Dr Margaretha Montagu – described as a “game changer”, “gifted healer”, “guiding light” and “life-enriching author” – is a certified transformational retreat leader who guides her clients towards their most meaningful and fulfilling lives, particularly when navigating life transitions – virtually, or with the assistance of her Friesian Horses, at their home in the southwest of France.
There’s a particular kind of tired that has nothing to do with sleep. It’s the tiredness that comes from lugging something around — a decision, a conversation you haven’t had yet, a truth you’re not sure is yours to tell — folded up small enough to fit in a pocket, but never quite small enough to forget it’s there. A weight that doesn’t show up on any scale, that follows you from the school run to the meeting room to the quiet kitchen at 2 a.m., where it lies there quietly reminding you it hasn’t gone anywhere.
Workplace stress rarely announces itself as a crisis. It arrives, instead, as a hundred small postponements — I’ll deal with it tomorrow, I’ll say something next week — each one perfectly reasonable on its own, until one day you look up and realise you’ve been carrying the same unfinished things for months. Priya’s letter is a bit dramatic, granted (most of us aren’t quietly building a case against corporate fraud over our morning coffee). But the shape of her week — the rehearsing, the almost-saying, the letting Thursday’s version of the problem get heavier than Monday’s — will feel uncomfortably familiar to anyone who’s ever contemplated a difficult conversation, working up the nerve to dive in.
The letter lived in the zip pocket of Priya’s blazer, folded into eighths, four pages of 12-point Calibri titled Re: Falsification of Q3 Safety Inspection Reports — and by Wednesday it had started to feel less like paper and more like something with a pulse.
She knew exactly what was in it. She’d written it. Cross-referenced it, in fact, against eleven pressure-test logs that Gary had signed off as nominal when the raw sensor data — the data nobody but Priya seemed to have actually opened — put three of those valves well past the point where “nominal” stopped being a word you were legally allowed to use. She’d checked it twice. She’d checked it a third time at eleven p.m. on a Tuesday, alone in the office, telling herself she was staying late for the Henderson deck, which was a lie so thin even the vending machine seemed to see through it.
What she hadn’t done was hand it to anyone.
Wednesday, she made it as far as his doorway.
“Got a sec?” she said, one hand resting flat against the zipper, as if she could keep the letter still by force of will alone.
Gary looked up, radiating the harried cheer of a man who had never once suspected he might deserve consequences. “For you? Always. Unless it’s Henderson, in which case, no, never, that account is cursed, and I am but a humble mortal.”
“Not Henderson.”
“Then sit, sit.”
She sat. She didn’t unzip the pocket. Instead, she asked, with the studied casualness of someone absolutely not building a case, how the March inspections had gone — whether the valve numbers had come back clean, whether corporate had flagged anything.
“Basically fine,” Gary said, already reaching for his phone, already half a sentence into something else. “Give or take. You know how it is.”
She did not know how it was. She knew, precisely, in numbers, how it was not fine — and for one long second she almost said so, mouth half-open around the shape of eleven valves, Gary — when his phone lit up with a name that made him swivel his chair away from her, voice dropping into the register men use for calls they don’t want overheard in a glass office. Corporate’s asking about March again, he murmured. No — no, tell them the file’s still being finalised.
Priya sat very still. The letter, against her ribs, suddenly felt less like a document and more like evidence someone might come looking for.
Thursday, she didn’t go near his office. She didn’t need to. At 4:50, walking past the print room with a coffee she didn’t remember pouring, she saw Gary’s assistant leaving with a banker’s box, and heard, through the half-open door, the particular hush of two people trying to sound unbothered on a phone call about retention policy and what exactly gets archived versus what gets, you know, cleaned up.
She stopped walking. She did not go in for a refill.
Back at her desk, she opened her email and found, sitting quietly in her Sent folder from three weeks ago, the original message where she’d flagged the sensor discrepancy to Gary directly, cc’ing no one, because at the time she’d still believed in giving people the chance to fix their own mistakes. Gary had never replied. Now she understood why: he hadn’t needed to. He’d simply started making the problem disappear one archived file at a time, and if she waited even one more day, there might be nothing left to attach her letter to. No inspection logs. No sensor data. Nothing but her word against a soufflé that had, morally speaking, collapsed weeks ago.
The letter was no longer a warning. It was a deadline.
Friday morning, she wore the blazer again, and this time, when she zipped the pocket shut she did it the way you’d holster something.
She didn’t stop at Gary’s office. She walked straight past the glass wall — he looked up, halfway to a wave, and something in her face made the wave die before it finished — and kept going, toward the elevator, toward the fourteenth floor, toward Legal, where a woman named Denise she’d never spoken to was about to become, in the space of one conversation, the only person standing between eleven faulty valves and whatever came next.
The elevator doors opened. Behind her, distantly, she heard Gary’s door open too — heard him say her name once, not unkindly, almost like a question — and she did not turn around.
Some letters you deliver. This one, she realised, stepping inside and letting the doors close between them, she’d been carrying so someone could finally stop him before there was nothing left to prove he needed stopping.
The doors sealed shut. The letter, folded in eighths, sat exactly where it had all week — except now, for the first time, it felt lighter.
I can’t promise a walk through the French countryside will hand you the courage Priya found in that elevator. But I can tell you that most of what we carry seems to weigh a good deal less by the second or third day of putting one foot in front of the other, with nothing to do but walk, and no one expecting anything from you except to show up for dinner.
If there’s something you’ve been folding into eighths and carrying around for longer than you’d like to admit, you’re always welcome to come and walk it out. Drop me an email at MargarethaMontagu@gmail.com— I’d love to hear from you.
If your soul is craving fresh air, meaningful movement, and a chance to reconnect with nature, join us on aCrossRoads Camino de Santiago Walking Retreat – a powerful, natural reboot for your body, mind, and spirit. No fitness requirements. No forced bonding. No pressure to have a breakthrough. Just one foot in front of the other, and finding your way to a brighter future.
Do you dream of escaping your stressful life to raise a herd of goats or grow sunflowers in the south of France? Then you may be ready for an Esprit Meraki retreat. Get access to this “very serious” quiz to help you figure out how urgent your need for a change of scenery is, when you subscribe to my monthly newsletter.
Author Bio: Dr Margaretha Montagu – described as a “game changer”, “gifted healer”, “guiding light” and “life-enriching author” – is an experienced medical doctor, a certified NLP practitioner, a medical hypnotherapist, an equine-assisted psychotherapist (EAGALAcertified) and a transformational retreat leader who guides her clients through life transitions – virtually, or with the assistance of her Friesian and Falabella horses, at their home in the southwest of France.
Have you ever noticed that some problems shrink once you start walking?
The problem itself hasn’t changed. The difficult conversation still needs to happen. The diagnosis hasn’t disappeared. Your bank account hasn’t magically recovered. Yet somewhere between the first few hundred metres and the next bend in the path, your mind begins to loosen its grip.
You breathe a little more easily.
You stop rehearsing imaginary arguments.
You notice the birdsong, the breeze, the scent of wildflowers or freshly cut hay.
Without quite knowing how, you begin to think clearly.
I’ve always found that fascinating.
