
The “Belonging” stage represents integration—returning to work and relationships with a clearer sense of self and boundaries. People in this stage aren’t rejecting society or their careers entirely; they’re engaging with them more authentically. They’ve learned the difference between fitting in and belonging.
“When I came back from sabbatical, I was a different version of myself,” one executive reflected. “Trivial things stopped mattering. What mattered was the larger scheme of things and I began to look at things from a more holistic perspective”
The Corporate Dilemma
Companies that offer sabbaticals face a fundamental paradox: they’re essentially paying employees to potentially realize they don’t want to work there anymore. Lago’s research confirms this risk—several participants never returned to their original companies, and those who did often came back with very different priorities and boundaries.
Yet companies that have embraced sabbatical programs report unexpected benefits. Employees return with fresh perspectives, renewed energy, and often, surprisingly, deeper loyalty—not to the company as an institution, but to colleagues and work that truly matters to them. They become more discerning about how they spend their time and energy, but also more effective when they do engage.
The key difference, Lago found, was in how companies framed these programs.
When sabbaticals were treated as rewards for high performance or opportunities for professional development, they often failed to deliver transformative results. When they were offered as genuine opportunities for rest and reflection—with no strings attached and no expectation of measurable returns—they succeeded.
This creates obvious challenges for HR departments trained to measure ROI on every investment. How do you quantify the value of an employee learning to “float” instead of constantly swimming? How do you budget for transformation that can’t be captured in performance metrics? These questions reflect broader tensions between humanistic approaches to employee wellbeing and business imperatives for measurable outcomes.
When Opportunity Meets Awareness
One of the most intriguing aspects of Lago’s research involves what Carl Jung called “synchronicity”—meaningful coincidences that seem to guide people toward important insights or opportunities. Participants who learned to release control during their sabbaticals reported a striking number of these experiences.
One executive discovered an old notebook with a list of things she wanted to become and found “scuba diving instructor” written there. When she decided to pursue it, she unexpectedly received money from a tax return that made the dream possible. Another, frustrated by poor food quality while traveling, started blogging about the experience and accidentally discovered the business opportunity that would become her new career.
These stories might sound like wishful thinking, but they point to something more practical: when we stop forcing outcomes and start paying attention to possibilities, we notice opportunities that were always there. The executive who became a scuba instructor didn’t manifest money from the universe—she became aware of resources she’d been ignoring. The food blogger didn’t stumble into success by accident—she recognized a market need because she’d stopped being so focused on her predetermined path.
“Leadership is more about being than doing,” one participant observed, quoting leadership expert Joseph Jaworski. In a culture obsessed with action and achievement, this insight feels almost radical. But the executives who internalized it reported becoming more effective leaders, not less. They delegated more, listened better, and inspired others through authenticity rather than authority.
Visualizing Change
Perhaps the most revealing aspect of Lago’s research came from an unusual source: she asked participants to draw representations of themselves before, during, and after their sabbaticals. The results were striking.
Before their breaks, people drew themselves as constrained figures—trapped in fishbowls, running on treadmills, or literally boxed in by corporate structures. Their self-representations were often dark, stressed, or fragmented. One executive drew herself with her mouth covered, representing how she felt unable to express her true self in her corporate role.
During their sabbaticals, the drawings opened up. People depicted themselves in nature, underwater (several chose water metaphors), or simply as more relaxed versions of themselves. The rigid structures disappeared, replaced by fluid, organic forms.
The “after” drawings were perhaps most interesting. Rather than showing people who had completely rejected their former lives, they showed integration. Figures standing confidently but peacefully, connected to both their inner selves and their outer environments. Not floating free from responsibility, but engaged with it more authentically.
These visual representations capture something difficult to express in words: the difference between being shaped by external forces and choosing how to engage with them. It’s the difference between fitting in and belonging.
Making It Last
The end of a sabbatical presents its own challenges. How do you maintain insights gained during months of reflection when you’re back to back-to-back meetings? How do you preserve spaciousness when your inbox is overflowing?
Some participants in Lago’s study struggled with this transition more than others. Those who tried to return to their exact same roles and routines often found themselves slipping back into old patterns. But those who used their sabbatical insights to make concrete changes—setting new boundaries, changing jobs or industries, or restructuring their work-life integration—were more successful at maintaining their transformations.
“When I returned, I had courage to say no to a role in the HQ and persist on another which was back in my country,” one executive shared. “Reconnecting with my roots gained importance for me.” Another described learning to create regular spaces for reflection even within a busy schedule: “Even when I went back to my urban life, I created space to feel connected with nature somehow.”
The key insight:
Sabbaticals aren’t magic bullets that permanently solve work-life balance issues. They’re catalysts for change that still require ongoing intention and effort to maintain. But they can provide clarity about what changes are worth making and the confidence to make them.
A Skill for Uncertain Times
Lago’s research, conducted in 2018, feels remarkably prescient in 2025. The themes she identified—burnout, identity confusion, the search for meaning beyond achievement—have only intensified. The “Great Resignation” of 2021-2022 can be understood as a mass version of what her participants experienced individually: people stepping back to reassess their relationships with work.
But there’s a crucial difference between quitting in frustration and taking a sabbatical with intention. The former is reactive; the latter is proactive. Sabbaticals, when done thoughtfully, create space for transformation rather than just escape.
This distinction matters as we navigate an economy where traditional career paths are increasingly obsolete. The executives in Lago’s study weren’t just taking breaks from their jobs—they were learning skills for navigating uncertainty, for finding meaning beyond external validation, and for maintaining their humanity in increasingly dehumanizing systems.
These are skills we all need as artificial intelligence automates routine tasks, as economic volatility makes long-term planning difficult, and as climate change forces us to reconsider fundamental assumptions about progress and growth. The ability to pause, reflect, and adapt may be the most valuable professional skill of the coming decades.
The Fundamental Question
In the end, Lago’s research circles back to something bigger than sabbaticals—or even work. It asks a question most of us try to avoid: What does it mean to live a human life inside a system built for productivity?
Kierkegaard once wrote:
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forward.”
The trick, as these leaders discovered, is to do both at once: to look back long enough to learn, but not so long as to stop moving.
In an age addicted to acceleration, the sabbatical whispers a counter-cultural truth: that real growth often requires stillness, and that our deepest human work happens not in the striving, but in the pausing to reflect on the fullness of who we are.
References
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