This week, my coach gave me a simple task: track how I spend my time.
What I found was confronting.
Every moment of my day was accounted for. There was no slack, no contingency, no pause. And when I did stop, it was because I’d run out of energy, not because I’d consciously chosen to rest.
I justified it with the usual line: “It all needs to be done.”
But that wasn’t the truth. The truth was, I didn’t know how to rest. So from today, I am learning how to rest.
When Doing Becomes a Default
Like many of the women I work with, I’ve spent years building, achieving, delivering and showing up in every role that calls for me. I know how to be productive. I know how to make things happen. But when someone tells me to rest, my mind scrambles.
Do I sit down? Read? Watch TV?
What counts as rest, exactly?
The uncomfortable truth is this: when your nervous system is wired for doing, resting can feel foreign, even threatening.
The Overachiever and High Achiever Within
Two of my Protective Strategies are Overachiever and High Achiever.
They’ve helped me succeed. They’ve also kept me trapped in a loop of constant motion, where productivity equals worth, and stillness feels like failure.
Overachiever whispers: “You haven’t done enough.”
High Achiever adds: “You’ll fall behind if you stop.”
Together, they create an inner world where rest feels indulgent, even dangerous. Because if you stop doing, what happens? Who are you then?
This is the real cost of busyness — not just exhaustion, but disconnection.
Deflecting Rest: My Awareness
In a recent coaching session, Rebecca reflected something powerful back to me:
“You deflect rest. It’s not a safe space for it to stay with you.”
That landed hard and true.
I can create space for others to pause, reflect, and breathe… but when it comes to myself, I push rest away.
It doesn’t feel safe to stay still. It feels unfamiliar, uncomfortable, like an energy I haven’t yet learned to hold.
That’s my current awareness.
And it’s the edge of my practice in Self-Mastery right now: learning not just to allow rest, but to receive it.
The Importance of Rest in Self-Mastery
In Self-Mastery, rest isn’t a reward.
It’s an act of awareness, of coming home to yourself.
When we rest, we’re not simply recharging our batteries; we’re allowing the wisdom of our experiences to settle.
We’re creating space for integration, for our truth to surface, for clarity to emerge.
Without rest, we keep reacting instead of responding. We stay caught in patterns that no longer serve us.
But the practice of rest, the conscious, intentional choice to stop, is where awareness deepens. It’s where we meet ourselves again.
What Does Rest Look Like Now?
Here’s what I’m learning: rest takes on different forms at various stages of life.
My children are wonderful teachers. For them, as they are small, rest means sleeping. I also have a teenager, for whom rest looks more like space - emotional, mental, and physical.
And yet, my own rhythm for rest hasn’t caught up. So I’m asking: what does rest look like for me now?
Not as a mother, or a coach, or a leader, but as me.
Maybe it’s sitting with a cup of tea and not reaching for my phone. It could be sewing badges with no agenda. Perhaps it’s reading for joy, or doing nothing at all.
I’m beginning to see that rest isn’t a single practice. It’s a relationship.
One that evolves as we do.
The Fear Beneath the Stillness
If I am being totally honest, for me, rest brings up fear. When I (we) stop, I (we) have to face what I've (we’ve) been avoiding - the discomfort, the emptiness, the uncertainty.
And yet, that’s where the gold is. That’s where awareness begins. That’s where we start to unhook from the story that we must earn our right to slow down.
Self-Mastery isn’t about controlling life.
It’s about seeing clearly, trusting yourself, and honouring truth, including the truth that your worth was never measured by what you do.
A Reflection for You
If rest doesn’t come naturally to you, you’re not alone. Many of us were never taught how.
This week, I’m asking:
What would it look like to give yourself rest without guilt, without question, without needing to justify it?
Maybe it’s five quiet minutes. Perhaps it’s an afternoon without a plan. Maybe it’s simply saying, “I’ve done enough for today.”
Whatever form it takes, it counts. Because every time you stop, you come back to yourself. And that’s where real mastery begins.
PS: Explore Your Protective Strategies
If you’re curious which strategies shape how you show up — and perhaps keep you in that cycle of overdoing — take the Protective Strategies Quiz.
You’ll receive a free PDF with your top three strategies and insights to help you move towards balance, awareness, and freedom.