Executives often give their best to their work — and their leftovers to their family.
I hear this all the time from executives I work with: “By the time I get home, I’m drained. My team gets my best. My family gets what’s left. And it breaks my heart.”
Sarah, a VP at a Fortune 500 company, said it perfectly during our consultation call: “I can lead a boardroom of 20 people, make million-dollar decisions without flinching, but when my 8-year-old asks me to help with homework, I snap. I become this person I don’t recognise — impatient, distracted, completely checked out.”
The truth is, stress doesn’t shut down at 6 pm. It comes home with you. It shows up in your patience, your energy, and your ability to be present. It shows up when you’re helping with homework, but your mind is still replaying that difficult conversation at work. It shows up when your partner is talking to you, but all you can think about is tomorrow’s presentation.
Stress destroys Lives. To find out what you can do to safeguard your sanity by taking my curiously confidence-boosting quiz, subscribe to my mailing list.
What most people don’t understand about executive stress:
It’s not just mental. It’s deeply physical. As a medical doctor, I can tell you — this isn’t a “time management” issue or a matter of “just leaving work at work.” This is a nervous system regulation issue. Your brain and body don’t know how to switch gears from “fight-or-flight mode” at work to “rest-and-digest mode” at home.
When you’re in back-to-back meetings, putting out fires, making high-stakes decisions, your nervous system is activated. Your cortisol is elevated. Your body is primed for action, scanning for threats, ready to respond to the next crisis.
The problem? There’s no natural transition. You go from a heated budget meeting to sitting in traffic to walking through your front door — but your nervous system is still in crisis mode. Your body doesn’t understand that the “threat” (that challenging stakeholder, that looming deadline, that difficult team dynamic) isn’t following you home.
This is why “work-life balance” advice often falls flat.
People say “just turn off your phone” or “leave work at the office” — but they’re missing the physiological component. Your nervous system needs a bridge. It needs help transitioning from one state to another.
The solution? You can train yourself to recover the same way you train yourself to deliver peak performance.
Think about it. You’ve probably invested thousands of hours developing your executive skills. You’ve learned to read rooms, influence outcomes, make decisions under pressure. But when did you last invest time learning how to recover? How to consciously shift your nervous system from activation to calm?
One of the simplest and most powerful tools I teach is walking meditation. But this isn’t your typical mindfulness practice. This is a neuroscience-backed movement that acts like a reset button between work and home.
Here’s how it works:
The 15-Minute Transition Protocol: Instead of rushing from your car to your front door, take 15 minutes to walk — ideally outside, but even around your building or up and down stairs works. As you walk, focus on the physical sensation of your feet touching the ground. Feel each step. Count breaths: 4 steps inhale, 6 steps exhale.
This isn’t just “relaxation.” This is actively engaging your parasympathetic nervous system — the part responsible for “rest and digest.” The bilateral movement of walking, combined with controlled breathing, literally rewires your brain from stress mode to calm mode.
Sarah tried this for just one week. Her feedback: “I can’t believe such a simple thing made such a difference. I walked into the house actually present. My daughter noticed immediately — she said, ‘Mom, you seem happy today.’ That broke my heart because I realised how often I must seem… distressed when I come home.”
Here’s what makes this even more powerful:
Walking meditation isn’t just about the immediate transition. It’s training your nervous system to become more resilient overall. The more you practice shifting between full-on action and calm, the more naturally your body will make those transitions.
Think of it like cross-training for executives. You’re not just managing today’s stress — you’re building your capacity to handle tomorrow’s challenges while staying present for the people who matter most.
The ripple effects are profound:
Your family gets the best of you, not the leftovers. Your decision-making at work actually improves because you’re not carrying yesterday’s stress into today’s meetings. You sleep better. Your relationships deepen. You start to remember why you worked so hard to build this life in the first place.
The deeper truth?
Most executives I work with have mastered the art of performing under pressure. But they’ve never learned the equally important skill of fully recovering from pressure. And in our always-on culture, recovery isn’t optional — it’s essential for sustainable high performance and genuine happiness.
This is exactly why I host Executive Reset Retreats on the Camino de Santiago in south-west France.
5-7 days. Maximum 3 female executives. We don’t just talk about stress management — we practice it. With horses. And by mindfully walking 10 km daily through the French countryside – a moving meditation. Away from devices, away from the constant demands, you remember what it feels like to be in your body instead of just in your head.
You learn practical tools like the transition protocol above, but you also experience something deeper: the remembering of who you are beyond your title, beyond your performance, beyond your endless to-do list.
The people who join these retreats don’t just return rested — they return with a new relationship to stress itself. They’ve proven to themselves that they can step away without everything falling apart. They’ve experienced what it feels like to be fully present, fully alive, not just fully productive.
If you’re an executive who feels this tug-of-war between work and home, I want you to know:
You’re not broken. You’re not failing. You’re just operating with outdated software — systems designed for a different era, before we understood the neuroscience of stress and recovery.
👉 Message me at MargarethaMontagu@gmail.com if this resonates. I’ll ask a few questions about your situation and share whether the retreat – or rather one of my courses-with-coaching – might be right for you. Because the people who show up for themselves in this way don’t just change their own lives — they change what’s possible for everyone watching them lead.
Find out more about the Executive Reset Retreat
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.