I arrived at the Gwinganna wellness retreat last week not really knowing what I needed.
I knew I was curious. I knew I wanted a digital detox. I knew I wanted to learn from nutritional biochemist Dr Libby about burnout and health. But I couldn’t have told you what I actually needed from the experience.
So, naturally, I did what I often do. I tried to optimise it. Get up early. Do the hard cardio. Fill every hour. Make the most of every opportunity. And if I’m honest, I was probably trying to earn the recovery.
Yet throughout the time, it felt like the place kept revealing something different through the seminars, conversations, meditations, reflections and connections.
At times, it felt as though the place knew before I did. It was almost as though the place kept revealing exactly what I needed, long before I was ready to admit it.
But perhaps that’s not quite true.
Because perhaps I already knew. I just hadn’t slowed down enough to hear it.
The Moment It Shifted
The shift came somewhere I didn’t expect. I went into a deep tissue massage hoping to release some sore hamstrings and a stiff neck. And I came out with that and something else entirely.
At one point during the treatment, my masseuse found a particularly tight spot in my back and asked what I wasn’t trusting. The conversation that followed surprised me.
We talked about intuition, self-doubt and the tendency to look outside ourselves for answers. Then she said: “You already know. Trust that.”
She encouraged me to let go of some things other people had said to me over the years, the words that had planted doubt. For those reasons, I’d become very good at trusting the data and much less comfortable trusting myself.
What I needed to remember was that wisdom matters too.
-
Experience matters.
-
Observation matters.
-
Lived experience matters.
Maybe I didn’t need another piece of evidence. Maybe I needed to trust the evidence I’d already accumulated.
And the irony wasn’t lost on me… I went to Gwinganna wanting to learn from one of the world’s leading experts on health and burnout. And I did. The science was fascinating. But some of my biggest breakthroughs came somewhere entirely different.
I arrived looking for evidence and left being reminded to trust my own wisdom too.
And perhaps that’s the point. Science and wisdom aren’t opposing ideas. They belong together.
I spend my days helping people see what they already know, yet I’d hadn’t been trusting my own.
The Same Thing I See Every Day
That’s what struck me most, because it’s the same pattern I see in my work constantly.
Leaders often know. Teams often know. Organisations often know.
In room after room, when I ask audiences what sustainable high performance requires, the answers come quickly – strong relationships, boundaries, time to think, motivation, the ability to cope and grow, a sense of purpose.
The answers are rarely a mystery. People don’t need to scour journal articles to find them.
The issue is rarely knowledge. More often, it’s interference. There is so often a gap between knowing and doing. A gap created by pressure, habit, fear, expectations, identity and responsibility.
And over time, that gap comes at a cost.
If We Already Know, Why Don’t We Act?
This is question I so often find myself returning to.
If we already know these things matter, why do we push through exhaustion? Why do we continue carrying responsibilities that aren’t ours to own? Why do we wait until something breaks before we pay attention?
Because performance rarely collapses overnight. It leaks.
-
Recovery gets delayed.
-
Boundaries disappear.
-
The conversations don’t happen.
-
Pressure accumulates.
None of it seems significant on its own. But collectively, it creates what I’ve started thinking about as performance leakage.
It’s when technically you’re ‘fine’, but you’re snappier, slower to make decisions, and you need more caffeine to get the same work done. The targets are still met. The business is still growing. But the effort required to sustain performance keeps climbing.
At Gwinganna, I was surrounded by people who were highly capable, successful on the outside but carrying an accumulation of pressure over time that was causing them to feel exhausted, burnout or lost. And for many, the cost had simply become too hard to ignore.
But the signals had been there long before the consequences arrived.
Maybe the most important lesson I took from Gwinganna wasn’t learning something new. Maybe it was being reminded of something I already knew, and finding the courage to trust it.
The time reminded me that science and wisdom can coexist. That evidence matters. But so does experience. That data matters. But so does our own knowing.
Sometimes the bravest thing isn’t learning something new. It’s acting on something we’ve known for a while.
So what’s something you know that needs your attention, and what’s stopping you from acting on it?
