Rest Without Guilt: What High Performance Taught Me About Knowing When to Stop

Last month, I sat at my desk staring at an email.

I must have read it five times.

The words were right there in front of me, but I couldn’t absorb what they were saying.

Something in me said:

Go home.

There was a time when I would have ignored that feeling.

I would have pushed through.

Answered a few more emails.

Finished one more thing.

Maybe taken some work home so I could “catch up”.

Because somewhere along the way, many of us have learnt that pushing through is what high performers do.

But that day, I chose differently.

I left at lunchtime.

I went home.

And I slept for three hours.

Then I did something similar the next day.

And the next.

For five days, I gave myself permission to stop.

And perhaps the most surprising part?

I didn’t feel guilty about it.

I used to think pushing through was a strength

I’ve spent much of my life in high-performance environments.

As an Olympian, pushing myself was part of the job.

There were early mornings when I didn’t want to get out of bed.

Training sessions when I was exhausted.

Days when motivation wasn’t there but the work still needed to be done.

Discipline matters.

Consistency matters.

There are absolutely moments when we need to do difficult things even when we don’t feel like doing them.

But there is another side to high performance that we don’t talk about nearly enough.

Knowing when pushing harder is no longer helping you perform better.

Those are two very different things.

And learning the difference has probably been one of my biggest lessons since elite sport.

Rest isn’t something you have to earn

We often treat rest as a reward.

Finish the project.

Clear the inbox.

Get through the week.

Do everything everyone needs from you.

Then you can rest.

The problem is that there will always be something else to do.

Another email.

Another meeting.

Another deadline.

Another responsibility.

Another person who needs something from you.

If rest only happens when everything is finished, we may never give ourselves permission to stop.

I’ve had to learn that rest isn’t a reward for completing my to-do list.

It’s part of being able to lead, create, think clearly and perform sustainably.

High performance requires recovery

Elite sport actually understands this remarkably well.

You don’t become a better athlete by training at maximum intensity every hour of every day.

Training and recovery work together.

There are hard sessions and lighter sessions.

There are periods of load and periods of recovery.

There are times to push and times to allow the body to adapt.

Yet outside sport, we can glorify the opposite.

Back-to-back meetings.

Eating lunch at the desk.

Answering emails late at night.

Being constantly available.

Working while exhausted.

And sometimes we wear that busyness as evidence that we’re committed.

But being busy and performing well aren’t necessarily the same thing.

Sometimes the highest-performance decision you can make is to stop.

Self-awareness is part of leadership

This is also something I’ve come to think about differently as a leader.

We often associate leadership with what we do for other people.

How we communicate.

How we make decisions.

How we motivate a team.

How we show up when things are difficult.

But leadership is also deeply personal.

It requires enough self-awareness to recognise what is happening within ourselves.

Am I actually thinking clearly?

Am I responding thoughtfully, or simply reacting?

Am I still producing good work?

Am I listening?

Am I making good decisions?

Or am I continuing because I’ve convinced myself that stopping would somehow mean I’m not capable?

That day at my desk, reading the same email five times told me everything I needed to know.

I wasn’t performing well.

Continuing to sit there wasn’t going to change that.

Going home was the better decision.

Rest can be a strategy, not a weakness

Rest doesn’t always mean taking a week off.

Sometimes it might mean going to bed earlier.

Taking an actual lunch break.

Walking outside between meetings.

Closing the laptop.

Taking a breath before moving into the next thing.

Saying no.

Asking for support.

Or recognising that today isn’t the day to keep pushing.

None of that makes you less ambitious.

And it doesn’t mean you don’t care about your work.

I still believe deeply in discipline, commitment and doing difficult things.

But I’ve stopped believing that exhaustion is evidence of ambition.

Sustainable high performance is knowing when to push and having enough self-awareness to know when to stop.

That week, my body was asking me to stop.

For once, I listened.

And I didn’t feel guilty about it.

High performance isn’t about pushing harder all the time

As an Olympian and keynote speaker, much of my work explores what elite sport can teach us about pressure, performance, leadership and sustainable success.

Because some of the most valuable lessons I took from high-performance sport weren’t simply about working harder.

They were about understanding yourself well enough to know what you need in order to perform at your best.

Explore Anna-Liza Mopio-Jane’s keynote topics and invite Anna-Liza to speak at your next conference, leadership event or staff development day.