This month has been a special one for me—turning 50 has brought with it a lot of reflection. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been sharing stories and lessons I’ve picked up over the years—about business, resilience, adaptability, and purpose. To close this mini-series, I want to talk about something that’s crucial to wellbeing but often overlooked: the power of rest and recovery.
Rest Isn’t a Reward—It’s a Requirement
If you’re familiar with my content, you’ll have heard the expression “business is an endurance sport,” and I’ve often spoken about the concept of the business athlete. But in both business and sport, we forget that it’s not just the effort that drives performance—it’s rest and recovery that makes it sustainable. In sport, recovery is built into the schedule. In work, we tend to treat rest like a reward we have to earn.
But one particular moment made this lesson land for me in a whole new way.
A couple of years ago, I came down with COVID—not severely, but enough to clear my diary for a few days. After getting over the initial guilt and discomfort of cancelling everything, I gave myself full permission to rest. I sat on the sofa with a brilliant book by Janice Hallett, and just… stopped.
And guess what? I felt amazing. My energy lifted. My mood improved. My motivation bounced back. I wasn’t just physically better—I felt mentally and emotionally recharged too. And it made me wonder: why did I need to get sick to allow myself that kind of rest and recovery?
Beyond Slivers of Recovery
Many of you will know I talk a lot about “slivers of recovery”—short, frequent micro-breaks that reset the nervous system. But this experience reminded me of the importance of deliberate rest—solid, extended periods of genuine downtime. As author Alex Soojung-Kim Pang writes, deliberate rest is what fuels creativity, resilience, and long-term performance.
That doesn’t mean you need to take a two-day sofa sabbatical (although I highly recommend it if you can). Deliberate rest can be:
- Thinning out your weekend plans
- Taking a spontaneous Sunday off
- Having a long soak in the bath
- Blocking out a couple of hours to settle down with a good book
- Saying no more often so you can say yes to yourself
Everything Flows from Energy, Mood and Motivation
When I talk about personal sustainability, I often say: everything is downstream of energy, mood and motivation. If we want to be resilient, focused, and high-performing, rest can’t be optional. It has to be part of the plan.
Prioritise Rest and Recovery
So my final birthday reflection is this: Don’t wait until you’re unwell to give yourself permission to rest and recover. Build it in. Honour it. Protect it.
Because rest isn’t the absence of productivity—it’s the foundation of it.
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