Yesterday, in the middle of a conversation that had nothing to do with productivity, strategy, or goals, a long term client said something that stopped me.

“You don’t build a life you need a vacation from.”

I told him immediately that I loved it. Not because it was clever, but because it was gently confronting. It landed in that place where truth doesn’t shout. It simply stays, waiting for you to be honest with yourself.

It touched a nerve. Not because it reflects where I am today in my work as a coach, but because it describes a struggle I knew well in my earlier years.

For a long time, vacations were my oxygen. I worked hard, pushed through, stayed switched on, and counted the days until I could disconnect. The break wasn’t just a break. It was relief. A chance to breathe again. A return to myself.

At the time, that felt normal. Even responsible. Work hard, earn your rest. That’s the script many of us inherited. But over the years, something uncomfortable became harder to ignore. The more I needed the vacation, the more something felt off in the life I was returning to.

This isn’t a blog about laziness, escape, or working less. It’s about something subtler. It’s about alignment.

Needing rest is human. Wanting a break is healthy. But needing to get away from your own life just to feel okay again is a signal worth listening to.

For many high performers, the issue isn’t that they work too much. It’s that they live in a constant state of internal friction. They are successful on the outside and depleted on the inside. They move fast, deliver results, and carry responsibility, but somewhere along the way, the life they built stopped feeling like theirs.

I see this often with leaders, entrepreneurs, and family business members. Calendars fill up. Expectations rise. The sense of choice quietly erodes. What began as a calling slowly turns into an obligation. What once gave energy now consumes it.

Vacations then become pressure valves. Necessary ones. But temporary.

You recharge, reset, feel like yourself again, and then slowly slide back into the same patterns. The same pace. The same compromises. The same unspoken belief that this is just how it is.

The phrase my client shared points to a different question altogether. Not “How do I recover better?” but “What am I recovering from?”

Often, it isn’t the work itself. It’s the way we relate to it.

It’s the roles we keep playing without checking whether they still fit. The boundaries we never renegotiated. The values we quietly sidelined in the name of growth, duty, or loyalty. The version of ourselves we kept performing long after it stopped being true.

For me, this insight first arrived as a shock. It came after my wife passed away. Life forced a pause I had not chosen, and in that pause, the way I had been living and working could no longer go unquestioned.

Later, when I was fortunate enough to rebuild and restart, the change became more intentional. I slowed certain things down. I let go of roles that no longer made sense. I became more honest about what genuinely energized me and what drained me, even when the draining things looked impressive from the outside.

I also had to redefine rest. Not as escape, but as rhythm. Not as something earned only after exhaustion, but as something woven into how I live and work.

Building a life you don’t need a vacation from doesn’t mean every day is light, joyful, or easy. Real lives include pressure, grief, responsibility, and effort. But underneath it all, there is coherence.

You recognize yourself in your days.

There is space to breathe inside the work. Space to say no. Space to be human. Space to switch off without guilt and switch on without resentment.

Ironically, when life becomes more aligned, vacations don’t lose their value. They deepen. They stop being acts of survival and become what they were always meant to be. A change of scenery. A widening of perspective. A pleasure rather than a rescue.

The client who said this wasn’t offering advice. He was naming something he had learned the hard way. That’s why it stayed with me.

So perhaps the question isn’t whether you need a vacation. Most of us do.

The question is whether you’re running toward your life when you come back, or bracing yourself to endure it again.

Because the most meaningful work we do isn’t just building careers, companies, or legacies.

It’s building a life that, even on hard days, still feels like home.

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