Last week I flew to Western Australia, and Mark Williams and Danny Penman’s Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Finding Peace in a Frantic World came with me.
I’d read it years ago. Picking it up again felt like meeting an old friend who’d quietly grown wiser while I wasn’t looking, or perhaps the wisdom was always there, and I had finally grown into being able to receive it.
Chapter three opens with a line attributed to Marcel Proust:
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
The chapter is titled Waking Up to the Life You Have.
Not the life you want.
The life you have.
I sat with that distinction for a long while.
Most of us, when we feel stretched or stuck, instinctively reach for a new landscape. A new role. A new team. A new version of ourselves. We imagine the answer lies somewhere else.
But over the past month, I’ve watched something quieter happen in the coaching room.
I once coached a technically brilliant leader who was frustrated that his team wasn’t showing enough initiative.
His instinct was to give clearer instructions, tighter timelines, and more check-ins. He thought he was being supportive.
The shift came when he realised his team wasn’t lacking capability.
They were lacking space.
Without meaning to, he had become so efficient at solving problems that nobody else had room to step into them.
He didn’t need a more capable team.
He needed new eyes.
I also spoke with a professional who felt deeply disconnected after changing roles.
She kept telling herself she needed to “find her people again,” as though belonging only existed somewhere ahead of her.
Then she paused long enough to notice the colleagues already making small bids for connection:
the quiet invitation to lunch,
the teammate checking in after meetings,
the person consistently liking and encouraging her work.
The landscape hadn’t changed.
Her attention had.
Again, no new landscape.
Just new seeing.
That’s the work, I think.
Not always the dramatic departure.
Not always the reinvention.
Sometimes it’s the slower, quieter discipline of looking again at what’s already in front of us and allowing it to become new.
So, if you find yourself this week scanning the horizon for somewhere else to be; a different role, a different team, a different version of your career, perhaps try the other voyage first.
The one Proust pointed to.
The one that doesn’t require you to go anywhere at all.
Until next week,
Mary