My last newsletter went out in July. It was about the “bias for action,” and how the urge to keep moving is sometimes fear dressed up as admirable productivity.

Then I stopped.

For almost five years, this newsletter has gone out at least once a month, often twice. I’m proud of that streak, but this summer, I let it go.

Something had come up for my family in July, and I wanted to be there for them. Fully there, not half-present thinking about the things I “needed” to do. Then the season did what seasons do, and things got busy and a few weeks became a few months.

What surprised me (or didn’t surprise me?) was the unwelcome voice that showed up. You’re breaking the streak. People will forget. If you break the consistency, you’ve lost. Ugh, I know that voice. I hear it from leaders all the time. It was signalling that I’m treating rest as a debt I’ll have to pay back or even recover from.

Mountaineers use a technique called the rest step. On a long, steep climb, you pause for a beat on every step. Your weight settles onto a locked back leg, you exhale, and your muscles get a moment to let go before the next move. From below, it looks like hesitation or slowness, but it’s often how people get up big mountains. Some mountaineers in the Himalayas will stand motionless in a rest step for 10 seconds! I got to practice the rest step when I attempted a summit of Mt. Rainier almost 15 years ago, and it made a huge difference in such a long climb. Tiny rests compound.

What I learned is that the rest step isn’t a break from the climb, but it’s a very important part of the climb.

A lot of leaders have this backwards. They treat pauses as time away from the real work, something to minimize, explain, or make up for later and overextend. So they keep moving on tired legs and wonder why everything continues to feel heavy.

Here’s what I noticed coming back to wanting to write and share recently. The energy to write didn’t return because I scheduled it, but it came back on its own. Ideas showed up on walks, after coaching sessions, in the car, doing the dishes. There’s a real difference between work you do because you “should” and work you do because something in you wants to. The first drains you if left unchecked, and the second fills you back up. Sometimes the only way to get from one to the other is to stop long enough to feel the difference.

For reflection: What are you still carrying on “should” alone, and what would it tell you if you set it down for a few weeks?

Not abandoning it forever, but just long enough to find out whether it’s a commitment or a habit that you’re afraid to question.

Here’s a small experiment for this week: Pick one recurring thing, like a meeting, a task, or a ritual. Ask yourself honestly, “If this didn’t exist, would I create it today?” If the answer is no, try pausing it for two weeks. Notice who misses it and, more importantly, notice whether you do.

I’m glad to be back. Next time, I want to dig into something I see in nearly every team I work with: how rarely teams actually talk with each other, instead of past each other.

In the meantime, I’d love to hear from you. Have you taken a pause lately, or are you overdue for one? Shoot me a note.