Always a busy schedule, everything is pre-planned in detail: meetings, visits, events, journeys, business lunches, time for the family, hobby, sports, vacation.
Heaven forbid, unplanned changes, postponements, diseases, etc. bring this fine-tuned clockwork into disarray.
It’s been a long time that we were the masters of our ideas and visions.
The appointment schedule determines our annual rhythm, we merely function.
Even in top-management, quality time for personal development is very limited. Even important meetings with colleagues are reduced to 10 minutes; time for contemplation is a distant dream.
Who can I talk to, who can I confidently share my anxieties and preoccupations with?
The picture of the happy family, with one’s partner at home who listens attentively to my problems, gives me advice – lucky the few who still live it.
Instead, we hear of the early deaths of managers, of depression, burn-out, people who fail for no obvious reason in their best years; and these are not distant events but happen to people in our immediate social environment.
Fear of failure, of not being up to the task, of not being able to achieve ambitious goals, sleepless nights, nervous disorders, headache and migraine, digestion problems, back pain and other afflictions are signs that something is not in order.
Fasting for managers allows people in managerial positions to switch off, give body, mind and soul time to rest. No external expectations to be met; instead eight days of quiet.
During the fasting session we talk very little or not at all.
We live consciously but without newspapers, computer, mobile phone, organiser and TV. We consciously renounce all that and exercise modesty.
In a group, together with other managers or, preferably, in mixed groups, we share our fasting experience with our co-practitioners.
Once the fasting session is over, it is time to decide how to proceed from here on.
This is a decision only I can make, after all, it is a decision about the direction of my life, about survival and continuation with a new purpose, about a happier, healthier and longer life richer in experience.