Latest / Women Who Lead: Leadership, Career & Influence / Rest Isn't Rebellion: Why Your Body Demands Maintenance, Not Apology | Women Who Lead
Transcript
- You are not lazy for needing to stop; you are running a high-performance engine on empty and expecting it to keep driving at full speed. Let’s get real for a second because I need you to hear this clearly. I want you to picture your career as a car. Maybe it’s a sleek sports car, maybe it’s a rugged off-roader built for the long haul. But regardless of the make or model, there is one fundamental truth about mechanics that we seem to forget when we step into boardrooms and leadership roles. If you drive a car without ever stopping to check the oil, change the tires, or let the engine cool down, it doesn’t matter how good the driver you are. It doesn’t matter how determined you are to reach the destination. The machine will break. And when it breaks, it won’t be a gentle suggestion. It will be a catastrophic failure that leaves you stranded in the middle of nowhere with no one around to help. We have been sold a lie, haven’t we? We have been told that rest is a reward. That if we just work hard enough, stay late enough, answer emails fast enough, we will earn the right to relax. But here is the radical honesty I’m offering you today: rest is not a reward. Rest is maintenance. It is the non-negotiable upkeep required for any complex system to function. When you treat sleep like a luxury item instead of a structural necessity, you are not being ambitious. You are being negligent. Negligent toward your own biology. Negligent toward the very tool that allows you to lead. And I say that with love, because I know how seductive the hustle culture feels. I know how good it feels to feel busy, because busyness masquerades as importance. What’s the cost of that silence? I mean the silence you create when you ignore the signals your body sends you. The heavy eyelids at 2 PM that you dismiss with another cup of coffee. The tightness in your shoulders that you blame on stress but is actually tension screaming for release. The brain fog that makes simple decisions feel like climbing a mountain. We have become experts at silencing these whispers until they become shouts. And by the time they shout, it’s usually too late. The breakdown has already happened. I see this pattern all the time in my coaching practice. Brilliant women who have climbed every rung of the ladder only to find themselves exhausted, irritable, and strangely disconnected from the joy of their work. They think they’ve failed. They think they’ve lost their edge. But they haven’t lost their edge. They’ve simply run out of fuel. And they feel guilty about it. Oh, do they feel guilty. They apologize for taking a lunch break. They feel ashamed for logging off at a reasonable hour. They look at their peers who seem to have endless energy and wonder what secret formula they are missing. There is no secret formula. There is only the difference between those who respect their biological limits and those who try to outrun them. This guilt is a trap. It is designed to keep you moving even when you should be stopping. It tells you that if you stop, you’ll fall behind. If you rest, you’ll lose momentum. But I am here to tell you that momentum built on exhaustion is fragile. It collapses under pressure. True momentum is sustainable. It is built on cycles of effort and recovery. Think about an athlete. They don’t train harder every single day without rest days. They understand that muscle growth happens during recovery, not during the workout. The same is true for your mind. Your insights, your creativity, your strategic clarity—they are forged in the quiet moments after the work, not during the frantic scramble of it. Let’s shift the language we use. When I hear women describe their downtime, I often hear words like 'wasting time' or 'falling behind.' I want you to replace those words immediately. Start talking about rest as strategic intelligence. Start viewing your downtime as active processing. When you step away from the screen, when you close the laptop, when you take a walk without your phone, your brain does not shut off. It switches modes. It moves from focused attention to diffuse thinking. This is where the magic happens. This is where connections are made. This is where solutions to problems that stumped you all morning suddenly appear while you are watering the plants or folding laundry. You don’t have to do it all at once. In fact, trying to do it all at once guarantees mediocrity. High-quality output requires high-quality input, and rest is the primary way we process information. If you feed your brain constant noise, constant data, constant demands, it cannot sort through it effectively. It needs space. It needs stillness. So when you schedule time to do nothing, you are not being passive. You are being proactive. You are creating the conditions for excellence to emerge. This is especially critical for leaders. Your team looks to you for stability, for clarity, for calm. If you are running on fumes, transmitting anxiety and fatigue, you poison the well. You cannot pour from an empty cup, yes, but more importantly, you cannot lead from a broken vessel. Your ability to