Rest as an Act of Resistance

Like many of us, I have been getting ready for the season. Around me, menorah candles are being lit, Christmas lights are colorfully decorating the homes down our street, and I know the light of Kwanzaa will soon be glowing for those who celebrate. And then…the heartbreaking news of Bondi, Brown, and Reiner.

The senselessness of it is hard to navigate. As one executive coaching client asked me, “My team is distraught, but we still have deadlines. How can anyone lead in the midst of this horror?” 

I shared what my friend, the best-selling author and workplace strategist, Erica Keswin, recently wrote, “Moments like this are a reminder that work does not exist in a vacuum. People show up carrying fear, grief, anger, and heartbreak—whether we acknowledge it or not.” 

As I explained to my client, “That is as true for our employees as it is for us, their leaders.” And then I advised him to rest. I told him that rest is not just a nice idea, but imperative to leading in these constantly challenging and changing times. 

I shared that I had recently read Tricia Hershey’s New York Times best-selling book, Rest is Resistance: Free Yourself from Grind Culture and Reclaim Your Life and have come to appreciate even more deeply the power of rest as a leadership tool. 

Hershey provides a nuanced assessment of rest including the notion that resting goes against everything we are taught under Work! Work! Work! capitalism. She writes that rest disrupts the forces of capitalism that treats humans as productivity units. This is particularly true for shareholder capitalism, where the purpose of the corporation is all about the bottom line and people are the cost of making goods that deliver to that bottom line. (Read my October Modern Leader Letter for more on the failure of Hustle/9.9.6. Culture).

Beyond economic systems, Work! Work! Work! is also rooted in our cultural, familial, and religious structures. One of my CEO clients, a devout Catholic, and I spoke recently about how hard it is for him to rest. He learned from an early age that work was synonymous with his value as a human. “Who am I if I am not productive?” Another client, a Hindu, shared that she struggled to rest because she was taught her success and hard work were an important reflection on her family’s reputation.

I can relate to my clients’ challenges around rest. My well-intentioned parents certainly infused their Protestant work ethic into my upbringing. One of my father’s favorite mantras - and if you read my November newsletter, you’ll know he had lots of mantras! - was “Work Hard/Play Hard.” As a child I absorbed the belief that my value was based on what I could DO (get the “A”, get the job, get the promotion), and that being productive was far more important than simply being. 

To rest is to say, “I matter”  

To rest is to also say, “We matter.”

I can’t do the work of making change in collaboration with global leaders if I am burnt out. You can’t do the work of creating highly productive workplaces without recognizing both you and your employees need to pause. We can’t do the work together of creating a sustainable system that supports companies, employees, the communities in which they operate, AND investors, if we don’t collectively honor our need to rest. 

So what does rest look like in the workplace? 

Devika Bulchandani, COO of advertising conglomerate, WPP, says that when it comes to leadership, “the real stuff happens in the micromoments.” So, I asked my buddy, Claude, to design rest actions based on Hersey's framework of rest as resistance and community care. According to Claude, here are three concrete actions a leader can take right now:

1. Model Rest Publicly and Give Explicit Permission

Set boundaries yourself and make them visible—leave at reasonable hours, take your lunch break, actually use PTO days if you have them scheduled. More importantly, explicitly tell your team that you are resting. Then tell them why and how. This matters because employees often won't rest unless they see leadership doing it and hear that it's genuinely acceptable, not just lip service.

I learned this first hand when I interviewed Clarke Murphy, former CEO of Russell Reynolds Associates. He shared a story of when he left a leadership team strategy planning offsite early so that he could see his daughter’s championship soccer game and spend some time with her before she headed off to college. He told the team he would be leaving early and why. He explained he was confident they would align on the best path forward and thanked them for their support as he prioritized his family. After that event, a number of leaders privately thanked him for his actions and message. Clarke told me, “I always assumed they knew they could take time off as needed, but I was wrong. After that, I became very public about how, when, and why I was putting my family and my wellbeing before my work.”

2. Create Collective Pauses in the Sprint

Instead of pushing straight through to that end-of-year deadline, build in structured rest moments for the whole team together. This could be micromoments like:

• A 15-minute guided breathing break mid-afternoon

• Starting meetings with 2 minutes of silence

• A team lunch where work talk is off-limits

• Shutting down all meetings one afternoon so people can actually think

Resting together matters—it signals that rest isn't an individual failure to keep up, but a shared practice that strengthens the team's capacity.

3. Eliminate One Thing From Each Person's Plate

Sit with each team member and ask: "What's one deliverable or task we can cut, delay, or reassign to get you through this sprint with your health intact?" Listen. Truly listen to what they need. Partner with them to reprioritize their to-do’s. Remove what isn’t essential, postpone what you can.  

When the sprint is done, gather your team and debrief. Ask, “How could we do better? What are the values, beliefs, and commitments that are driving us? Do they make sense to us? Or, do we need to evolve them?” Then ask each other, “What more do we need to ensure we are not just productive, but can each fully thrive?” 

The underlying principle here is that supporting employees isn't about adding wellness perks to burnout conditions. It's about fundamentally questioning whether the deadline truly requires sacrificing people's wellbeing, and collaborating to make structural changes—not just encouraging individual coping strategies.

A CEO client I coach told me he failed miserably at this earlier in his career. His team was committed to closing a deal before the end of this year. Then good fortune brought in another client that was also eager to close their deal before the end of the year. My client knew he couldn’t be in two places at once and so he sent his trusted vice president to manage the details of the second deal. This meant the VP would have to travel back and forth to another city while the deal was being negotiated. The VP said he was more than willing to take on this opportunity, a chance to showcase his skills and abilities. The only constraint was that he needed to be back home on a specific date in order to attend his partner’s holiday party. “We’ll do what we can,” the CEO told the VP. But, as he shared with me, he secretly thought to himself, "In any case, it’s just a holiday party. If he misses it, oh well.”

You can imagine what happened next. The negotiations went longer, VP missed the party. But that’s not all, the VP also missed the important surprise announcement at the party of his partner’s very big promotion. He wasn’t there and he wasn’t there because his CEO didn’t think it was a priority. This CEO didn’t support his employee to put up boundaries around an important event in his life. The highly trusted and valued VP eventually ended up leaving the firm. In his exit interview, he told the CEO that the holiday party experience showed him where the CEO’s true values were and where they weren’t. The CEO told me, “I could have called the client and insisted we push the meeting back by one day. I could have gone to the meeting in lieu of my employee. But I didn’t and in doing so I sent a very different message than I intended. I never made the same mistake again.” 

We can’t always be our best; it is especially difficult when the world appears as though it is spinning off its axes. But times like these require leaders like us to dig deep and not only support ourselves, but also those around us. 

Over the next few weeks, give yourself time to do as Hershey suggests: daydream, meditate, take long showers, disconnect from social media, and claim a sacred pause in daily life.

I would add, get out into nature. I know I will be taking long hikes in the redwoods and resting amongst their fairy circles. I will do this so that I can step into 2026 better prepared for what is ahead.  

I invite you, too, to rest so we can partner and resist together. 

Wishing you and your loved ones a restful and restorative holiday season.

Lead On!

Lisen

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