With my medical background, I do appreciate the science. Walking increases blood flow to the brain, reduces stress hormones and encourages the release of chemicals that improve mood and cognitive function. It’s hardly surprising that we often think more clearly after a walk than after another hour spent worrying in the same chair.
But I suspect there’s something else going on too.
Walking changes our perspective in more ways than one.
When we’re anxious, our world closes in on us. Our attention narrows until all we can see is the problem directly in front of us. We go round and round the same thoughts like a hamster on a wheel, hoping that one more lap will somehow produce a different answer.
It rarely does.
Walking interrupts that pattern.
The rhythm of placing one foot in front of the other has a calming effect that sitting still often doesn’t. The body is moving forwards, and somehow the mind begins to believe that moving forwards is possible too.
Perhaps that’s why walking has been part of the human story for so long.
Countless ordinary people have gone for “a walk to clear my head” without ever reading a scientific paper explaining why it works.
Sometimes instinct gets there before research does.
One of the things I’ve observed over the years is that answers rarely arrive when we chase them. They tend to appear when we create enough space for them to catch up with us.
That’s why I encourage people not to fill every walk with podcasts, phone calls or endless scrolling. There is nothing wrong with those things in moderation, but they don’t leave much room for your own thoughts to emerge.
Silence can feel surprisingly uncomfortable at first.
Then something changes.
The mental noise begins to settle, rather like muddy water left undisturbed. The questions that seemed impossibly tangled became a little clearer. Not always because you’ve found the answer, but because you’ve finally found the right question.
Someone arrives convinced they need to make a huge decision immediately. They spend a couple of days walking quietly through fields, forests and sleepy villages, and by the end of the week, they’re asking completely different questions.
Their circumstances haven’t necessarily changed.
They have.
I think that’s because walking reminds us of something we often forget during difficult times.
Life is lived one step at a time.
Not twenty miles at a time.
Not five years at a time.
One step.
When we’re facing a life quake, a change, challenge or crisis, it’s tempting to believe we must have the whole plan ready before we can begin. We want certainty before we take action. Unfortunately, life is rather stingy with certainty.
What it usually offers instead is the next step.
And then the one after that.
Looking back, most of the important changes in my own life didn’t begin with a grand master plan. They began with a conversation, an unexpected opportunity, a quiet realisation or quite literally a long, slow walk.
Only in hindsight did the path make sense.
Perhaps that’s the greatest lesson walking has to teach us.
You don’t need to see the entire journey before you take the first step.
You simply need the courage to trust that the path will reveal itself as you keep moving.
After all, every destination, no matter how extraordinary, begins in exactly the same way.
With one foot in front of the other.
If your soul is craving fresh air, meaningful movement, and a chance to reconnect with nature, join us on aCrossRoads Camino de Santiago Walking Retreat – a powerful, natural reboot for your body, mind, and spirit. No fitness requirements. No forced bonding. No pressure to have a breakthrough. Just one foot in front of the other, and finding your way to a brighter future.
“I am an experienced medical doctor – MBChB, MRCGP, NLP master pract cert, Transformational Life Coach (dip.) Life Story Coach (cert.) Stress Counselling (cert.) Med Hypnotherapy (dip.) and EAGALA (cert.) I may have an impressive number of letters after my name, and more than three decades of professional experience, but what qualifies me to excel at what I do is my intuitive understanding of my clients’ difficulties and my extensive personal experience of managing major life changes using strategies I developed over many years.” Dr M Montagu
Do you dream of escaping your stressful life to raise a herd of goats or grow sunflowers in the south of France? Then you may be ready for an Esprit Meraki retreat. Get access to this “very serious” quiz to help you figure out how urgent your need for a change of scenery is, when you subscribe to my monthly newsletter.
When I first started hosting Camino de Santiago walking retreats in rural Gascony, the French Tuscany, I assumed I would be the one doing most of the teaching.
I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Over the years, dozens of people have arrived at my farmhouse carrying backpacks, walking boots, and lives that had gradually become much too heavy. Some were still working. Some had retired. Some were rebuilding after loss, illness or divorce. Others simply couldn’t explain why they felt so restless.
They thought they had come to walk a couple of sections of the Camino.
In the end, they became MY teachers. The CrossRoads Conversations blog post series explores what my guests have taught me over the last twenty-odd years.
It would make wonderful marketing if I could tell you that spending two days walking the Camino de Santiago will solve all your problems.
Unfortunately, it won’t.
You may still have a difficult boss, a challenging marriage, an uncertain retirement, grown-up children who insist on making their own questionable decisions, and a tax return waiting for you when you get home. The Camino, for all its many gifts, has yet to develop a talent for dealing with bureaucracy.
What it does, however, is something rather more subtle.
It changes how we see our problems.
Over the years, I’ve hosted dozens of people at my little farmhouse in southwest France. They come from all walks of life, although many have one thing in common: they have reached a point where life feels heavier than it used to. Some are standing at a crossroads. Others have recently lost someone they love, are adjusting to retirement, recovering from illness, or simply wondering when life became so relentlessly complicated.
And then they spend two or three days walking sections of the Camino de Santiago along the historic Le Puy route.
Alone.
People are often surprised when I tell them that I don’t walk with my guests. Surely, they ask, wouldn’t it be more supportive if I accompanied them?
Perhaps.
But over the years, I’ve discovered that people don’t usually need someone beside them telling them where to put their feet.
The red-and-white arrows do a perfectly good job of that.
What people often need is the freedom to notice their thoughts.
One of the unexpected things I’ve learned is that nature has an extraordinary way of restoring perspective.
Not because it whispers the answers.
Not because trees possess secret therapeutic powers.
And certainly not because vineyards spend their evenings discussing existential philosophy.
It happens because nature gently reminds us that we are part of something much bigger than the small, noisy world we’ve built around ourselves.
On the Camino, life becomes beautifully simple.
You walk.
You breathe.
You notice.
The warm scent of pine drifts through the air. Swallows skim low over fields of ripening wheat. Cicadas provide the soundtrack on hot summer afternoons. In autumn, the vineyards glow gold and crimson beneath impossibly wide Gascon skies. Even the silence has texture.
Without really trying, your attention shifts.
Yesterday, you were replaying an awkward conversation for the seventeenth time.
Today, you’re wondering how many people have walked this same path before you.
Yesterday your inbox felt like a national emergency.
Today, you’re watching a line of ants carrying crumbs many times their own size and thinking they seem remarkably organised.
Nature has an amusing way of exposing our exaggerated sense of urgency.
It quietly reminds us that the seasons continue regardless of whether we’ve answered every email.
The vines don’t panic because it’s already Tuesday.
The oak trees don’t compare themselves to the walnut trees.
The sunflowers don’t spend their mornings worrying whether they’re blooming too early in the season.
Only we humans seem to have perfected the art of exhausting ourselves by measuring our worth according to how busy we are.
I’ve noticed something else over the years.
Guests rarely return from a day’s walking announcing that they’ve solved every problem in their lives.
What they do say is remarkably consistent.
“I can see things more clearly.”
“I think I know what I need to do.”
“It doesn’t feel quite so overwhelming anymore.”
The problems haven’t disappeared.
Their perspective has changed.
