Decision Recalibration: Identify Your Decision-making Blind Spots

An Annual Pilgrimage as Executive Practice for Recalibrating Professional Judgment

#AnnualCaminoDeSantiagoEscape

Why do you attend a Camino de Santiago walking retreat every year? Because it helps me fine-tune my decision-making process.

In the glass-walled conference room, executives stare at PowerPoint slides, their faces illuminated by the blue glow of laptops. The air feels thin, recycled through ventilation systems and strained lungs. Someone mentions quarterly targets. Another checks his watch. Decisions are made in this room—important ones that affect hundreds of lives and millions in revenue—yet something essential is missing.

Two thousand miles away, on a dirt path winding through the French countryside, another executive walks alone. The morning light filters through ancient oaks, casting dappled shadows across the trail. Her smartphone rests at the bottom of her backpack, battery dead for three days now. She’s made no decisions more consequential than where to stop for lunch, yet her mind is clearer than it’s been in years. And in this clarity, she suddenly sees with perfect vision which of her recent professional choices sprang from wisdom and which from counterreaction.

This is Decision Recalibration—perhaps the most valuable and least discussed benefit of walking the Camino de Santiago. It’s not just a nice-to-have skill for today’s leaders; it’s an essential practice for anyone whose decisions impact others. Because in our pressure-cooker professional environments, how many of us can truly tell the difference between the choices we make from centred clarity versus those we make from reactivity?

Your Environment Influences Your Decisions

Did you know that your workplace is designed to make good decisions nearly impossible? I’m not being hyperbolic—I mean this quite literally. The modern professional environment is optimised for many things—efficiency, accountability, collaboration—but clear decision-making isn’t one of them.

Consider the forces at work: The constant ping of notifications creates artificial urgency. The cascade of emails demands immediate responses. The parade of meetings fragments attention. The subtle pressure of watching colleagues work late shifts your sense of appropriate boundaries. The quarterly targets loom like storm clouds, influencing every choice.

In this ecosystem, your brain adapts. It begins making decisions not from your wisest self, but from a reactive stance—responding to the loudest alarm, the most recent request, the most emotionally charged interaction. Worse, you develop neural pathways that normalise this reactivity until it feels like clarity.

Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio puts it elegantly: “We are not thinking machines that feel; we are feeling machines that think.” In environments charged with subtle pressures and unstated expectations, our feelings drive our thinking far more than we realise.

The most troubling part? It’s nearly impossible to detect this pattern while immersed in it.

The Camino de Santiago: Your Personal Decision Laboratory

This is where the Camino works its peculiar magic. Walking the ancient pilgrimage routes creates conditions uniquely suited for decision assessment—a controlled environment for examining your choices with unprecedented clarity.

The mechanics are simple but profound:

First, physical distance creates psychological distance. When you’re 500 miles from your office, the urgent email that seemed to demand immediate action suddenly reveals itself as something that can wait.

Second, the rhythmic act of walking activates different cognitive processes. Stanford researchers have found that walking enhances creative thinking by up to 60 per cent. This same enhancement applies to self-reflection and pattern recognition.

Third, the absence of digital interruptions allows sustained thought. Without notifications fracturing your attention every 84 seconds (the average in most workplaces), you can follow a single line of thinking to its conclusion.

Fourth, immersion in nature recalibrates your sense of time and importance. Research from the University of Michigan shows that even brief exposure to natural environments improves cognitive function and perspective-taking ability.

Finally, there’s the “pilgrim perspective”—the unique social environment of the Camino, where you share the path with people from all walks of life. The CEO walks alongside the college student, the doctor alongside the mechanic. Status markers disappear, replaced by shared humanity that contextualises professional concerns.

Together, these elements create perfect conditions for examining which of your decisions arose from clarity and which from reaction.

Daniel’s Crossroads: A Story of Recalibration

Daniel didn’t know he had a decision problem. As Chief Marketing Officer for a fast-growing fitness technology company, his reputation rested on confident, decisive leadership. His team described him as someone who “didn’t second-guess himself.” Board members appreciated his “bias for action.” He’d built his career on quick decisions that often proved right.

Yet at forty-three, with a career most would envy, Daniel found himself increasingly unsettled. The confident decisions that had built his reputation now kept him awake at night. Something felt off, though he couldn’t name it.

The breaking point came after a particularly aggressive product launch. The campaign had been his brainchild—a bold, contrarian approach that had seemed brilliant in the planning stages. When early metrics showed disappointing results, Daniel doubled down, shifting even more resources to the campaign. In marketing meetings, he squelched dissenting voices, interpreting their concerns as lack of vision. “Trust me,” he’d said, “I’ve been doing this for twenty years.”

Two quarters later, with the campaign objectively failing and millions wasted, Daniel found himself in his CEO’s office, facing uncomfortable questions he couldn’t answer. Why had he been so certain? Why had he dismissed concerns? Why had he escalated commitment when early data suggested caution?

That evening, Daniel stared at his laptop, reading an email from an old college friend who’d just returned from walking the Camino de Santiago. On impulse, he booked a three-week leave. His team was shocked—Daniel hadn’t taken more than four consecutive days off in seven years.

The first days on the French route were physically challenging but mentally even harder. Daniel walked fast, irritated by the slower pilgrims who clogged the path. He checked his phone compulsively, despite spotty service. He mentally drafted marketing strategies while walking, not noticing the landscapes around him.

