I Tried to Relax for Two Hours — My Leadership Brain Wouldn’t Let Me
Have you ever noticed how hard it is to actually rest when your mind has been trained to see patterns, gaps, and opportunities everywhere?
Being a trainer, a speaker, a coach — it’s a blessing and a curse.
And most people only talk about the blessing.
As I was lying down for two full hours getting my eyebrows and lashes done. Eyes closed. Calm environment. Great service. I pay extra for experiences like this because quality matters to me. Attention matters to me. Care matters to me.
Acts of service are my love language — and I will always invest in them.
If you’ve ever experienced Eastern European beauty work — Russian manicures, lashes, brows — you already know. The level of precision, the durability, the standards. There’s no equivalent. Ask immigrants. Ask Americans who’ve tried it. It costs more, yes — and it lasts longer. The quality speaks for itself.
Everything about the appointment was objectively wonderful.
And still — my mind would not turn off.
With my eyes closed, I noticed how they spoke to one another.
How transitions could be smoother.
How small changes could elevate the experience for the client.
How the team dynamic could improve outcomes even more.
Not because anything was wrong— but because my brain is wired for better.
That’s the part people don’t warn you about when you become a leader, a coach, a trainer.
Your nervous system becomes trained to scan.
To optimize.
To notice micro-inefficiencies.
To imagine possibilities before others even feel the friction.
This ability builds businesses.
It transforms teams.
It saves organizations years of trial and error.
And it can quietly rob you of rest.
This isn’t about being critical.
It’s not about fault-finding.
It’s not about dissatisfaction.
It’s about pattern recognition becoming automatic.
When you help people grow for a living, your mind doesn’t wait for permission to engage. It doesn’t clock out just because you’re lying down with your eyes closed. It sees systems everywhere — even in silence.
And here’s the truth most high performers won’t say out loud:
The same skill that makes you exceptional can overstimulate your nervous system if you don’t learn how to regulate it.
I did enjoy the procedure.
I relaxed as much as I could.
And simultaneously, in the background of my mind, I was writing business scenarios.
“If they did this one thing differently…”
“If the flow shifted just slightly…”
“If communication tightened here…”
That’s not ambition.
That’s conditioning.
Leadership isn’t just a mindset. It’s astate.
Your brain adapts to responsibility. To impact. To seeing around corners. And over time, it forgets how to fully disengage unless you intentionally teach it how.
This is where burnout quietly begins — not in chaos, but in constant mental engagement.
Not in stress — but innever being off.
Most leaders don’t need better time management.
They need better self managments, and more specifically nervous system literacy.
They need to understand that rest isn’t just physical stillness — it’s cognitive permission. It’s emotional safety. It’s the felt sense that nothing needs to be improvedright now.
And that doesn’t happen automatically for people like us.
It must be trained.
At MotivAction, we work with leaders who are deeply competent, deeply caring, and deeply tired — not because they’re weak, but because their internal systems are always online.
The work isn’t about turning your brilliance off.
It’s about learning when to set it down.
So you can receive.
So you can enjoy.
So you can be present without scanning for improvement.
Because excellence without regulation becomes exhaustion.
And leadership without rest becomes unsustainable — no matter how successful it looks on the outside.
If your mind won’t turn off, nothing is wrong with you.
You’re not broken.
You’re trained.
The question isn’t how to stop seeing — It’s how to choose when to see.
If this resonates, you’re exactly who we work with.
We train leaders and teams to master this — not by doing less, but by regulating better.
