The Humanist
Self-Awareness & "Buen Retiro": Why Everyone Needs One
Everyone needs a buen retiro, a place, ritual, or practice that gives their thoughts room to breathe before asking them to make sense.
Quick answer: A buen retiro — a personal retreat you return to on purpose — deepens the self-awareness that an Insights Discovery profile and debrief session are designed to unlock. The test surfaces your behavioural patterns; the debrief helps you name them; a buen retiro gives you the recurring space to actually sit with them. Below, I explain how these three pieces connect, using my own beach retreat as the example.
What Is a "Buen Retiro" and Why Does Self-Awareness Depend on It?
Buen retiro is Spanish for "good retreat," but the phrase means more than a holiday spot. It's a place you return to deliberately and cyclically because it does something for you that nowhere else can.
For me, that place is a specific beach. This specific hidden corner on the eastern coast of Sicily.
It has been my companion through years of solitude — some chosen, some simply imposed by circumstance — and it taught me something I didn't expect: boredom is not empty time.
It's the space where a restless mind stops performing and starts noticing. It's where I first understood the quiet power of reading, not as escape, but as a way of borrowing other people's minds to make sense of my own.
Over the years, that stretch of reef became an informal training ground for reading people, reading cultures, and following curiosity without an agenda.
How Solitude and Discomfort Build Self-Awareness
Yet the paradox is that this was never an isolated place.
Every July, and even more so in August, the beach would fill with people returning from different parts of Italy and from abroad, particularly from the United States and Northern Europe. Families reunited, childhood friendships briefly resumed, and the shoreline became a temporary village where people of all ages shared the same space. Children, teenagers, parents, grandparents, long-time residents and seasonal visitors naturally mixed together. For a few weeks each year, it felt less like a beach and more like a community.
Looking back, that environment taught me as much about people as solitude taught me about myself. There was a continuous flow of stories, accents, habits, ambitions, and ways of seeing the world. Watching and listening became a form of education in itself.
At the same time, I was rarely fully part of the groups around me. I was something of a misfit among many of the children and adolescents my age. My solitude was not entirely a personal preference; it was also shaped by the subtle experience of feeling different and not always finding my place among my peers. What I considered a limitation then, I now recognize as an invitation to observe more carefully, read more deeply, and develop a relationship with my own thoughts rather than relying on belonging for certainty.
I felt out of place there more often than I felt at home: misunderstood, sometimes low, often on the outside of things. It took years to reinterpret that discomfort. What looked like rejection was, in hindsight, friction: the exact kind that shapes distinction instead of conformism. The inner strength that colleagues and stakeholders later recognized in me — what they called talent, dedication, or resilience — wasn't polished in a boardroom. It was forged in solitude, on a retired space of this beach, where nobody was interested in me and there was nothing to prove.
My buen retiro has always marked that turning point: a reset before the next cycle of effort begins. And for me it has always been September. September specifically. I've never let go of the school-year rhythm: the sense that a "new cycle" begins in autumn, not January.
How Does This Connect to the Insights Discovery Profile?
This is exactly why I find the Insights Discovery psychometric assessment so useful in my work with clients, and why the debrief session matters as much as the test itself.
The assessment gives people a language for patterns we've always sensed but never named: how we're energized, how we relate to others, where our natural strengths sit, and where tension tends to build. On its own, though, a report is just data.
The debrief is where the data becomes self-awareness.
It's the moment someone connects a colour, a graph, or a set of adjectives to an actual memory, an actual place, an actual version of themselves they'd stopped examining.
In short: the debrief session does, in one hour, something similar to what my beach has done for me over years. It creates a deliberate pause. And a safe space to deep dive into thoughts and explorations, without the rush to perform, to move onto action. It asks you to sit with what the data is showing you, including the uncomfortable parts, instead of rushing past it. Just as solitude on that shoreline taught me to reread my own "misfit" moments as sources of strength, a good debrief helps a person reread their own behavioural patterns: not to fix them, but to understand what they've quietly been building all along.
Curious what your own Insights Discovery profile might reveal about your patterns, strengths, and the kind of "retiro" that would serve you best?