£85,000 a month and the waiting lists are long. This is a growing market giving a strong signal.
Luxury residential mental health retreats aimed squarely at executives is a market that is expanding rapidly. Starting prices run from £85,000 to £175,000 a month and the waiting lists are long.
Think about that for a moment as a signal for a need, and a growing need.
The people going to these places are high-functioning, driven, capable leaders. Almost without exception, people who have been running their life and companies very fast for a very long time on a human system that was never designed to be sustainable without rest. Then one day the body took control and made the decision the mind had refused to.
These places do amazingly good work for people in acute crisis. That is not what concerns me. What concerns me is what happens next.
I feel much better
Most people when they leave, feel genuinely better, and go back to exactly the same operating environment that made them sick in the first place.
They don’t think about the true cause of their collapse or burnout or chronic exhaustion. It’s put down to working hard, burning the candle at both ends, the final push to get the deal done and so on.
But strip away all these acts and ask any form of the question “why?” Why did we do that? Why did we need to do that? The answer I’m always given is a fancy and very intelligent version of “that’s what we have to do” or “that’s the way it’s done round here”. No-one was brave enough to challenge intelligently with experience and ask why?
The operating environment was never the problem anyone tried to solve. The person was treated. The system was untouched.
The clock resets. The market grows.
What nobody says out loud
Here is the thing nobody says out loud, most of what sends people there was entirely preventable by fixing the source.
The key isn’t managing stress better or teaching skills to build more resilience. You’ll often hear me talk about the power of breath, however learning to breathe in a way that temporarily calms the nervous system before returning to the environment that destabilised is only temporary.
In over 46,000 performance audits I’ve managed across high-pressure business environments, the pattern is consistent. Stress shows up as operational design flaws before it shows up as human sickness. Fix the design flaw and the human recovers. Naturally. Without a programme. Without a retreat. Without pizza on a Friday.
The operating conditions nobody redesigns
Here are a handful of operating conditions that exist and which cause irritation, frustration, stress and lowers productivity.
Unclear decision rights that mean every decision costs twice what it should. Meeting architecture that drains cognitive capacity without producing clarity. Handoffs that create rework because ownership and the sequence of handover was never created. A culture of urgency that has become the default operating frequency, not a response to genuine emergency.
These are engineering problems. And like any engineering problem, they have solutions.
The businesses that spend £85,000 sending a leader away for a month could, for a fraction of that, have redesigned the conditions that required the retreat. And the leader would have come back to something different that was supportive, encouraged innovation, growth and empowered leaders to live their life’s legend.
Now is the time for human and business re-engineering to work hand in hand
If you recognise what I’m talking about in this article, the next step is a conversation. I don’t do sales pitches, but simply offer a straight talking session to identify how to fix the real problem in business.
A confidential conversation with me costs nothing, but it might change everything. https://gailbiddulph.co.uk/contact/
Love. Gail.