And changing your perspective is a remarkably empowering activity.
It offers enough distance from everyday life for us to see patterns that were invisible when we were caught up in them.
Perhaps that’s why I never promise my guests that the Camino will change their lives.
Instead, I tell them something much simpler.
Walk.
Pay attention.
See what happens.
Because while nature may not solve our problems for us, it has an extraordinary gift for helping us remember that we are usually stronger, wiser and more resourceful than we believed when we first laced up our walking boots.
And sometimes, that change in perspective is all we need.
Could you do with seeing life from a different perspective?
If you think you—or someone you care about—might benefit from stepping away from the noise of everyday life and spending a few days walking the Camino de Santiago through the peaceful countryside of southwest France, I’d love to tell you more about my small-group Camino de Santiago walking retreats.
Sometimes the greatest change begins not with finding new answers, but with looking at old questions from a different perspective.
You can email me at MargarethaMontagu@gmail.com.
If your soul is craving fresh air, meaningful movement, and a chance to reconnect with nature, join us on aCrossRoads Camino de Santiago Walking Retreat – a powerful, natural reboot for your body, mind, and spirit. No fitness requirements. No forced bonding. No pressure to have a breakthrough. Just one foot in front of the other, and finding your way to a brighter future.
Do you dream of escaping your stressful life to raise a herd of goats or grow sunflowers in the south of France? Then you may be ready for an Esprit Meraki retreat. Get access to this “very serious” quiz to help you figure out how urgent your need for a change of scenery is, when you subscribe to my monthly newsletter.
What Life Lessons Can You Learn While Walking the Camino de Santiago? – a free guide filled with 10 not just “quaint anecdotes” or Instagram-worthy moments (though there are plenty of those) but real transformations from real people who walked this insight-giving trail – Subscribe to my monthly newsletter to Download the Guide
I put the essence of who I am, and everything I have experienced that makes me who I am, with great enthusiasm, into my retreats, courses and books. – Dr Margaretha Montagu (MBChB, MRCGP, NLP master pract (cert,) Transformational Life Coach (dip,) Life Story Coach (cert) Counselling (cert,) Med Hypnotherapy (dip) and EAGALA (cert)
When I first started hosting Camino de Santiago walking retreats in rural Gascony, the French Tuscany, I assumed I would be the one doing most of the teaching.
I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Over the years, dozens of people have arrived at my farmhouse carrying backpacks, walking boots, and lives that had gradually become much too heavy. Some were still working. Some had retired. Some were rebuilding after loss, illness or divorce. Others simply couldn’t explain why they felt so restless.
They thought they had come to walk a couple of sections of the Camino.
In the end, they became MY teachers. The CrossRoads Conversations blog post series explores what my guests have taught me over the last twenty-odd years.
Why So Many Guests Leave With Less
One of the first things I notice when guests arrive at my little farmhouse in the Gers isn’t their smiling faces. It’s their luggage.
Some people pull up with suitcases that suggest they’re headed to the North Pole for six months, not to a five-day retreat in the sun-warmed southwest of France. A bag for clothes. A bag for shoes. A bag for “just in case.” Every year, I watch another wheel snag on the gravel, and another guest laughs and says, “I think I brought a bit too much, maybe?”
I know that feeling. Most of us do. We pack for sunshine and for rain, for elegant dinners and impromptu barbecues, for books we’ll never crack open and snacks we’ll never eat. Travelling light, it turns out, does not come naturally to the human species.
Until we decide to walk the Camino.
During my Camino de Santiago walking retreats, guests spend two or three days on foot along the historic Le Puy route. The walks are unguided — deliberately so. I’ve come to believe that people find their way through life more easily when they’re trusted to find their own way along a path, rather than being herded down it.
Before setting off, I nudge them gently: take only what you truly need. Water. A picnic. A waterproof, if the sky looks moody. Maybe a notebook. That’s more or less it.
And somewhere between those first uncertain steps and the end of the day’s walking, something quietly shifts. Carrying a lighter backpack has a funny way of reminding you that other things in life have gotten unnecessarily heavy, too.
Not everyone who arrives here is grieving or burnt out. Some are wondering what comes after retirement. Some, despite having hit a successful stride in their careers, still feel oddly restless. Some have recently lost someone dear. Others just have that nagging sense that life has become far more complicated than it needs to be.
After hundreds of crossroads conversations, I’ve noticed a pattern: the heaviest things people carry are seldom visible.
Expectations. Old disappointments. The pressure to keep achieving. Guilt. Regret. Responsibilities that quietly stopped belonging to them years ago. The belief that they need every answer before they’re allowed to take the next step.
Unlike an overstuffed suitcase, none of that gets left behind in the bedroom. It comes along for the whole walk.
The Camino has a gentle way of bringing this into focus. It doesn’t solve anything, and it certainly doesn’t perform miracles. What it does is make space — enough space for people to finally notice what they’ve been hauling around without ever questioning it.
I never set out to host retreats for people standing at life’s crossroads. And yet, somewhere along the way, I realised that’s precisely who kept showing up on my doorstep. Doctors, teachers, business owners, engineers, artists, retirees, parents, grandparents. Different stories, remarkably similar undertone: I can’t keep going on like this.
The Camino rarely answers that outright. Instead, it asks a quieter question:
What are you still lugging around that you should be leaving behind?
Not your responsibilities, obviously. Not the people you love. But perhaps the unrealistic expectations. The relentless busyness. The need to prove yourself, again and again. The habit of dragging yesterday into tomorrow.
If there’s one thing dozens of guests have taught me, it’s this: people usually arrive believing they need to add something to their lives. More confidence. More certainty. More purpose. More answers.
Far more often, they leave having let go of something instead.
A few unnecessary burdens stay behind on the Camino. Like the stone many people bring from home to leave on the path.
If you (or someone you know) are carrying more emotional baggage than you’d like to admit — and you suspect a few days on the Camino de Santiago might help you set some of it down — email me at MargarethaMontagu@gmail.com
If your soul is craving fresh air, meaningful movement, and a chance to reconnect with nature, join us on aCrossRoads Camino de Santiago Walking Retreat – a powerful, natural reboot for your body, mind, and spirit. No fitness requirements. No forced bonding. No pressure to have a breakthrough. Just one foot in front of the other, and finding your way to a brighter future.
Do you dream of escaping your stressful life to raise a herd of goats or grow sunflowers in the south of France? Then you may be ready for an Esprit Meraki retreat. Get access to this “very serious” quiz to help you figure out how urgent your need for a change of scenery is, when you subscribe to my monthly newsletter.
What Life Lessons Can You Learn While Walking the Camino de Santiago? – a free guide filled with 10 not just “quaint anecdotes” or Instagram-worthy moments (though there are plenty of those) but real transformations from real people who walked this insight-giving trail – Subscribe to my monthly newsletter to Download the Guide
“I am an experienced medical doctor – MBChB, MRCGP, NLP master pract cert, Transformational Life Coach (dip.) Life Story Coach (cert.) Stress Counselling (cert.) Med Hypnotherapy (dip.) and EAGALA (cert.) I may have an impressive number of letters after my name, and more than three decades of professional experience, but what qualifies me to excel at what I do is my intuitive understanding of my clients’ difficulties and my extensive personal experience of managing major life changes using strategies I developed over many years.” Dr M Montagu
Whenever people find themselves at a crossroads, they almost always ask the same question.
