You're not too busy to slow down.
- StevenMiyao
- 3 days ago
- 3 min read
You're avoiding what slowing down would make you feel.
Most senior leaders aren’t stuck because they lack answers. They’re stuck because they’ve been moving fast enough to stay just ahead of something they’d rather not feel and calling it productivity.
What if the busyness was never the problem?
Joao Viana left a successful corporate career and created something that didn’t exist before. He called it Walking Mentorship. He walks alongside people for seven days through places like the Camino de Santiago. Not as a guide. As a thinking companion. And what he’s found after hundreds of walks is that the insights that change people aren’t dramatic. Slowly, one day at a time, until you look back and realize you’re facing a completely different direction.
The first thing most people discover is that the busyness was never the problem. It was a solution for avoidance.
Somewhere around day three or four, when the miles add up and the small talk runs out, people start opening up about things they've been carrying for years.
Most of us never create the conditions for that to happen, and we call it a full life.
Why is it so hard to leave the old story behind?
Joao spent two years trying to talk himself out of Walking Mentorship after he left corporate life. Not because the idea was wrong. Because he didn’t know who he was without the old corporate story.
Most leaders never stop to question whether the story was true in the first place.
Why do so many high achievers feel alone?
Here’s what Joao notices more than anything else after hundreds of walks. The people who come to him aren’t short on relationships. They’re short on places where they can stop performing. That’s a different kind of lonely, and it’s far more common than anyone talks about.
Joao runs one exercise that stops people cold. He asks them to call someone and find out what that person genuinely thinks their strengths and weaknesses are.
One man refused. He wasn't sure he had anyone to call.
By the end of the day, he'd spent hours on the phone. His assistant of 30 years sent 45 minutes of voice messages walking back through his entire career.
His response: "This was one of the best days of my life."
What Joao has learned is that clarity isn’t the destination. Honest contact with yourself is. The walk doesn’t work because it produces insights. It works because, for a few days, you no longer need to be useful, and something truer gets a chance to breathe.
He leaves us with two simple practices. Walk alone, and with the people you’ve been meaning to be honest with. And write — in the morning, how you want to show up; at night, how you actually did.
He ends with this:
"Imagine reading a book with no way to turn the page back. How carefully would you read it? That's life."
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