The corporate world has spent decades optimizing output, revenue, efficiency, and speed. As artificial intelligence takes on more analytical work, a harder question is what does high performance look like when machines can outperform humans across technical tasks? For Lucia Oderiz, founder of AJNA Retreats, the answer to that question requires a different kind of capability
The Gap Between Achievement and Alignment
Oderiz built her career across digital strategy, organizational culture, and business growth. “Everyone is obsessed with high performance, doing, doing, and doing, and reaching bigger titles,” she says.
Organizations often focus on strategies and systems, but often neglect their leaders’ well being. As AI accelerates decision cycles and increases pressure on leadership, that imbalance becomes more visible.
Oderiz anticipated this shift before it entered mainstream leadership discussions. A former executive at L’Oreal and co-founder of several startups, she built her career mastering external performance before turning inward. What she identified was not traditional burnout, but a subtler issue she calls “sophisticated disconnection.”
By sophisticated disconnection, Oderiz refers to leaders who deliver results by making urgent decisions, favoring short-term wins, or struggling to sustain team trust despite business outcomes. These patterns really show in metrics but can weaken leadership effectiveness over time. For this reason, Oderiz began studying neuroscience, energy practices, and ancestral systems.
These areas are not typically associated with executive development. For Oderiz, the combination was practical rather than abstract.
“AJNA’s mission is to put together my two worlds: the holistic one and the corporate one,” she says.
Translating Inner Work Into Business Language
Oderiz has focused on making internal development accessible to analytical leaders. Rather than introducing unfamiliar terminology, she reframes key ideas into operational terms: intuition becomes decision intelligence, energy maps to cognitive and emotional performance, and presence translates into measurable leadership impact.
This approach doesn’t simplify the work; it makes it usable. Executives engage when concepts link directly to outcomes such as decision quality, team retention, and
consistency.
That thinking informs the creation of AJNA Retreats, a high-touch executive development program for senior leaders. AJNA Retreats specifically offered structured, multi-day retreats in which participants engage with scientific frameworks, guided practices, and facilitated sessions focused on leadership presence and internal capability. The program includes pre- and post-retreat assessments, such as measuring decision-making speed under pressure and team feedback scores.
Facilitators are selected not only for their credentials but also for their demonstrated application of the work. The program also incorporates artists such as Awaré and Holloway to introduce nonverbal forms of processing and attention training. The intent is to create an environment where leaders can observe and adjust how they think, not just what they think.
Finding Success in Marbella
Based in Marbella, Spain, Oderiz structures her schedule to support sustained attention and decision quality. Time outdoors and under interrupted periods of focus are built into her routine as operating requirements rather than preferences.
Oderiz’s experience building companies while raising three children informed her understanding of performance trade-offs. Time and attention became finite resources that required active management. This perspective shapes how AJNA approaches burnout as a signal of misaligned priorities and depleted cognitive capacity.
Oderiz is positioning AJNA within what she describes as corporate-conscious transformation: companies investing in internal capabilities with the same intent as executive education. Early adopters are already allocating budget from leadership development programs, particularly in industries where decision velocity and complexity are high.
Consciousness as a Competitive Advantage
Lucia Oderiz’s argument is direct. As AI continues to improve the speed, analysis, and even creative output, human differentiation shifts toward internal capability. Leaders who lack awareness of their own cognitive and emotional patterns are more likely to become reactive and dependent on external inputs.
For organizations, internal development directly affects decision-making, team performance under pressure, and leadership effectiveness in uncertain environments.
“I feel a strong personal mission to participate in elevating the level of consciousness of companies and leaders,” Oderiz says.
With that intent in mind, AJNA Retreats offers a practical model to help companies address a traditionally hard-to-measure performance factor.
Image credit: Lucia Oderiz