“What should I do?”
Should I leave my job?
Should I move house?
Should I retire?
Should I end the relationship?
Should I start a business?
Should I walk the Camino?
They’re perfectly reasonable questions, and I’ve asked many of them myself over the years. The trouble is, they often assume that the answer lies somewhere outside us, waiting to be discovered like a missing sock behind the washing machine (how did it even get there?)
Life, inconveniently, is rarely that obliging.
When people come to me during a major life transition, they often hope I’ll tell them what to do next. After all, I’m a doctor. Surely I must have a diagnosis, a treatment plan and perhaps a prescription to make the whole business a little less complicated. When they say “complicated”, most actually mean “terrifying.”
I’m afraid life doesn’t work like that. Mine certainly doesn’t.
In medicine, the correct diagnosis usually comes before the treatment. If someone has a pain in their chest, we don’t immediately prescribe medication and hope for the best. We first figure out what is causing the pain.
Oddly enough, we often do the exact opposite when it comes to life’s bigger questions. We rush towards decisions before we understand what is causing the pain.
No wonder so many people find themselves climbing ladders that are leaning against the wrong wall.
I suspect that is why major life crises can feel so unsettling. They don’t just force us to make decisions; they force us to question the assumptions that shaped the decisions we’ve already made.
Perhaps the better question isn’t, “What should I do?”
Perhaps it’s, “What really matters to me?”
The answers aren’t the same.
Imagine two people who both decide to leave demanding careers.
From the outside, they’ve made the same decision.
One leaves because they’re running away from stress. Six months later, they discover that stress has an irritating habit of following them wherever they go.
The other leaves because they have become clear about the kind of life they want to live. They value time with family, meaningful work, good health and mornings that don’t begin with checking emails before breakfast.
Their decision looks identical.
Their motivation couldn’t be more different.
Purpose has a remarkable way of simplifying complicated decisions. It doesn’t necessarily make them easy, but it gives them direction.
When we know what truly matters, saying “yes” becomes simpler because we’re also prepared to say “no”.
Without that clarity, every opportunity looks equally tempting. Every path seems equally uncertain. We spend months comparing options when the real issue isn’t choosing between them. It’s that we haven’t decided what sort of life we’re trying to create in the first place.
I’ve seen this happen on countless occasions.
People arrive feeling desperate for answers, convinced that changing jobs, moving house or booking a one-way ticket to somewhere with better weather will solve everything. Sometimes those changes are exactly what’s needed.
Sometimes they aren’t.
More often than not, what changes first is not their postcode but their perspective.
Once people reconnect with what gives their life meaning, the practical decisions begin to fall into place. Not because life suddenly becomes simple, but because they finally have a compass.
I’ve always preferred a compass to a map.
A map tells you exactly where to go, but it only works if someone else has already walked the route. A compass is different. It doesn’t tell you every twist and turn. It simply helps you keep moving in the right direction, even when the path disappears from view.
Purpose works in much the same way.
It won’t spare you from uncertainty. It won’t eliminate difficult choices or guarantee that every decision will be the right one. What it will do is help you navigate those moments with greater confidence because your choices are anchored in something more solid than convenience.
So, if you’re standing at one of life’s many crossroads, wondering what to do next, resist the temptation to rush towards the nearest answer.
Instead, pour yourself a cup of tea, take the dog for a walk, sit beneath a tree or spend an afternoon somewhere quiet. Then ask yourself a different question.
Not, “What should I do?”
But, “What kind of life do I want to wake up to each morning?”
The answer may not arrive immediately.
But when it does, you’ll probably find that the next steps are clear.
Author Bio: Dr Margaretha Montagu – described as a “game changer”, “gifted healer”, “guiding light” and “life-enriching author” – is an experienced medical doctor, a certified NLP practitioner, a medical hypnotherapist, an equine-assisted psychotherapist (EAGALAcertified) and a transformational retreat leader who guides her clients through life transitions – virtually, or with the assistance of her Friesian and Falabella horses, at their home in the southwest of France.
If your soul is craving fresh air, meaningful movement, and a chance to reconnect with nature, join us on aCrossRoads Camino de Santiago Walking Retreat – a powerful, natural reboot for your body, mind, and spirit. No fitness requirements. No forced bonding. No pressure to have a breakthrough. Just one foot in front of the other, and finding your way to a brighter future.
Do you dream of escaping your stressful life to raise a herd of goats or grow sunflowers in the south of France? Then you may be ready for an Esprit Meraki retreat. Get access to this “very serious” quiz to help you figure out how urgent your need for a change of scenery is, when you subscribe to my monthly newsletter.
The neuroscience of uncertainty, decision fatigue and emotional overload.
One of the most common questions I hear from people struggling through a major life change is: “Why am I so tired all the time?”
Not the sort of tired that disappears after a good night’s sleep.
This is different.
It’s the kind of exhaustion that makes replying to an email feel like climbing a mountain. The sort that leaves you staring into the fridge, unable to remember why you opened it. The sort that has you wondering whether you’ve lost the plot.
You’ve not.
In fact, your exhaustion may be one of the most normal responses to an abnormal situation.
When life changes dramatically, we tend to focus on the obvious losses: the relationship, the career, the home, the financial security or the future we had imagined.
What we don’t notice is the invisible workload our brain has suddenly taken on.
Every day, your mind is trying to answer hundreds of questions it never had to think about before.
What happens next?
Did I make the right decision?
Can I afford this?
Who am I now?
What if things never get any better?
Should I stay?
Should I leave?
Should I start again?
Even making ordinary decisions can become unexpectedly difficult.
Tea or coffee?
Reply now or later?
Go for a walk or stay at home?
None of these choices are particularly important on their own, but together they create something psychologists call decision fatigue. Every decision uses mental energy. When uncertainty becomes your status quo, your brain has far more decisions to process than usual.
It’s rather like leaving dozens of apps running on your phone all at once.
Eventually, the battery drains.
Your brain works in much the same way.
Even as a doctor, I’ve been fascinated by how closely our minds and bodies work together. Emotional stress isn’t “just in your head”. Your body responds as though it has detected a physical threat. Stress hormones increase. Sleep becomes lighter. Concentration suffers. Your nervous system remains on high alert, even while you’re sitting quietly on the sofa.
No wonder you’re exhausted.
Then there’s another, often overlooked, source of tiredness.
Uncertainty.
Human beings generally cope better with bad news than with endless uncertainty. At least bad news gives us something concrete to deal with. Uncertainty keeps the mind endlessly rehearsing possible futures, searching for answers that simply don’t exist yet.
It’s mentally draining.
This is one reason I encourage people not to make every important decision immediately after a LifeQuake. When your internal battery is running low, even making sensible choices can feel too demanding.
Instead, begin by conserving your energy.
You don’t have to solve your entire future this week.
You only need to decide what the next good step might be.
That might mean making one phone call.
Having one honest conversation.
Walking for half an hour without your phone.
Writing down the worries circling endlessly in your mind.
Or simply allowing yourself an afternoon without feeling guilty for resting.
