Welcome to episode #219 of the Own Your Best Life Podcast. You can outwork pretty much any problem. The seats at the table and opportunities you desire are on the other side of the work that goes into it. 

This is why as an Asian American woman, hard work felt ingrained into me – not an option if I wanted to do anything in life. While I never considered myself smart, I did believe I worked hard. 

Yet, there comes a point where it’s not intelligent to work. It’s more intelligent to rest. How do we actually rest when we love getting so much done?

More importantly, how do you not get to a place where you hate your work or resent the people in your life because they are constantly adding to your plate, not making it better?

If you’ve been on the burnout and exhaustion-bus, it’s time to get off and today’s podcast on how rest is productive is a must-listen. 

I’ve talked about creating capacity in the last podcast. I shared how this past year has really opened up with a new kind of growth because I had more space and time to lean into new projects, work demands, different relationships and fun trips.

I will credit this shift in my capacity to my ability to use rest well. I didn’t want to rest just because I was supposed to rest. I believed in the tagline, “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” because I have so much energy for life that I wanted to use it now. Why waste it on sleep?

Yet, my ability to take on more work, leadership roles and say yes to more fun came from knowing how to use rest to help tackle to-do lists and looming deadlines – and how to enjoy life now, not later. A paradox we’ll explore today.

Mixed Messages

We get a lot of mixed messages about work. Do less but more. Save time and energy. Create time and energy. Take vacation, but not too much. We cycle between pushing ourselves so intensely that we see results, to wanting to quit our jobs and taking long mental health breaks because we’re done and don’t want to do it any more.

I remember when I was starting my career. I was working at supply chain at Black and Decker (now Stanley Black & Decker) in a demand planning role – and we had these cycles of the month – the “close” and we had to tell the story of what occurred in terms of sales and demand in the past month, our accuracy in forecasting and then evaluate what shifts needed to be made for the following year. It was exhausting those first several months to get the hang of these cycles. I would be on the phone with my mom and she would say, “May, you sound so tired.”

I’d brush it off and just say, “I’m fine.” Separately, I planned a trip and when I told my mom about said trip, she responded, “Aren’t you worried someone’s going to take your job?” In one breath it is to take rest and in the other breath it’s that I am worried about my job if I take some time. A sense of having to fight so hard for what you have versus assuming it is yours. 

If you don’t feel like you have a sense of privilege or of entitlement, you can combat this with creating less stress and worry for yourself through work ethic. You’re not as worried about job layoffs because you know that you are delivering more than expected. Work ethic can become one of those advantages that even if you weren’t born into the ideal circumstance, you can create an advantage for yourself. 

I cannot emphasize this enough because people often think that people work hard because they love it. Often, it’s because it is so ingrained into their cultural context that they don’t even see that they’re fighting for their jobs every day. They expect that this is the world we live in. If food and security is your number one priority, then you’ll do what it takes to make sure that you have that for your family and yourself.

Rest, then becomes an afterthought. Thoughts like, “I can rest only if the house is clean and everything is put away” are typical if you, like me, never saw your parents sitting on the couch. They rarely watched TV. They took vacations and our family tiled our floor or did the landscaping. Whether I realized it or not, I became used to thinking that I should always be busy and productive. Working faster, not less.

These mixed messages exist because it’s not always black and white. Sometimes, taking a trip is more stressful than giving yourself more time to get things done. Other times, taking a trip will show you how to get more done in the time you have.

If you’re confused about how to rest and work effectively, it’s normal and not your fault.

The Rest Shift

What can change from here on out is understanding that you will no longer let yourself be confused about resting and working. 

You get to decide that there is no more confusion and that you can make the work and the rest decisions more simple than ever before.

First, you have to truly see what rest does and why it matters. Did you know that we actually perform better when we rest? Truly perform better. Did you know that driving while sleepy is similar to driving under the influence of alcohol? Did you know that everything from weight loss to memory  is affected by sleep?

It’s a wonder drug bottled into something called sleep and we achievers have been under-utilizing it for decades. No more. If you’re a parent with newborn or young children, you will have a challenge with sleep deprivation. If you struggle staying asleep or going to sleep, it will be more challenging to rest. Yet, there is no perfect sleep – we are on a trajectory of improvement and getting better – not getting more anxious about sleep. Let’s begin.

