Let’s take your brain to the spa
News Stories · Leadership - Mindfulness

Let’s take your brain to the spa

Executives recharge their batteries at IMD’s signature learning program
June 2019

Pretty appealing right? We can understand your surprise. Sounds relatively strange to compare a jam-packed intense week of learning, with an 8 a.m. sharp daily start and over 20 classes a day to a spa. But it’s a fair comparison as IMD’s Orchestrating Winning Performance (OWP) week helps you recharge and challenges your thought-process.

But here’s the thing; A full week away from one’s normal day-to day life and workplace pressure – allocating deliberate time to step back and look at the bigger picture – is a break in itself. Challenging set-ways and beliefs, whether personally or professionally, forces you to pull yourself out of your usual automatism. It really is ‘fresh air’ for the brain. One could go as far as to comparing the experience to a brain ‘massage,’ just like at the spa.

A moment to stop the noise, to let old ideas float out, and get some fresh air to make space for new ways of working and thinking to make their way in. This is the very purpose of OWP.

Approaching the end of the week, here are what some first-time attendees feel about it.

Let’s hear it from them. Does it feel like you took your brain to the spa for a week?

“Certainly. Maybe not as traditionally relaxing, but strangely, yes,” shares a participant from the Netherlands.

“What appealed to me is the freedom of choosing topics most relevant and tailored to my needs. But what drew me here and kept me glued to my chair was this idea of digital disruption, and how alien it seemed to me until I got through this week. I am amongst those that needed to be convinced of something I felt I knew already– that it’s real.”

One of his peers from the United Kingdom chimed in: “Hearing Sibongile Manganyi-Rath speak during her keynote with such fondness for Africa, that she knows she will never leave despite the political and economic challenges the continent faces. This was my spa moment! It moved me.”

Others around the coffee table after lunch echoed their own feelings on what made them feel renewed: “We give a round of applause at the end of an artistic performance normally right? Here, at the end of each class instinctively, we clap. I believe that this honor is well deserved due to the level of excellence of the professors and activities.”

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