We are very accustomed to thinking about progress as something we make happen. We practise, we work, we train, we problem-solve, we keep going. And when something isn’t moving as quickly as we would like, our instinct is often to do more.
But what if some of our most important breakthroughs happen when we stop?
I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the past few months, partly because circumstances have required me to slow down in ways I would never have chosen for myself.
My recovery from injury has involved patience, rehabilitation and plenty of deliberate effort. But recently, something interesting happened. I went on holiday, I rested, and when I came home, I discovered that I could type again with my right hand. Not as well as I could before my accident, and not perfectly, but I can type again. The same thing has begun to happen with my handwriting.
Of course, the progress didn’t literally happen overnight. My body and nervous system have been healing for months. But what struck me was that this particular shift became apparent after I had stopped actively working at it. Something had been happening in the rest.
Then recently, I had another experience of the same principle. I went walking with my breath coach, who supports me with both swimming and walking, using breathwork as a key part of how we work together. I haven’t done much walking this summer and yet, I walked a stretch with ease that previously would have challenged me.
Again, the improvement appeared after the break.
It reminded me of an experience one of my clients had this summer. Part of her vision was to take a full month away with her family for holiday, rest and recuperation. She really wanted that time, but she found the idea of letting go of her work commitments difficult. This wasn’t new. She had wanted a proper summer break before, but somehow work had always crept back in.
So I encouraged her to treat this year as an experiment. What if, just once, she really took the break? What if she gave herself permission to step away and simply noticed what happened?
She did the experiment and had a wonderful holiday with her family. And, she continued her preparation for running a marathon. A grant came through. And, perhaps most interestingly, she had breakthrough ideas about her research.
When we spoke afterwards, she marvelled at everything that had happened despite the fact that she had been on holiday. I invited her to consider that perhaps those things hadn’t happened despite the holiday but rather because of it.
Rest is not the absence of activity
We tend to judge productivity by what we can see: writing the paper, answering the emails, attending the meeting, doing the training, making the decision or completing the task. Rest, by comparison, can look like nothing is happening.
And yet the human system is extraordinarily active when we stop consciously directing it. Sleep supports memory consolidation, learning, physical repair, immune function and emotional regulation. Ideas continue to connect beneath conscious awareness. The nervous system gets an opportunity to shift state. Muscles recover after training and the brain integrates what it has taken in.
There is a reason athletes build recovery into training. Growth does not happen through exertion alone. The exertion provides the stimulus; recovery allows the system to adapt. Perhaps the same principle applies to far more of our lives than we realise.
Vex King puts it beautifully: “Rest isn’t weakness. It’s wisdom.”
I think that distinction matters, because so often we treat rest as something we have earned only when the work is finished, or something we reluctantly allow ourselves when we no longer have the energy to continue. What if, instead, we understood it as part of the process itself?
There are times when the next stage of our growth may not require another push. It requires integration.
Making space for something other than effort
My own coach offered me another way of thinking about this that resonated deeply with me. She spoke about sleep as a time when Spirit works to restore us and replenish our energy. Whether or not that is language you would use yourself, I love the invitation within it: we don’t have to be consciously in charge of everything that is happening within us.
For me, as someone who understands us as spiritual beings having a human experience, there is something profound in recognising that we need to make space for restoration, integration and renewal. We cannot continually pour more into a system and never give it time to integrate what is already there.
There is a natural rhythm to all of this: an inhale and an exhale, effort and release, action and allowing, doing and being. It seems to me now that wisdom lies not in choosing one over the other, but in recognising that both belong to the process of creation.
✨ So perhaps there is another question available to us: What becomes possible when I give myself enough space for what I have already done to integrate?
My hand didn’t stop healing because I went on holiday. My walking capacity wasn’t necessarily lost because I hadn’t been testing it. My client’s professional life didn’t collapse because she stepped away from it for a month. Something continued. Something integrated. And when we returned, we could see what had changed.
This doesn’t mean that action doesn’t matter. Of course it does. Rehabilitation, training, practice, showing up and doing the work all matter. But rest is not necessarily the interruption of that work. It is actually one of the conditions that allows the work to bear fruit.
I guess that is why some of our best ideas arrive in the shower, on a walk, in the garden, on holiday or after a good night’s sleep! We have stopped demanding an answer long enough to create space for one to emerge.
As I continue to recover, I’m learning something I suspect I understood intellectually long before I was required to live it: there are seasons for pushing forward and seasons for allowing, times to practise and times to pause, times to make things happen and times to leave enough space for something to happen within us and around us.
So maybe the question isn’t always, What do I need to do next?
💫 Perhaps, sometimes, it is:
Where might I need to stop long enough for my next breakthrough to find me?
P.S. My Vision Workshop on 17–18 October is another kind of invitation to create some space.
Not to rest exactly – we’ll be doing plenty of meaningful work together – but an opportunity to step away from the busyness of everyday life for a couple of days and give yourself the time and space to listen to what you really want, reconnect with the bigger vision for your life, and notice what might become possible when you stop long enough to hear yourself.
If that kind of spaciousness feels like something you need right now, I’d love to welcome you.
Find out more and book your place here.