The Rest Protocol

I teach my clients a rest protocol that changes their mindset and their routines. If you want to feel at your best and like you are glowing with health and energy again – getting rest is key.

When I was starting testing these rest protocols, I would force myself to do massages. I love massages but it felt like such a luxury. Even with the massage, I preferred deep tissue or harder massages to feel like they were really “doing something” in my body. Remember, my thought was that everything has to be productive or have a purpose. 

One morning, after a deep tissue massage, I was walking outside back to my car in an almost comatose state – that post massage high you get from releasing stress and tension held in your body.

As I was walking, staring towards the sky I suddenly had a big insight. I was working on a leadership curriculum and something felt a little off. It occurred to me as I was getting closer to my car to change the timing and the style of training. This wasn’t the right timing for this kind of training. I had to call an audible and change the kind of work and the flow of the curriculum. It all clicked and made sense. I knew exactly what to do next, how to truly make it effective and when I shared my plan – everyone said it made sense.

These kinds of insights and shifts to the plan are what I get paid for and what your clients and organizations will pay you for as well. They add value. They are not found on google and in other people’s brains. They are found in ours alone.

If I hadn’t taken that break and had that insight, I would have copied and pasted everything I’ve been doing up to that point. Everyone would have gone with the plan assuming that I am the expert and I know best – until it didn’t work and people felt overloaded, stressed and the training would hurt more than it helped. No one would truly notice the difference but me, yet the purpose of you being a leader is to have higher standards of yourself than others.

It reminded me that we need to have some space in our work – especially if we are or want to show up as leaders.

Our life, when we just go from one thing to another, is a series of executional steps. When we don’t stop and take stock of what’s truly needed next, we often copy and paste the past into the future. It’s easier for us to do a series of steps we’ve done before. Linear thinking versus divergent thinking.

Which is why we wake up a year from now or 10 years from now wondering why nothing has changed. Still stressed and wondering if we’re really proud of ourselves, even if we’ve changed jobs or our businesses.

If this feels like you, turning your wheels without much progress to show for it and a history of burning out, you’re not doomed. You just need a simple step change that I work with my clients on that is entirely able to be learned even if they have a busy schedule and life. It is the foundation of big growth and going from doer to leader to leader of leaders.

The essence is that you have to have rest and you prioritize it within the cycles of the work that you are completing in a day, week, month, quarter and year. Everything has a rhythm and flow, including your work and rest. You also know what your rest protocol is for you – because not everything (for example, drinking/tv/etc.) can be used as rest even though they may seem relaxing. 

When you time it properly, your rest creates big insights for you to take the next steps on when it’s time to work. Your rest also allows you to have even more energy and momentum to do the hard part of the work which is inevitably there for anything that you are working towards. 

When you see more progress because you go into a bout of work and actually create something worthwhile, it fuels you to take the rest more seriously. When you treat yourself like a high-performance athlete you start getting more roles and opportunities that are geared towards people who know how to handle harder, vague and ambiguous tasks that require focus, discipline and creativity.

The other part you realize is that you don’t always get the rest you need. There will always be those situations in life where we are not the most prepared because they catch us by surprise or they tax us for longer than we’re expecting. Think about personal crises that pop up unexpectedly, upcoming restructuring or layoffs where you are potentially going to be affected or even changing priorities in work and deadlines that move up. 

You need rest for those moments too and if you haven’t trained yourself on how to rest without massive amounts of time off or a giant break in between projects, it’s harder and more difficult to handle those situations with grace and composure.

Harder times define us. Harder jobs, projects, family situations. They are not desired but they are our reality whether we love them or not. These harder times are the moments Spiritual Achievers are ready for and willing to take on even when they’re tired.

This is when we want you to stand out for your leadership in attitude and fortitude, because it’s easy and understandable in those cases to be irritable and short-tempered.

You have more in you left to be intelligent and know how to execute and rest. You don’t have to go forever and it’s smarter sometimes to call it quits for a short break then it is to quit forever.