We live in a culture that treats rest as a reward for productivity.
Nature tells a different story.
Winter isn’t just rest, it’s preparation.
Seeds spend months hidden beneath the soil before anyone sees evidence of growth. Trees appear lifeless for months before fresh leaves emerge in spring. The quiet season isn’t empty. It’s essential.
Perhaps you’re in one of those seasons too.
Your tiredness doesn’t necessarily mean you’re falling behind.
It may simply mean your mind and body are doing the extraordinary work of adapting to a life you never expected to be living.
That work is largely invisible. But invisible doesn’t mean unimportant.
So, if today all you managed to do was make yourself a cup of tea, take the dog for a walk, or simply get out of bed when everything inside you wanted to stay under the duvet, don’t dismiss it.
Recovery isn’t measured only by dramatic breakthroughs.
More often, it’s measured by small acts of courage repeated day after day.
One quiet step. Then another. Until, almost without noticing, you realise you’re no longer just surviving the storm.
You’re learning how to remain standing in it.
Author Bio: Dr Margaretha Montagu – described as a “game changer”, “gifted healer”, “guiding light” and “life-enriching author” – is an experienced medical doctor, a certified NLP practitioner, a medical hypnotherapist, an equine-assisted psychotherapist (EAGALAcertified) and a transformational retreat leader who guides her clients through life transitions – virtually, or with the assistance of her Friesian and Falabella horses, at their home in the southwest of France.
If your soul is craving fresh air, meaningful movement, and a chance to reconnect with nature, join us on aCrossRoads Camino de Santiago Walking Retreat – a powerful, natural reboot for your body, mind, and spirit. No fitness requirements. No forced bonding. No pressure to have a breakthrough. Just one foot in front of the other, and finding your way to a brighter future.
Do you dream of escaping your stressful life to raise a herd of goats or grow sunflowers in the south of France? Then you may be ready for an Esprit Meraki retreat. Get access to this “very serious” quiz to help you figure out how urgent your need for a change of scenery is, when you subscribe to my monthly newsletter.
Whenever someone tells me they’re going through a major life change, I notice something curious.
They almost always begin by talking about what has happened.
“I lost my job.”
“My marriage ended.”
“The children have left home.”
“We’ve moved abroad.”
“I’ve retired.”
These are all significant events, of course. They deserve our attention. But after years of listening to people who are going through some of life’s biggest challenges, and of going through these challenges myself, I’ve become convinced that the events themselves rarely cause the biggest problems.
The problems usually arrive a little later, often disguised as a simple question.
“So who am I now?”
That’s the question that keeps people awake at three o’clock in the morning.
Our identity is rather like the scaffolding around a building. Most of the time, we don’t notice it’s there. We simply assume we know who we are because life keeps confirming it.
You’re the doctor.
The teacher.
The business owner.
The husband.
The wife.
The parent.
The caregiver.
Then one day, life quietly removes the scaffolding.
The job disappears.
The relationship ends.
The children no longer need you in the same way.
Your health deteriorates.
It’s finally time to retire.
Suddenly, the labels you’ve worn for years no longer fit quite as comfortably, if at all.
No wonder life feels uncertain.
We’re trying to answer tomorrow’s questions wearing yesterday’s identity.
One of the biggest mistakes we make during periods of change is assuming we need to rebuild our old life as quickly as possible. We rush to find another job, another relationship, another project or another distraction because we’re desperate to feel like ourselves again.
But perhaps we are not meant to become our old selves again.
Perhaps we were meant to become someone smarter.
I don’t mean changing your personality. If you love terrible puns, you’ll probably still love terrible puns after retirement. If you’ve always preferred tea to coffee, that isn’t likely to change either.
I’m talking about something much deeper.
The story you tell yourself about who you are.
For years, one of my retreat guests had introduced herself by her profession before saying anything else about herself. It had become her identity. When redundancy arrived unexpectedly, she didn’t just lose a job. She lost the answer to the question, “Tell me about yourself.”
It took time, many conversations and plenty of solitary walking before she realised that she had confused what she did with who she was.
It’s an easy mistake to make.
Our culture applauds achievement. At dinner parties we’re often asked, “What do you do?” rather than, “What lights you up?” or “What matters to you?”
We slowly begin to believe that our value lies in our productivity, our titles or our accomplishments.
Until life takes one of them away.
The good news is that identity isn’t something we find once and keep forever.It’s something we continue to shape throughout our lives.
Every major transition offers us an opportunity to ask questions.
Not, “How do I get my old life back?”
But, “Who do I want to be next?”
That’s a very different conversation.
It’s gentler.
More hopeful.
And, oddly enough, far more practical.
Because once you begin to understand who you’re becoming, the decisions that once felt overwhelming often become much clearer. You stop chasing opportunities that belong to your old life and start recognising the ones that belong to your next chapter.
Life changes can feel like grand scale demolitions.
Sometimes they are.
But demolition isn’t the opposite of construction.
It’s often the beginning of it.
So, if life has recently stripped away one of the labels you’ve carried for years, resist the temptation to replace it too quickly.
Sit with the question for a while.
Walk with it.
Write about it.
Pray about it, if that’s part of your life.
Allow yourself the extraordinary privilege of discovering who you are when all the labels have fallen away.
You may find that the person emerging is smaller than the one you were before.
Author Bio: Dr Margaretha Montagu – described as a “game changer”, “gifted healer”, “guiding light” and “life-enriching author” – is an experienced medical doctor, a certified NLP practitioner, a medical hypnotherapist, an equine-assisted psychotherapist (EAGALAcertified) and a transformational retreat leader who guides her clients through life transitions – virtually, or with the assistance of her Friesian and Falabella horses, at their home in the southwest of France.
If your soul is craving fresh air, meaningful movement, and a chance to reconnect with nature, join us on a Camino de Santiago Walking Retreat in the southwest of France. This isn’t just a scenic hike – it’s a powerful, natural reboot for your body, mind, and spirit. Imagine quiet paths, rolling hills, cozy evenings, and slow conversations. No fitness requirements. No forced bonding. No pressure to have a breakthrough. Just one foot in front of the other, and finding your way to a brighter future.
When we hear the word grief, most of us think of bereavement.
We think of funerals, sympathy cards and the aching absence of someone we loved.
But grief is far less selective than that.
Over the years, I’ve come to believe that many people walking through a bog life change aren’t simply stressed, anxious or overwhelmed. They’re grieving. The trouble is, they don’t always realise it.
You can grieve the career that once gave your days structure and meaning.
You can grieve the marriage that ended, even if you know it was the right decision.
You can grieve the home where your children grew up, the country you left behind, the healthy body you once took for granted, or the dreams that quietly slipped away while you were busy making other plans.
You can even grieve the person you used to be.
Unlike bereavement, these losses rarely come with rituals. Nobody sends flowers because you’ve retired. There isn’t a memorial service for the business that failed or the identity you’ve outgrown. Friends often assume you should be excited about your new beginning, while you’re privately mourning the ending you never expected.
That can leave you feeling confused.
“I should be grateful.”
“I wanted this change.”
“So why do I feel so sad?”
The answer is surprisingly simple.
