When you consider the idea of "resetting," what does that actually mean to you? Not the performative version — the out-of-office reply, the trip that left you exhausted, the week you told yourself you'd unplug and then didn't. The real version. The kind that leaves you genuinely different on the other side.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately. In a few weeks, I have the opportunity to spend a long weekend at a men's retreat. I've been to one before, and it left enough of an impression that I'm heading back — this time with an entirely new group of guys.
The setup is something most people would either find deeply appealing or immediately dismiss. We hike a mile into basecamp, phones are confiscated at arrival, and roughly a thousand men set up camp in the middle of nowhere. Some come in with a group; others have only connected via Zoom calls with strangers who are now setting up a tent next to them. We bring everything ourselves, outside of water and what amounts to nearly 200 kegs of beer on tap whenever you want. For 48 hours, our unit eats together, works together, and bonds together.
There's group time, alone time, and cigars-by-the-fire time. The environment is structured around one goal: share what's really going on and grow from it. No judgment. No condemnation. It gets raw and it gets real. For many of us, it's one of the only places where that's genuinely true.
Here's why I'm telling you this, and why it matters beyond my upcoming weekend in the woods.
What a Reset Actually Is
Most people treat a reset as a change of scenery. They book a trip, they go somewhere new, they post a photo. Then they come home and pick up exactly where they left off — same patterns, same pace, same slow drift away from whatever actually matters to them. The scenery changed. They didn't.
A real reset isn't about location. It's about reconnection. It's about deliberately creating the conditions to ask the question most of us are too busy to ask: am I living in alignment with what I actually value?
That question sounds simple. It isn't. Answering it honestly requires stepping away from the noise long enough to hear yourself think. For some people, that looks like a men's retreat in the woods. For others, it's a solo weekend in a cabin, a long run without headphones, or an afternoon at the kitchen table while the house is quiet. The format matters far less than the intention behind it.
Why Vacations Miss the Point
It's worth being direct about this: vacations are not what I'm describing. For most people in leadership, a vacation is not a reset — it's a relocation. The devices come along. The notifications still pull at attention. The mental load of managing other people's experience (the right hotel, the right restaurant, the schedule everyone agrees on) takes over before the plane lands.
And when you get home, you need a vacation from your vacation.
That's not a failure of effort. It's a failure of design. A vacation is optimized for enjoyment and experience. A reset is optimized for reconnection and clarity. They require different structures, different intentions, and different measures of success. Confusing one for the other is part of why so many leaders reach the end of a week of PTO feeling vaguely worse than when they left.
Burnout Is a Values Problem
We talk about burnout as though it's a workload problem. Too many hours, too many meetings, too little rest. And workload is a real contributor. But the leaders I've watched burn out most completely weren't always the ones working the most hours. They were the ones who had spent the most time doing work that felt disconnected from what they cared about.
Burnout has a values fingerprint. When what you're spending your time on stops reflecting what you believe matters, the depletion compounds faster than any workload calculation can explain. You can carry an enormous amount when it's in service of something meaningful to you. You can fall apart under a modest load when it isn't.
This is part of what neuroscience has been confirming for years, and it's at the core of what we're building inside Braintrust Academy's NeuroCoaching program. Value creation and self-awareness aren't soft skills or feel-good extras. They're the operating system underneath everything else a leader does.
Step One: Identify Your Core Values
The first step is deceptively simple: figure out what your top three to five core values actually are. Not what sounds good. Not what your company's values poster says. Yours.
These can be anything. Family. Faith. Loyalty. Adventure. Hard work. Trust. Hope. Success. There's no correct list, and there's no version that's more respectable than another. The only criterion is honesty. What, when you strip away the performance of it, actually drives your decisions? What, when it's missing from your life, makes everything feel subtly off?
Most people have never sat down and done this exercise formally. They have a general sense of their values the way they have a general sense of their health — they know when something feels wrong, but they haven't defined the baseline clearly enough to understand why. Define the baseline. Write it down. Don't overthink the first pass. The goal of step one is simply to have a list you can work with.
Step Two: Process Why They Matter
Having a list of values and understanding your values are two different things. Step two is about going deeper: set aside time with a close friend, a small group, or just yourself to genuinely process why each of these values is important to you.
This is where the retreat format serves a real purpose. The environment removes distraction and creates the kind of psychological safety where that processing can actually happen. When there's no phone, no inbox, no competing priority, and no social pressure to perform, people tend to tell the truth — including to themselves.
You don't need a thousand men in the woods to create that environment, though it certainly helps. You need intention, time, and either the discipline of genuine solitude or at least one other person who won't let you stay on the surface.
The why matters because it's what makes values durable. "Family" as a word on a list can be ignored. "Family" as something you've traced back to a specific fear, experience, or aspiration — that's harder to sideline. The work of step two is turning labels into understanding.
Step Three: Commit to Doing It Again
The most common mistake people make with this kind of work is treating it as a one-time event. They do the exercise, feel something real, and then let the next six months wash it away before they come back to it.
The commitment in step three is simple: this won't be the last time you step away and refresh. Build it into how you operate, not just how you respond to crisis. The leaders who manage themselves best over time aren't the ones who finally hit a wall and took a month off. They're the ones who created enough regular space that the walls became less likely.
How often, how long, and in what format is entirely up to you. What matters is that it happens before you need it, not after.
The People Watching You Are Learning From You
Here's the part that tends to land hardest for people in leadership: the individuals around you are watching how you treat yourself. And they are taking notes.
If you're the kind of leader who never disconnects, who powers through exhaustion, who treats rest as weakness — you're not modeling resilience. You're modeling a pattern that will eventually break, and the people who look to you are absorbing that pattern as the standard.
If you're responsible for others, that responsibility includes showing them what sustainable looks like. Not in a performative way. In a genuine one. The organizations that get this right don't just offer wellness programs — they have leaders who actually use them, who actually take time off, who actually prioritize the kind of self-awareness that keeps them calibrated over the long run.
Value your balance as much as you value everything else in your world, and you will be a better version of yourself. The people you share life with — co-workers, family, friends — will recognize the difference, even if they can't name what changed.
How NeuroCoaching Connects to This
In the coming weeks, we're launching our next full program inside Braintrust Academy: NeuroCoaching. Value creation and self-understanding is one component of a much broader framework — but it's a foundational one. The neuroscience of how people lead, coach, and develop others is inseparable from how well they know themselves.
The leaders who develop their people most effectively are not necessarily the ones with the most experience or the sharpest strategic instincts. They're the ones with the most self-awareness. They know what they value, why they value it, and when they've drifted. That self-knowledge shapes every conversation they have, every decision they make, and every version of their leadership that others experience.
More details on NeuroCoaching are coming soon. In the meantime, if this resonates and you're curious about what a values-based leadership development program looks like in practice, start a conversation with us. It doesn't have to begin with a thousand men in the woods — though I'd recommend that too.
