Your rest is not a luxury
“...people get really desperate and really panicked about this idea because it’s a paradigm shift...to understand that your rest is not a luxury. It is not something that you will add on once you’re burnt out. It really is the center of your life. It has to be the north star.”
Photo by Vanessa Palafox
Last weekend I woke up feeling bone to soul tired. The type of tired where you feel it in your marrow. For the past few months I’ve been balancing a 40 hour a week job as well as laying the foundations of my sabbatical coaching and creative business. Mornings and weekends writing, planning and posting, filling every crevice of spare time it seemed. Part of me felt the familiar drive to push past the fatigue and plow through my to do list, but another part of me paused.
I’ve come to this endeavor with lacerations from previous jobs that I’ve endured. I’ve cracked open my heart to share my experiences of burnout, so that other tech professionals will know that they aren’t alone. I’ve been doing slow and deep work to reclaim my story, my life and my well-being. Ignoring my body’s signals has been the primary avenue through which burnout has so frequently emerged in my life, so I’m standing now at the paradigm shift Hersey notes in the above quote.
As my coach Nadia de Ala said to me so eloquently this week, “the business you're building right now is not just your escape route. It's not just your emergency exit or your getaway. It is your vessel for healing. It's not just survival. This work is helping you reclaim your power, rewrite your story and heal.”
All I can say is “amen,” as I slow down my pace and continue to trust that I can create a business that not only helps others find rest and nourishment, but that also renews me as I create a new way of working. Maybe you’re not building a business, but you feel crushed from the demands of your personal and professional responsibilities. I offer the same words to you from Hersey-- “your rest is not a luxury.”
This week, how can you rest in even the smallest way? A 10 minute nap? A 20 minute walk? Instead of multitasking during meetings allowing yourself to be present in the current session? Although it’s lovely if we can create it, and I’m excited to help folks figure out how they can take career breaks, we can’t wait to rest until we have an expansive amount of time and space before us. The habit of centering rest begins in the smallest choices we make today.