Sunday was my wife's birthday, and on Saturday evening we all went out as a family to play padel, which I had never played before. My nineteen-year-old plays regularly.

I was fine for most of it, right up until the end, when the game was all but over and I went for a ball I had no business going for, because I wanted him to see me get it. I had not stretched, my calf went, and the pain was immediate enough that I could not drive us home.

We iced it the moment we got in, and I spent her actual birthday the following day with my leg up and another ice pack on it. Her friends were already coming over, so they took the whole day off my hands, and she had a brilliant birthday without needing me for any part of it.

Practically, that meant no gym all week. That was fine on Monday, and by Wednesday I was irritable for reasons I couldn't locate and it took me most of the morning to work out what was actually bothering me.

I missed it.

You need to understand how absurd that sentence is coming from me, because for more than thirty years I avoided gyms entirely. I did not dislike them so much as I had decided, at some point I cannot even date, that they were not for me, in the way you decide you do not like a food you have never eaten. That was never a preference I was holding. It was a fact about who I was.

Last year I changed my mind about my body, largely because I am getting older and I wanted the strength while it is still available to me, so I started going. I will not pretend it went well.

For the first couple of months I was still standing in there asking myself what I was actually doing, everything hurt, and a reasonable part of me kept suggesting that avoiding this for all those years had been sound judgement rather than avoidance. That was my body recalibrating and nothing more, though it did not feel like that at the time.

Now I say hello to people I know in there, and it has become part of the week rather than somewhere I turn up feeling like I have wandered into the wrong building.

Here is the part I did not expect. At no point in that entire year did I stop and think, I have become someone who trains, because the change never announced itself. I found out on Wednesday, on a sofa with my leg elevated, because something had been taken away from me and I could finally feel the shape of the hole it left behind.

You are in motion, and you have been for years, because the diary fills and the quarter turns and somebody always needs something from you by Thursday, and underneath all of that sits a quiet assumption that you know who you are, on the grounds that if you do not, who would.

That assumption is doing more work than you realise, and most senior leaders arrange their entire lives so that the interruption which would test it never arrives.

So here is the question I would put to you if we were sitting across from each other. If your week stopped on Wednesday, what would you actually miss? I am not asking what would fall over in your absence, or what it would cost the business, because those are easier questions and you have answers ready for both of them. I am asking what you would miss.

Most of the leaders I work with cannot answer that quickly, and when the honest answer does eventually surface, it very rarely sounds like longing. It sounds like relief. There is some part of their week they would be quietly glad to lose, and they have never once said it out loud, because saying it makes it real, and real would mean doing something about it.

That relief is the most useful information you have about your own life, and the cruelty of it is that it only ever shows up when something stops.

Everything looks justified while you are moving. The meeting you dread stays in the diary because it has always been in the diary, and the version of you running the company is the one that got the company here, and nobody has stopped long enough to ask whether that is still the right version.

Most people only find out by accident. Something interrupts them, shows them what they have built and what they would not miss, and then they can move again, so they move, and by the following Monday it has gone.

So try one thing this week. Choose something you do without thinking, something weekly, something that is genuinely yours to cancel, and remove it once, deliberately, on purpose. Not a holiday, because a holiday removes everything at once and therefore tells you nothing.

Just the one thing.

Then pay attention to how you feel on the day it would have happened, because if you miss it you have learned something about what you actually value, and if you feel lighter you have learned something considerably more expensive.

Three questions:

1. What have you built this year that you would genuinely miss if it stopped on Wednesday?
2. Which part of your week would you be quietly relieved to lose, and who around you is still paying for the fact that you have never said so?
3. You have been stopped before. What did you see clearly during that time that you went straight back to ignoring the moment you could move again?

See you next Monday.

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