remain steady in chaos depends entirely on your ability to recover from it. Now, I have to acknowledge the elephant in the room. For women, rest carries a heavier burden than it does for many men. We are socialized to believe that our worth is tied to our utility. To how much we can hold, how much we can manage, how much we can give. Taking time for ourselves feels selfish. It feels like a betrayal of our role as caretakers, as organizers, as the glue holding everything together. We worry that if we stop, the world will spin out of control. And maybe it will, for a moment. But the world spinning out of control is not your fault. It is not your responsibility to fix every crack before you take a breath. I remember early in my corporate career, I was leading a major merger. Two teams, two cultures, thousands of employees affected. The pressure was immense. I thought that if I slept eight hours, I would miss something critical. So I slept four. Then three. I started making small errors. Missed details in contracts. Tone-deaf comments in meetings. The irony was that by trying to protect the deal with every waking minute, I was actively endangering it with my deteriorating judgment. It took a mentor, a woman far wiser than I was, pulling me aside and saying, 'Deborah, you are not saving the company by destroying yourself. You are adding risk to the transaction.' That hit me hard. Because she was right. My exhaustion wasn’t a badge of honor. It was a liability. And recognizing that was the first step toward changing my behavior. It wasn’t easy. I had to unlearn years of conditioning. I had to sit with the discomfort of doing less. Of letting things wait. Of trusting that the sky wouldn’t fall if I stepped away for an hour. But once I did, my performance improved. My relationships deepened. My decision-making became sharper. I realized that by caring for myself, I was actually caring better for my work. And that is a powerful reframe to carry with you. So, how do we make this practical? How do we integrate necessary maintenance into a life that feels like it’s moving at a hundred miles per hour? First, you must schedule rest with the same rigor you schedule client meetings. Block it out. Treat it as a non-negotiable appointment. If someone asks what you are doing, you say you are working on your cognitive recovery. Make it sound professional. Because it is. Second, define what rest looks like for you. For some, it is meditation. For others, it is reading fiction. For me, it is walking in nature without listening to podcasts. Find the activity that truly disengages your executive function. Stop trying to optimize your downtime. Stop turning your hobby into a side hustle. Let it be useless. Let it be purely for your soul. Third, forgive yourself for the gaps. There will be weeks where you cannot rest. Where the crisis demands everything. That is okay. Acknowledge it. Plan for the recovery period afterward. Just as you would plan for a sprint, not a marathon. You cannot sustain peak intensity indefinitely. Build in buffers. Create margins. And finally, communicate your boundaries. Tell your team, your family, your partner that you need this time. Not as a request, but as a requirement for your continued effectiveness. You are modeling healthy behavior for everyone around you. By prioritizing your maintenance, you give others permission to do the same. You show them that success is not measured by burnout, but by sustainability. That is a legacy worth building. I want to leave you with this thought. The pause is not the enemy of progress. The pause is the architect of longevity. In a world that celebrates the grind, choosing to rest is a quiet act of rebellion. It is a declaration that you value your humanity over your productivity. It is a refusal to be consumed by the machine. And I know it feels scary. I know it feels like you are slipping. But trust me, you are not slipping. You are grounding yourself. You are anchoring your ambition in reality rather than fantasy. Look back at the last few episodes we’ve discussed. We talked about navigating awkward shifts with former peers. We talked about the noise of passive-aggressive communication. All of those challenges require presence. They require emotional bandwidth. And you cannot access that bandwidth if you are depleted. Rest is the foundation upon which all other leadership skills stand. Without it, everything else crumbles. With it, you become resilient. You become adaptable. You become the kind of leader people want to follow not because you demand it, but because you embody balance. So tonight, I invite you to experiment. Close the laptop an hour earlier. Take a walk without checking your phone. Sit in silence for ten minutes. Notice what arises. Notice the guilt, perhaps. Notice the fear. And then notice that nothing bad happens. The world continues. The work remains. And you... you begin to heal. You begin to recharge. And tomorrow, you will meet it with clearer eyes and a stronger heart. You are allowed to stop. You are allowed to rest. It is not rebellion. It is survival. It is strategy. It is love. Take care of yourself. You are doing important work, but you are also a human being first. I’ll see you next week. Until then, breathe.