Back in July, my wife Bharti and I were heading to Goa for the ActionCOACH Global Conference.
Ahead of that, Bharti had booked us five days at a wonderful wellness retreat on the coast in South Goa
She'd been saying for a while that we needed to pay a bit more attention to our health, and I was quite happy to go along with it.
I thought I knew roughly what I was signing up for.
A bit of yoga.
Some meditation.
Healthy food.
Long walks.
Probably quite a relaxing five days before the conference.
It turned out she'd signed us up for something rather more serious.
It was a total Detox. We had doctors and nutritionists involved, yoga and meditation every day, massage and various other treatments.
What we ate and drank was pretty carefully calibrated: shots, smoothies, salads, soups.
There were talks about sleep, breathing, nutrition, the critical function of vital organs like the liver - all grounded in auryvedic science and generally looking at health impacts in a much more holistic way.
And then there was the daily coffee infusion.
Let's just say I'd previously only ever taken my coffee from one end!
So it wasn't quite the relaxing few days I'd envisaged.
As part of the programme, they took various measurements when we arrived.
I wasn't expecting anything particularly surprising.
I go to the gym four or five times a week, do circuits, enjoy saunas and walk regularly.
I knew I was carrying a little more weight than I wanted to, but generally I thought I was pretty healthy.
One of the measurements suggested otherwise.
My visceral fat reading was much higher than I'd expected. It was 15, and that was enough to give me a bit of a wake-up call.
I hadn't known it was there.
I couldn't see it.
And because I was exercising regularly and generally felt pretty good, it wasn't something I'd been particularly worried about.
So then I started thinking about how I'd got there.
And there wasn't one big thing.
Since moving from an office to working from a purpose-built office at home, I wasn't moving around as much during the day.
The kitchen was rather closer than it used to be and I’m a glutton for fried, spicy snacks in all forms.
A beer or glass of wine in the evening had become quite a regular habit.
There were probably a few things like that. Compounding.
Nothing that had ever made me think, “I really need to sort this out.”
They'd just crept in.
The boiled frog analogy probably works quite well. The water had been warming up gradually and I hadn't really noticed.
Coming home, I decided I was going to do something about it.
And this is where I realised I probably needed to follow some of the advice I spend my working life giving other people.
Rather than just saying, “I need to be healthier,” I wanted to know what I was actually going to change and how I'd know whether it was working.
So I started tracking things.
I stopped drinking alcohol completely for a while.
We became much more conscious about what we were eating, particularly processed and ultra-processed foods, and started paying more attention to protein, fibre, vital healthy fat and the overall nutrition in what we cooked.
I've been walking after meals wherever possible.
I've also paid much more attention to sleep. I'm aiming for seven-plus hours and I've changed my routine in the evening and the start of the day.
The devices go in the drawer and I'll pick up a book instead - preferably one that has absolutely nothing to do with work.
None of this is particularly complicated.
But because I was measuring it, I couldn't really kid myself about whether I was doing it.
About six weeks later, I checked the numbers again.
My weight had gone from around 70kg to under 65kg. My waist had gone from around 37 inches to 34. My sleep and step averages have gone up
The visceral fat reading that had initially concerned me had come down from 15 to 9, and the other measures I was watching were heading in the right direction too.
More importantly, I felt better.
It did make me smile, because this is essentially what I do with clients.
Quite often somebody will tell me that something in the business is going reasonably well.
Sales are OK.
Margins are probably about right.
The team seems busy.
There's plenty in the pipeline.
And quite often my response is some version of: how do you know?
Sometimes the numbers confirm exactly what you thought.
Sometimes they don't.
That's what happened to me in Goa.
I thought I was pretty healthy. I had plenty of evidence I could use to support that view. I exercised regularly. I walked. I wasn't living on takeaways.
But there was another number that I hadn't been looking at.
Once it was in front of me, I had a choice.
I could explain it away, or I could get interested in why it was there.
And once I started looking at the things that might be contributing to it, there were actually quite a few things I could change.
There's been another interesting side to this.
When I came back from Goa, I also decided I wanted to get much more focused on bringing the right new clients into the business.
Not simply more clients, but businesses and people that really fit the type of work I want to be doing.
That's gone very well over the same period.
I'm certainly not suggesting that giving up a glass of wine in the evening somehow causes new clients to appear.
But I do wonder whether there's something about focus that carries across.
I've been clearer about what I'm trying to achieve. I've been tracking it. I've been holding myself accountable to it.
In one case that's health. In the other it's business.
Perhaps I shouldn't be quite so surprised that the same principles seem to work for both.
I went to Goa expecting some yoga, meditation and a few relaxing days before a conference.
I came away with a fairly significant wake-up call.
I'm glad I got it.
Because sometimes the thing you aren't measuring is precisely the thing you need to know.
What numbers do you need to make visible to get to the right diagnosis?
