Serious about Leisure: For some execs, ‘R & R’ means ‘rabid and resolute’

Jesse Scheve

Yating Liang: Skills crafted through serious leisure can make execs more proficient at work.

Jayme Sweere: Being properly rested also requires a type of discipline.

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Free-Time Fun

What do you get from your pursuit of serious leisure?

“The view from the top of a mountain is just mind-blowing. I fell in love with achieving that view. The mental grit of knowing that’s coming and waiting for it – that’s huge.”

—Rikki Barton, nonprofit founder and mountain climber

“Some of my surgeries are long. Just to be able to stand there and get through a two-, three- or four-hour surgery, that’s helpful. Focusing on surgery is the same as focusing for a marathon. You always have to be thinking, practicing, studying and working at it.”

—Dr. John Steinberg, surgeon and marathoner

“I’ve used it as a good excuse to travel. I love to sightsee. The most beautiful place I’ve ever seen was Antarctica. The wildlife was amazing – the scenery, the fresh ocean air. It was spectacular.”

—Dr. Jose Dominguez, surgeon and marathoner

“Poker is relaxing. It’s hard to explain why. At the same time, you use a lot of different parts of your brain. It’s almost exactly like sports. Those long tournaments are definitely exhausting.”

—John Lopez, entrepreneur and poker player

The word leisure – meaning free time – comes from the Latin “licere,” or to be allowed. Think license. Time away from work gives people license to use their time however they wish.

Some high-performing professionals aim high in their off hours. Rikki Barton, founder of Onward Consulting LLC, aims for Mount Everest.

“Hiking and climbing mountains, I feel like I’m challenging myself,” she said. “It helps keep me going.”

Barton is training for a September climb to the base camp of Mount Everest. It will be a 10-day hike to an elevation 18,000 feet up the 29,000-foot peak. Meanwhile, she’ll be training, climbing 14,000-foot Pike’s Peak and using an oxygen deprivation mask.

Barton said what she loves best about hiking and climbing are the views.

“I’ve always loved nature,” she said. “I’m a person of faith, and that’s how I experience God.”

Tying it back to her work, she said  climbing helps her to understand striving – something key to her work in prevention of drug abuse and suicide.

“With all of that, I definitely feel the strive to keep going because I care about people and know that I can make the world a better place for them,” she said.

Leisure mindset
Yating Liang, a professor of kinesiology at Missouri State University, does research in leisure motivation. She said whether someone is a staff member or a CEO, it’s important to balance work with leisure.

While the common perception about leisure is that it is a chance to relax, Liang said that’s just one side of the coin – casual leisure. There is also such a thing as serious leisure, and those who pursue it dedicate time and intention to the effort.

Liang said serious leisure is one way C-suiters and other executives can cope with stress from work.

“All these people are very goal oriented. That’s kind of how they are and how they treat work,” she said. “They carry it over as part of how they pursue leisure. They are looking for some sort of outcome in their leisure as well.”

For these people, leisure can be an important outlet for developing a different identity and perhaps finding a degree of satisfaction work may not offer, Liang said.

“Developing that identity requires them to dedicate a tremendous amount of time and effort to really crafting their skills,” she said. “It can help CEOs become better leaders in their jobs.”

In a 2023 article in the Frontiers in Psychology journal, authors Seppo E. Iso-Ahola and Roy F. Baumeister note that leisure requires one main condition: freedom of choice. Leisure activities (or nonactivities) happen off the clock and are selected by the participant.

Though the sky is the limit for how people can spend free time, the 2021 American Time Use Survey by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics found that the civilian population averages 5.27 hours per day for leisure and sports, and more than half of that time – 2.86 hours – is spent watching TV. Those are the scant 1,924 hours per year that could be spent, say, learning Italian. The U.S. Foreign Service Institute reckons basic fluency in certain languages can be achieved in 480 hours, so in a single year of leisure time, a person could learn the basics in French, German and Spanish.

Or they could become fluent in “Ted Lasso.”

Other ways to strive
CoxHealth surgeons Dr. Jose Dominguez and Dr. John Steinberg engage in serious leisure the world over, having completed marathons on all seven continents.

Dominguez specializes in colorectal and Steinberg in cardiothoracic surgery. Sometimes their work can feel like a marathon, with multiple hours of intense focus and time on their feet.

Steinberg said he had run one marathon in his life when he was approached by Dominguez with a proposal that the two travel to Antarctica to do another.

That began the pair’s effort to run all over the world. Dominguez meanwhile raised nearly half a million dollars in marathon sponsorships for the Children’s Tumor Foundation on behalf of his son, who has the disease neurofibromatosis.

Dominguez said he and Steinberg had three bucket lists, and they have checked off two of them: to run on all the continents and to run in the six marathon majors (Chicago, New York, Boston, London, Berlin and Tokyo). Now they’re working on running marathons in all 50 states, and Dominguez said he’s at the 60% mark.

He said that while some runners are enthusiastic about the sport, he is not.

“When I’m running in a marathon, the whole time I’m running, in my mind I’m saying I’m never going to do this again,” he said. “But within two or three hours of the race, I’m planning the next one.”

While Steinberg said he enjoys seeing the world while running, he particularly enjoys his flash friendships with other runners.

“In big marathons, there are a lot of people around you. You make 15-20 friends during the time of the marathon, and then you never see them again,” he said. “I’m in the middle of China, talking to a guy from Sweden. That’s really cool.”

The importance of rest
In her practice, yoga therapist Jayme Sweere of Stressed Out Humans LLC combines yoga with advanced performance training and human optimization science to help clients break from old habits.

Sweere said rest must be part of the equation.

“There have to be times of passivity and rest for the body to function optimally,” Sweere said. “If our rest is also very active and demanding, then the body’s never experiencing recovery.”

In training, it’s referred to as periodization, Sweere said.

“Those periods when you’re moving up and training hard have to be complemented by rest and recovery for performance to be at its best,” she said. “Often, executives want to be disciplined people, and that moves over into their leisure time. But there’s also a discipline to being properly rested that is often overlooked.”

Rest is important to cognitive function and emotional intelligence, Sweere said.

“There are times when workplaces can look like day cares full of tired toddlers,” she said. “There’s this need for rest, but this tendency to fight it.”

Fun and games
In March, entrepreneur John Lopez won a World Series of Poker tournament, earning a roughly $146,000 pot and a championship ring.

Lopez, who owns Old Route 66 Wellness marijuana dispensary and several other businesses, said he doesn’t like relaxing, though sometimes he pops a cannabis gummy and watches an entire movie.

“If I don’t have cannabis, I go back to my computer and try to solve stuff,” he said.

An entrepreneur’s brain never turns off, Lopez said.

“I love building businesses,” he said. “I look at it as a complex problem. If you solve it right, you excel. If you don’t solve it right, you fail.”

Lopez said his strength as a poker player comes from his ability to read microexpressions, something he perfected as a soldier working the front gate of a military installation in Afghanistan. He couldn’t understand the Dari or Pashto languages, so he had to rely on a study of expressions and gestures to keep his fellow soldiers safe.

It’s a skill that plays well on the poker table.

“Poker is rarely about your cards,” he said. “It’s more about the other person – how they stack their chips, cover their nose, cover their face. It’s things people do that they don’t realize.”

Lopez’s serious approach to his hobby keeps him nimble for the world of business.

“You always have to think of people’s feelings and anticipate what they’re thinking as you introduce new things,” he said. “There are pretty high stakes with business in general.”