On the fifth day, hobbled by blisters and exhausted from pushing too hard, Daniel found himself sharing a table with an elderly Frenchman at a small albergue. The man had been watching Daniel with gentle amusement.

“You walk the Camino like you are escaping something,” the man observed.

Daniel started to dismiss the comment, then paused. “Maybe I am.”

“What are you running from?”

The question hung in the air. Daniel surprised himself by answering honestly. “I made a series of bad decisions that cost my company millions. I don’t understand why I was so sure I was right.”

The old man nodded. “Ah, certainty. Tell me, how do you know when a decision is right?”

The simplicity of the question struck Daniel like a physical blow. He opened his mouth to answer, then closed it again. He had no idea.

The next morning, walking alone through a mist-covered forest, Daniel found himself replaying recent decisions—not just the failed campaign, but dozens of smaller choices. For the first time, he noticed a pattern: His most confident decisions often came not from clarity but from discomfort. When faced with uncertainty, competing opinions, or complex data, he grew more decisive, not less—as if decisiveness could banish complexity.

His “bias for action” wasn’t wisdom; it was a reaction to the discomfort of not knowing.

Three days later, crossing a particularly challenging mountain pass, Daniel felt an unfamiliar sensation—a quiet certainty different from his usual forceful conviction. He realised he needed to restructure his team, creating space for more deliberative processes. The solution wasn’t more confidence in his decisions, but more humility about his limitations.

That evening, he drafted an email to his CEO outlining the plan. Re-reading it before sending, he recognised the old pattern—the desire to act immediately, to prove his value through quick solutions. He deleted the draft. This decision deserved the space of his full Camino journey.

By the time Daniel returned to work, he had mapped his recent decisions into two categories—those made from clarity and those from reaction. He implemented a new personal practice: for any significant decision, he would first identify what discomfort might be driving his response. He created space for dissent on his team, rewarding thoughtful pushback rather than quick agreement.

Six months later, his team’s performance had significantly improved. “I still make quick decisions,” he told a colleague, “but now I know when I’m deciding from clarity and when I’m just reacting to pressure. That makes all the difference.”

The Recalibration Process

Daniel’s story illustrates the power of decision recalibration, but how exactly does one practice it on the Camino? While each person’s process will be unique, here’s a framework many executives find helpful:

First, create a “decision inventory.” As you walk, catalogue important decisions you’ve made in the past year. Don’t analyse them yet—simply list them mentally or in a small notebook.

Second, develop physical awareness of your decision states. When you recall each decision, notice sensations in your body. Reactive decisions often create tension in the chest or stomach, while clarity decisions typically bring a sense of expansiveness or peace. Your body knows the difference between reaction and clarity long before your mind admits it.

Third, ask clarity confirmation questions: “What was driving this decision?” “Was I moving toward something positive or away from something uncomfortable?” “Would I have made the same choice given more time and space?” “What information did I ignore or minimise?”

Finally, create an implementation plan. Identify specific practices you’ll adopt to bring Camino clarity back to your professional environment.

Why This Must Be an Annual Practice

Decision recalibration isn’t a one-time correction but an ongoing practice. Just as physical muscles develop imbalances without regular attention, our decision-making develops reactive patterns that require periodic reassessment.

As our roles evolve and challenges change, new reactive patterns emerge. The executive who has mastered one set of triggers may develop entirely new ones when promoted or faced with different pressures.

This is why many successful professionals make walking a section of the Camino an annual practice. Each journey builds on previous insights, creating compounding benefits that transform not just individual decisions but entire leadership approaches.

Michael, CEO of a healthcare company, describes it this way: “My first Camino retreat helped me recognise when I was deciding from fear instead of clarity. My second taught me how to create space for deliberation without sacrificing responsiveness. My third showed me how to help my team develop their own decision clarity. Each year builds on the last.”

The French Camino Advantage

While any Camino route offers benefits, the French path that wind through Nouvelle-Aquitaine and Occitanie provide unique advantages for decision recalibration.

The varied terrain mirrors different decision environments we face professionally. Moving through these landscapes embodies the different energies of decisions: some require steady endurance, others careful navigation of difficult terrain.

The cultural elements of southwest France—villages where time seems to have moved differently, local customs that prioritise patient enjoyment over efficiency—provide a powerful contrast to corporate values that often drive reactive decisions.

Recalibrating Your Decision-making Process

As we return to where we began—contrasting the conference room with the Camino path—we can now see the choice more clearly. It’s not that professional decisions can’t be made well in traditional environments; it’s that without regular recalibration, we lose the ability to distinguish between our reactive patterns and our wisest choices.

The quality of our decisions directly impacts the quality of our professional legacy. Yet few executives have concrete practices for assessing and improving their decision processes. The annual Camino pilgrimage offers exactly this—a structured opportunity to find clarity.

While you might not be able to walk the Camino tomorrow, you can begin the recalibration process today. The next time you face an important decision, pause and ask yourself: “Am I deciding from clarity right now?” Notice what your body tells you about the answer.

Better yet, consider joining us on a Camino de Santiago walking retreat this year. Your decisions affect too many people to leave their quality to chance. As the old pilgrim might ask: How do you know when a decision is right? The answer might be waiting for you on an ancient path through the French countryside.

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