Every ending involves a loss, even when it’s a chosen ending.
I’ve seen this time and again. Someone finally escapes a toxic job, yet feels strangely empty. A long-awaited retirement arrives, only to be followed by restlessness rather than relief. A couple relocate to their dream home in the countryside, only to discover they miss the familiar routines and neighbours they were so eager to leave behind.
I’ve experienced it time and again.
Our emotions don’t always keep pace with our decisions.
As a doctor, I’ve learned that healing often begins with an accurate diagnosis. We wouldn’t expect a broken ankle to heal correctly if we insist it is merely a bruise. Yet we often do exactly that with emotional pain. We call it stress when it’s grief. We call it weakness when it’s loss. We tell ourselves to “get over it” without acknowledging what has disappeared.
No wonder so many people feel stuck.
The good news is that grief isn’t something to fear. It isn’t a sign that you’re moving backwards. More often, it’s evidence that something mattered. A lot.
The more we have loved, invested, hoped or belonged, the more likely we are to grieve when life changes.
In fact, I sometimes think grief deserves a better reputation.
And, perhaps most importantly, it creates space for what comes next.
I’ve noticed that people begin to move forward not when they stop grieving, but when they stop fighting the fact that they are grieving.
There’s a quiet relief in finally saying, “Of course this is hard. I’m closing a chapter of my life.”
That simple acknowledgement often lifts a surprising weight from our shoulders.
We live in a culture that celebrates beginnings. New jobs, new homes, new relationships and fresh starts all receive applause.
Endings rarely do.
Yet every meaningful beginning asks us to let go of something first.
If you’re navigating a life change and finding yourself unexpectedly emotional, perhaps there’s nothing wrong with you.
Perhaps you’re simply honouring what has been.
Give yourself permission to do that.
Not forever. Grief isn’t somewhere we’re meant to pitch a tent and stay. But neither is it something to sprint through as quickly as you can.
Walk through it instead.
At your own pace.
One day you’ll look back and realise that what felt like the end of your story was, in truth, the closing of one chapter and the quiet beginning of another.
Every new chapter deserves its opening pages.
But first, we have to finish reading the last one.
Author Bio: Dr Margaretha Montagu – described as a “game changer”, “gifted healer”, “guiding light” and “life-enriching author” – is an experienced medical doctor, a certified NLP practitioner, a medical hypnotherapist, an equine-assisted psychotherapist (EAGALAcertified) and a transformational retreat leader who guides her clients through life transitions – virtually, or with the assistance of her Friesian and Falabella horses, at their home in the southwest of France.
If your soul is craving fresh air, meaningful movement, and a chance to reconnect with nature, join us on a Camino de Santiago Walking Retreat in the southwest of France. This isn’t just a scenic hike – it’s a powerful, natural reboot for your body, mind, and spirit. Imagine quiet paths, rolling hills, cozy evenings, and slow conversations. No fitness requirements. No forced bonding. No pressure to have a breakthrough. Just one foot in front of the other, and finding your way to a brighter future.
Just when you’ve finally got the hang of things, the children have grown up, your career feels secure, the mortgage is becoming less frightening, or you’ve settled into a comfortable routine, life has a habit of throwing a rather spectacular spanner in the works.
A redundancy. A divorce. A frightening diagnosis. The loss of someone you love. Retirement that doesn’t feel nearly as liberating as everyone promised. A move to a different country. Or perhaps nothing dramatic at all—just the unsettling realisation that the life you’ve spent years building no longer feels like it belongs to you.
Most of us assume these moments are interruptions. We tell ourselves that if we can just get through this difficult patch, life will return to normal.
But what if this is it? This IS normal?
I have come to the mind-shattering conclusion that constant change is normal/
Life isn’t a straight road. It twists, climbs, descends, doubles back on itself and occasionally disappears into the undergrowth altogether.
Over the years, I’ve had the privilege of meeting some seriously awesome people, who arrived at one of my retreats believing they were somehow failing at life.
Yet the more stories I heard, the more I realised something rather comforting.
They weren’t failing.
They were changing.
There’s an important difference.
A caterpillar doesn’t become a butterfly by trying harder to be a better caterpillar. At some point, the old version simply doesn’t fit anymore. The transformation is uncomfortable, messy and, from the outside, probably looks like everything has gone terribly wrong.
We aren’t all that different.
Major life changes often dismantle more than our circumstances. They quietly dismantle our identity. We lose the job, but we also lose the person we believed ourselves to be. We lose the relationship, but we also lose the future we had imagined. We retire from a career, only to discover that our sense of purpose retired with it.
No wonder it feels so disorientating.
One of the greatest myths our culture perpetuates is that successful people have their lives neatly sorted, everything firmly under control. In reality, every meaningful life includes seasons of uncertainty. The difference isn’t that some people avoid these chapters. It’s that they eventually stop seeing them as evidence of failure.
Instead, they begin to recognise them for what they often are: invitations.
Not invitations anyone would willingly accept, admittedly. I doubt many people wake up desperate for a personal crisis. But life’s most difficult chapters frequently ask questions that our comfortable years never do.
Who are you when the title doesn’t fit anymore?
What still matters when the plan falls apart?
What kind of life do you want to rebuild?
These aren’t easy questions, and they rarely have quick answers. In fact, trying to answer them too quickly is often part of the problem. We rush to replace what we’ve lost instead of taking time to understand how we’re changing.
I’ve learned that clarity rarely arrives because we think harder. More often, it appears when we create enough time and space to listen—to ourselves, to that quieter voice we’ve been too busy to hear.
Perhaps that’s why so many people find unexpected answers while walking. When the body moves steadily forward, the mind often follows. One thoughtful step at a time, problems that seemed impossible begin to loosen their grip, and possibilities quietly emerge where none seemed to exist before.
If your own life feels as though it’s falling apart at the moment, I’d like to offer you a different perspective.
Perhaps it isn’t falling apart.
Perhaps it’s falling into place in a way you simply haven’t recognise yet.
That doesn’t make today any easier. It doesn’t remove the grief, uncertainty or fear. But it does mean that feeling lost isn’t necessarily a sign you’ve taken a wrong turn.
It may simply mean you’re between chapters.
And every worthwhile story has lots of those.
Author Bio: Dr Margaretha Montagu – described as a “game changer”, “gifted healer”, “guiding light” and “life-enriching author” – is an experienced medical doctor, a certified NLP practitioner, a medical hypnotherapist, an equine-assisted psychotherapist (EAGALAcertified) and a transformational retreat leader who guides her clients through life transitions – virtually, or with the assistance of her Friesian and Falabella horses, at their home in the southwest of France.
If your soul is craving fresh air, meaningful movement, and a chance to reconnect with nature, join us on a Camino de Santiago Walking Retreat in the southwest of France. This isn’t just a scenic hike – it’s a powerful, natural reboot for your body, mind, and spirit. Imagine quiet paths, rolling hills, cozy evenings, and slow conversations. No fitness requirements. No forced bonding. No pressure to have a breakthrough. Just one foot in front of the other, and finding your way to a brighter future.
When you’ve outgrown the job, the industry, or possibly the identity you built in your thirties and forties, the Camino has a suggestion: start walking.
