OPINION: Personal travel exposes us to ourselves in ways work travel never does.
My recent European vacation brought into sharp relief the difference between travelling for work and travelling for pleasure.
As a chief executive, I always modelled the behaviours I wanted staff to adopt, including taking annual leave.
Yes, I worked hard, but I also took weeks-long breaks as an essential part of resetting and recalibrating. Stepping away was a discipline, a signal that rest and relaxation were essential to sustaining performance.
While true that modern-day leaders spend extraordinary amounts of time in motion, very little of it creates the kind of distance that restores perspective. Work-related travel moves leaders from meeting to meeting, but it rarely shifts them mentally.
That kind of perpetual movement is not travel but, instead, transit: a form of professional commuting that keeps leaders connected, productive and available without offering any respite.
Time in the air used to be decompression time, hours in which you were uncontactable that were used to think, read or relax.
But with work-anywhere devices and inflight WiFi, the plane has become an extension of the office.
What was once a pause, often on your own time, is now another workspace: efficient, connected and entirely devoid of any peace and quiet.
We’ve become so connected that we’ve forgotten how to disconnect.
Without it, leaders become trapped in a cycle of constant responsiveness – reacting, replying, deciding, performing – be it in the office or virtually.
The difference becomes obvious the moment you travel on your own terms. When we travel for pleasure, it’s on our own time; a very different experience to work-related travel that is often on the corporate card and efficiently planned by an administrator who understands your preferences and schedule.
Leisure travel requires choices, trade-offs and investment. Work travel removes all of that. It is streamlined and designed for efficiency, not discovery.
My recent sojourn to Europe was a year in the making and planned with such precision it warranted its own spreadsheet. Things went wrong and without an able assistant it was my job to fix them.
Carefully laid plans unravelled in ways that were outside of my control: trains cancelled due to equipment failure, long taxi queues and rising stress levels as I tried to reach the airport for the flight home. One anxious hour of my life I’ll never get back.
In those moments, I gained new insights about myself that I reflected on afterwards: how I problem-solved under pressure came up well, and how I coped with unexpected stress was not so good.
There is something clarifying about discovering your own limits in real time, away from the structures and supports that usually keep them hidden.
Personal travel exposes us to ourselves in ways work travel never does.
I am not alone in this insight. Researchers who study international experience and cognition have found that time spent adapting to unfamiliar environments builds genuine cognitive flexibility: the ability to see problems from multiple angles and approach them with greater creativity.
The effect is strongest for those who immerse themselves rather than simply pass through, which is precisely what separates a holiday from a work trip.
I also marvelled at places I hadn’t seen and things I didn’t know. A clear case of the more I saw, the more I realised how little I knew.
True travel – the kind undertaken on your own terms – creates the distance leaders can’t find in airport lounges or hotel lobbies.
It is known to restore curiosity, widen perspective and reconnect them to the world beyond the day-to-day pressures. It also strengthens organisations.
When leaders step away, teams step up. Capability grows in the space created by absence.
The leadership lesson is simple: movement is not the same as perspective. Work travel keeps leaders in motion, true travel helps them make meaning of that motion.
In a world that demands constant availability, the ability to step away (and return with a wider lens) is not indulgence. It’s a discipline worth embracing: one fully disconnected trip a year, with no inbox and no itinerary dictated by someone else’s calendar.
Leaders at every stage of their career would do well to practise it.
• Marion Fulker is an executive coach and the WA state chair of Smartgroup