You also don’t have to do this alone. When you are in a community of other achievers who love to wear exhaustion as a badge of honor you realize that you’re not alone when you are shifting new habits and behaviors so that you can find even more ease and flow in your life. The paradox is that the more you allow yourself to love work, the more you allow yourself to rest.

I’ve enlisted the help of coaches, smart devices and have been working on this for years if not decades. I even thought I was narcoleptic in college because I was sleep deprived. If I can come this far, to where I average 7+ hours of sleep per night, have both a full-time corporate job in training and development, run a full coaching practice and also spend time with my 2 girls and husband – then you can do this too. It’s heightened my intuition, I can wake up without an alarm, my skin glows and I have been so much more effective in my work.

My clients also notice that they’re calmer under pressure. They make decisions that they never would have before – decisions more consistent with the kindness, compassion and intelligence that they have inside. They get more positive feedback at work, feel more settled into who they are, less anxious about their insecurities and more confident in their ways of working even if they’ve struggled with burnout in the past. It’s not easy for achievers to rest, but when they do they see that this protocol fuels their next level of growth – and is the engine for their ability to be seen as leaders.

Join my program and I’ll teach you what I learned over decades in days and hours. I want you all to utilize rest for all the incredible results it can help you create. You can stop overworking and hiding, feeling like no one truly sees the brilliance within you even though you are working all the time. This is the beginning of a new way of working and you’re ready to stop reading, listening and thinking about it. You’re ready to be the one who walks out of a massage without the guilt, takes rest seriously and gets it done. It is so fun to be able to feel like even now, you’re got so much more aliveness and magic that life has in store. Let’s get after it.

If you’d like to become a Spiritual Achiever, I invite you to watch the free training on how to Stand Out and Lead, using spiritual, high-performance strategies: STAND OUT AND LEAD.

You can apply to join my Spiritual Achiever® program, where you’re going to create your next chapter with spiritual and high-performance strategies to achieve time and financial freedom using my proven method. It’s risk-free. You either start seeing results within your first month or I give you your money back. Schedule your call here at www.mayempson.com/contact.  We’ll see you inside.

Want to know more about what happens when you join?

1. When you join Spiritual Achiever® Coaching you’ll be supported for a full year: Career Revelation Academy: A 5-step career change process (if you have a job you want to stay in, I’ll show you how to love it even more) that can launch you into your next career chapter in 30 days.
2. 2x/month group training and coaching on Spirituality, Achievement, Earth Energy and Harmony. You’ll know how to design your days for breakthroughs, create a personal brand and community, lead yourself and others through change, become more physically and mentally fit, reduce stress and reinvent what’s possible in this next chapter of your life.
3. Discover your Leadership Strengths and Branding Workshop: Increase your awareness of what makes YOU different from others and how to become even better at your genius zone.
4. Your Best Year workshop: Create your one year plan and design this next year, no matter what time of the year it is.
5. Your Next 5 Years one-day virtual retreat: Vision what’s possible 5 years from now and break out of your old routines so you can step into new habits, behaviors and routines.
6. Tickets to all in-person Spiritual Achiever retreats (discounted rates): Highly immersive and intimate gatherings where we spend time in nature, experience energy work, eat and move well – all while making big decisions and committing to what’s next for us.
7. Monthly 1:1 Coaching Sessions: To help you break through obstacles, define your individual path, and to work on both strategy and mindset.

The next step?

Schedule a consultation to get clarity on how coaching can help you on your journey.

Once you’re accepted into the program, you’ll receive a calendar invite for a 2-hour deep dive 1:1 session to map out your personal goals and your own year-long journey.

You’ll have immediate access to the Spiritual Achiever process and philosophy – how to achieve your biggest goals and reinvent your life.

You’ll have immediate access to 5 modules of Career Revelation Academy – to love your career even more and launch that next chapter of your career in 30 days.

You’ll have the calendar invites for the upcoming group calls and retreats.

If this speaks to you, I can’t wait to talk to you live: Schedule a consultation.

Reach out at www.mayempson.com/contact for more information on my Spiritual Achiever coaching program. You’ll figure out what’s next and actually go and do it. 

That’s it for this week. Have an amazing one and I’ll talk to you next time.