Does walking the Camino actually help with a career crisis?
Yes — but not by producing answers directly. A 5-day break with 3 days of sustained walking on the Camino in southwest France reduces rumination and restores the brain’s executive control, measurably, according to Stanford and University of Utah research. That cognitive shift is what makes the underlying career question audible. The clarity people report afterward is a byproduct of the walking, not a guarantee built into the itinerary.
This article explains why that works, what a typical five-day walking retreat involves, how it compares to therapy and career coaching, and what to do with the clarity once you have it. It includes a named case study, three peer-reviewed studies, and a comparison table to help you work out whether what you’re feeling is ordinary work frustration or something that needs more than a holiday to resolve.
5 Key Takeaways
A career crisis in midlife is not necessarily about failure. It is the signal that an identity built in your thirties has done its job and is ready to be renegotiated — and most workplaces give you no space to hear that signal clearly.
Walking in nature measurably reduces rumination. A 2015 Stanford study (Bratman et al., PNAS) found a 90-minute nature walk reduced both self-reported rumination and activity in the subgenual prefrontal cortex, the brain region tied to repetitive negative self-focus.
A five-day break is enough. The shift doesn’t require a sabbatical — it requires enough consecutive days of walking, nature, and removal from professional context for the brain’s default mode network to do the background processing your commute and your inbox don’t allow.
The Via Podensis through France offer this without overcrowded paths — walkable by anyone reasonably active, not requiring athletic preparation.
Clarity is not a five-year plan. Most people return from the Camino with a clearer question, if not a finished answer — and that distinction matters more than it sounds, because the wrong plan built on the right question is still the wrong plan.
The Woman Who Had Everything and Couldn’t Explain Why That Was the Problem
Sophia Renard was, by the metrics her industry used to measure such things, doing extremely well. She was forty-six years old, a senior partner at a marketing consultancy in Paris, a woman who had spent twenty-two years building a career with the focused determination of someone who had known exactly what she wanted since her mid-twenties. She had the partnership, the clients, the reputation, the LinkedIn profile that was, if she were being objective, genuinely impressive.
She had also, for approximately two years, been waking at four in the morning. Not with anxiety exactly — just awake, her mind running at full capacity with nothing in particular to process, which was somehow more disconcerting than if it had been processing something specific. Her doctor said the things doctors say. Her husband Luc suggested she was working too hard, which was accurate and not useful. A therapist asked good questions she answered articulately and left no clearer than when she arrived.
The Camino was Luc’s idea, framed carefully as a holiday rather than a prescription. She arrived in the French countryside on a Saturday in October, had dinner with the small group of other walkers, said little, and went to bed at nine.
She woke at four. Out of habit she reached for her phone, then put it face-down and lay listening to a silence that was older and less pressured than the Paris one. She began walking the next morning through French farmland that looked as though it had been managing perfectly well for centuries.
On the second day, on a long straight section between two villages whose names she’d already forgotten, a thought arrived so simple it stopped her walking.
She had spent twenty-two years doing what she’d decided she wanted at twenty-four. She had done it extremely well. And somewhere in the last two years, without ceremony, she had finished wanting it. Not the work — the wanting. The drive. It had quietly redirected itself somewhere she hadn’t yet looked.
She stood on the path for a long moment. A bird she couldn’t identify called from a field to her left. She began walking again. She did not have the answer yet. For the first time in two years, she had the question — and the question turned out to be most of the work.
Is what you’re feeling a career crisis, or just a bad few months?
The two are easy to confuse and respond to different things. Ordinary work frustration eases with a holiday and is usually tied to a specific project, person, or deadline. A deeper identity-level shift persists across good weeks and bad ones, shows up as unexplained early waking, and doesn’t lift when something at work goes well.
Here is a quick way to tell the difference before you book anything — a holiday for the first, a different kind of break for the second:
Signal
This is restlessness
This is something else
Frequency
Comes and goes with workload, eases on holiday
Persists even when the work itself is going well
Focus
Frustration with a specific project, boss, or team
A diffuse sense that the role itself no longer fits
Sleep
Occasional bad nights before a deadline or review
Recurring early waking with no specific trigger
Response to success
A win resolves the feeling, at least for a while
A win registers but doesn’t touch the underlying flatness
Timeframe
Weeks
Many months to several years
Why does walking bring career clarity?
Walking in nature shifts the brain into its default mode network — a state of undirected, self-referential thinking associated with insight and autobiographical processing. Professional environments do the opposite: meetings, inboxes, and targets keep the brain in directed-attention mode, which actively suppresses the kind of background processing a career question needs to surface.
This matters because the modern response to career uncertainty — career assessments, coaching frameworks, five-year plans — assumes clarity comes from more analysis. That assumption solves the wrong problem. A career crisis in midlife is rarely a lack of information. It’s a perception problem: you already have the data, you just can’t see your own situation clearly enough from inside it, because the environment that produced the question is also the environment preventing you from answering it.
The career clarity the Camino produces isn’t the result of thinking harder about the problem. It’s the result of finally, for three consecutive days, thinking about something else — and letting the brain do the work it’s been trying to do at four in the morning for two years.
Removing the professional context matters too. Identity at work is environment-dependent: take the office, the title, and the inbox away, and the role becomes visible as a construction rather than a fact. On the Via Podensis, you are not the senior partner. You are a person walking through a Gascon forest. For most people carrying significant professional identity, that’s unexpectedly clarifying.
How does a Camino walking retreat compare to therapy or career coaching?
Each tool does something different, and the comparison helps clarify which one you actually need right now.
Approach
Best for
Limitation
Therapy
Processing specific emotional content, patterns, or past experience with professional support over time
Talk-based; doesn’t directly engage the nature-walking mechanism that reduces rumination
Career coaching
Structuring a known goal into an action plan, CV, or transition strategy
Assumes you already know what you want; doesn’t help if the question itself is unclear
Camino retreat
Creating the cognitive conditions for the question to surface clearly in the first place
Produces clarity, not a finished plan — you still need to act on what it reveals
Many people use these in sequence rather than as alternatives: the Camino to find the real question, then coaching or therapy to work out what to do about it.
What does a five-day French Camino walking retreat actually involve?
For anyone picturing a religious pilgrimage with hostel dormitories and strangers with blisters, the small-group version looks different in practice:
Three guided walks across the retreat, typically 10–15km per day on the Via Podensis — slightly shorterthan the daily stage range walked on the full French Camino routes, but paced for a three-day walk rather than a month-long pilgrimage.
Same, comfortable accommodation each night — proper beds, in a 200-year-old farmhouse — with a maximum of four guests per retreat, so the group stays small enough for real conversation.
Meals built around the regional Gascon table: the kind of food that makes the evenings as memorable as the walking.
Unstructured time built in deliberately — afternoons and evenings with nothing scheduled, because the clarity this article describes tends to arrive unscheduled. If you can walk for two to three hours without significant difficulty, and you’ve done some walking in the weeks beforehand, you’re ready.
5 Mistakes to Avoid
1. Bringing the laptop. A significant number of people bring their work as a security object, not intending to use it but unable to commit to five days without it nearby. Leave it. The insight you need cannot be found in a browser tab.
2. Using the walk as a strategy session. The temptation is to think hard and systematically about the career question while walking. This produces the same circular thinking the four o’clock mornings already produce. The clarity arrives in the gaps between thoughts, not in the thoughts themselves.
3. Expecting a five-point plan to fall out of the French sky. The Camino produces clarity — a sense of what matters — not a strategy document. Arrive expecting a direction, not a finished route.
4. Treating restlessness as failure. A career crisis at midlife is frequently a sign you’ve accomplished enough of what you set out to do that you’re now free to ask what’s next. That reframe is uncomfortable and accurate.
5. Not acting on what the walk reveals. The clarity is real but fragile once ordinary life reconvenes. Write down what you understood before you land, and identify one small, concrete next step before the week is out.
Further Reading
Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans
Two Stanford professors apply design thinking to building a career that actually fits, using prototyping and curiosity rather than five-year planning. Most useful after the Camino, when the clarity is fresh and the question becomes what to do with it.
The Second Mountain by David Brooks
Brooks argues that the first mountain — career, achievement, accumulated professional identity — gives way in midlife to a second mountain: vocation over career, depth over breadth. It names, with precision, the exact transition this article describes.
Embracing Change — in 10 Minutes a Day
Career renegotiation is a change problem — not dramatic enough to force itself, not comfortable enough to ignore. Margaret Montagu’s Embracing Change — in 10 Minutes a Day offers a practical framework for the daily choices that move you toward the life you want. Read it on the flight home, when the question shifts from what do I want to how do I begin.
If you are currently facing a major life transition or any other dramatic change in your circumstances, and you have no idea how you are going to cope, the good news is that the strategy presented in this book can help you, step by step, to improve your ability to handle the stress caused by change, even if you feel entirely powerless at the moment.
And if you’re approaching this as a sceptic who doesn’t buy the idea that a walk can fix anything,The Camino for Sceptics was written for exactly your objection.
5 FAQs
Can walking actually produce career clarity, or is that wishful thinking?
The neuroscience supports it. Walking in nature activates the brain’s default mode network, the state associated with insight and self-referential processing, while reducing the cortisol and mental fatigue that cloud judgement. It’s not magic — it’s measurable neuroscience plus five days of uninterrupted silence.
What if I spend the whole retreat worrying about work instead of thinking clearly?
This is the most common day-one experience and it resolves quickly. By day two, most people report the work worry has receded to background noise; by day three it’s frequently inaudible. The walking itself does this work — you don’t have to force it.
I’m not ready to decide anything — is the retreat still worth it?
Yes. The Camino is a clarity tool, not a decision-making tool, and clarity is the prerequisite for any useful decision rather than the decision itself. Most people leave with a clearer question, not a finished plan — which is the more valuable outcome at this stage.
How do I justify five days away to my employer or to myself?
Five days of annual leave needs no justification to your employer. Internally: the person who returns with real clarity about the next decade of their working life is a more valuable professional than the one still waking at four every morning running a job that no longer fits.
What if the clarity I find is something I don’t want to act on?
Then you have clarity and a choice, which is more than you had before. Some people return knowing, for the first time with certainty, that they want to stay exactly where they are — and find that certainty arrived at through walking feels entirely different from certainty assumed by default.
Sophia Renard came home from France on a Thursday and was back in the Paris office by Monday — faster, she admitted, than strictly necessary. But she came back differently, carrying something two years of four o’clock mornings hadn’t managed to produce on their own.
She had not resigned or restructured anything visible. What she had done, somewhere on a straight section of the Via Podensis, was locate the thing that had shifted — and understand it as a direction to follow slowly, not a problem to solve immediately. She stopped waking at four most nights within a few weeks. Luc noticed. He said nothing, which was one of the things she had always liked best about him.
If you’ve been waking at four in the morning with a mind that has something to say and nowhere to say it, spring and autumn retreats on the Camino de Santiago in southwest France are available for small groups of up to four guests. Three non-guided walks through the Gascon countryside, proper rest, regional food, and the particular quality of silence that tends to make the important things audible.
Think of asking your employer to pay for this transformational stress management break; you can motivate your application by mentioning that, according to Forbes, approximately 70% of people experienced burnout in the last year. Work-related consequences include job dissatisfaction, decreased productivity, poor performance, professional mistakes, absenteeism, quiet quitting and resignations, resulting in a high turnover rate. Although conditions at work may also need improvement, a retreat focused on stress management, led by a medical doctor, can contribute significantly to preventing burnout in employees.
Do you dream of escaping your stressful life to raise a herd of goats or grow sunflowers in the south of France? Then you may be ready for an Esprit Meraki retreat. Get access to this “very serious” quiz to help you figure out how urgent your need for a change of scenery is, when you subscribe to my monthly newsletter.
If your soul is craving fresh air, meaningful movement, and a chance to reconnect with nature, join us on a Camino de Santiago Walking Retreat in the southwest of France. This isn’t just a scenic hike – it’s a powerful, natural reboot for your body, mind, and spirit. Imagine quiet paths, rolling hills, cozy evenings, and slow conversations. No fitness requirements. No forced bonding. No pressure to have a breakthrough. Just one foot in front of the other, and finding your way to a brighter future.
“I am an experienced medical doctor – MBChB, MRCGP, NLP master pract cert, Transformational Life Coach (dip.) Life Story Coach (cert.) Stress Counselling (cert.) Med Hypnotherapy (dip.) and EAGALA (cert.) I may have an impressive number of letters after my name, and more than three decades of professional experience, but what qualifies me to excel at what I do is my intuitive understanding of my clients’ difficulties and my extensive personal experience of managing major life changes using strategies I developed over many years.” Dr M Montagu
3 Peer-Reviewed Research Articles That Support This Article
The claims above are grounded in published research, not impression. Each study below addresses a specific mechanism this article relies on.
1. Nature Experience Reduces Rumination and Subgenual Prefrontal Cortex Activation
Bratman, G.N., Hamilton, J.P., Hahn, K.S., Daily, G.C., & Gross, J.J. (2015). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(28), 8567–8572.
Stanford researchers compared a 90-minute walk in nature against an equivalent urban walk. The nature-walk group showed significantly reduced self-reported rumination and measurably lower activity in the subgenual prefrontal cortex — the region tied to repetitive negative self-focused thought. This is the direct evidence for why the four-in-the-morning loop quietens on a walking retreat.
2. How a Walk in Nature Restores Attention and Improves Executive Control
McDonnell, A. & Strayer, D. University of Utah, Department of Psychology.
Using EEG monitoring on 92 participants, this study found that a 40-minute walk through nature — but not through an equivalent urban route — produced measurable improvements in executive control, the prefrontal-cortex function governing decision-making and working memory. This is the mechanism behind clearer, calmer thinking after walking, not just calmer feeling.
3. Attention Restoration Theory
Kaplan, R. & Kaplan, S. (1989). The Experience of Nature: A Psychological Perspective. Cambridge University Press.
The foundational framework explaining why natural environments allow directed-attention fatigue to recover. The Kaplans’ theory of ‘soft fascination’ — the effortless attention nature requires compared with the demands of a screen or a meeting — explains why five consecutive days produces a depth of mental recovery that a single evening off cannot.
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