Episode #114: Why Rest Is Key To Trusting Yourself

Let’s talk about rest. How to prioritise it, why it’s an essential foundation of self trust, and what trusting yourself can do for you in your business. You’re listening to quietly ambitious with conversations about how it really feels to build a business that honours your whole self unapologetically. And that includes who you are, how you feel, what you really desire, the impact that you want to create, and importantly, the money you want to make. I’m your host, Ruth Poundwhite. And my superpower is supporting sensitive and ambitious humans to make more money by fully expressing and owning all of who they are. Let’s dive in. Hi, and welcome back to another episode of The quietly ambitious podcast. What you’re about to hear in this episode is an excerpt from my book quietly ambitious, which is available on Amazon worldwide either in paperback or in Kindle format, which you don’t have to have a Kindle to read. By the way, you can also read on the app. And this excerpt is from chapter 11, which is all about honouring our natural cycles of creation. So in the chapter before we get to this bit that I’m about to read, we talk about the cycle of creation and going through different phases of visibility of ideas of output of productivity, and especially. And that importantly, also includes the winter slash New Moon Slash menstrual menstrual phase, which is basically All About going inward focus, reflection, rest. And the excerpt that I’m about to read is all about how we actually prioritise that rest, and how that rest is linked to our self trust. If you like what you hear, then I invite you to go and buy the book to get the full picture. And let me know your thoughts as always on social media. I’m on Instagram at Ruth Poundwhite and I hope you enjoy this extract. Excerpt from chapter 11, honouring our natural cycles of creation and prioritising Rest. Rest is part of the work. One of the hardest things about working with our natural seasons and cycles is honouring our need to rest in a culture that prioritises output and productivity and especially for those of us who identify as overachievers doing nothing can be the hardest phase of all. The winter season is often characterised by a lack of ideas or a lack of motivation. Try as you might it’s hard to access that state of flow when you push yourself to keep doing and it’s scary. What if you stopped making money? What if you never come up with the next right thing to put out into the world? What if people forget about you and your business? The reason this season is called the fertile void is because as if nature, the pause comes before the next shoots appear. As Kate Northrup author of doula is a revolutionary approach to time and energy management for ambitious women describes it deep true creativity doesn’t emerge despite the deep pause it emerges because of it. How to prioritise rest. As a business owner, you’ll relate to the fact that your to do list never ends. The key is knowing that it’s okay that you’ll never get through that to do list, you have to build the evidence to trust that taking time to rest lays the groundwork for everything else to fall into place. Practically speaking,

it means being willing to radically prioritise and let things go. Even the most ambitious humans can’t achieve it all at once, especially when they’re not well rested. The book dropped the ball achieving more by doing less by Tiffany du feu gave me new guiding questions to support me in my inner winter. What can I drop the ball on? How can I make this easier? The truth is that letting go of things that some parts of you want to do is uncomfortable. Choosing not to be productive is uncomfortable. Taking a nap in the middle of the day while somebody else is caring for your child or your clients are asking you questions or there are bills that need to be paid is all uncomfortable. And rest is also boring. It’s not all spa days luxury holidays and having healthy meals cooked for you. It’s time spent lying in bed binge watching TV shows it’s not answering your emails for a week. It’s awkwardly asking your partner to help you do something you should be doing yourself or letting your garden grow wild because taking care of it is not currently a priority. It’s also making decisions in your business even when you’re feeling full of energy and ideas that allow space and time for rest. It’s taking on fewer clients at higher prices, not making yourself available for meetings on certain days of the week. Some sometimes cancelling client calls or saying no to projects that you wouldn’t mind being part of. It can also look like choosing the one thing that will move the needle in your business and forgetting everything else. All of this can be uncomfortable to do. But over time you build up the evidence that resting really works. Not only do you start to feel better, but you discover that your ability to make money is actually supported by your need to rest. Rest is also about self trust. If you’re going to learn to rest when you need to, then you need to learn to listen to both your mind and your body. In my work, rest isn’t just about doing less or doing nothing at all. It’s also an acronym that stands for radical entrepreneurial self trust. We need to learn to trust our bodies need to rest and we need to trust in ourselves as business owners if we’re going to have the courage to build a business that supports all of our needs. We need to trust ourselves in the moments where the noise on the internet is telling us something different to the thing that’s in our heart. We need to trust ourselves when we have a nudge to create something new even though our brain is trying to protect us by giving us all of the reasons why it just won’t work. We need to trust ourselves to take time out to step back to do things differently in a culture that ties our self worth to productivity, and a very limited number of markers for success. We need to trust ourselves to be the leaders we were meant to be, especially as sensitive humans who have been raised in a culture with very limited examples of what leadership should look like for people like us. And we need to trust ourselves to break free from and play a part in changing the norms of marketing, business work, and whatever other unhelpful, maybe even toxic beliefs come up in your particular industry. We cannot cultivate this trust in ourselves if we never take time to pause and go inwards. Trust in yourself is not the same as complete confidence. Trust is more akin to self compassion, and building your ability to deal with whatever happens versus building confidence based on what does or does not happen. Your self trust is something that you get to practice completely independently of external results. Although if you keep going, you will see the results to help you build it more quickly and you will still fail in the future too. Here’s how Kristin Neff describes the benefit of self compassion versus self esteem in her book with a few added notes by me self compassion, which I highly recommend, by the way, when our sense of self worth stems from being a human being intrinsically worthy of respect to which I add by practising self compassion. Rather than being contingent on obtaining certain ideals to which I add by building self esteem. Our sense of self worth is much less easily shaken. In short, self trust is a way of being a willingness to step back from the here and now and to commit to yourself and an unknown future. Confidence is a feeling that may come and go. But your ability to practice self trust is always there, even if it’s sometimes harder to find. So how do you learn to trust yourself, it all begins in the winter slash rest phase of the cycle, connecting to and listening to what your intuition is trying to tell you. Always developing that awareness of your thoughts, identifying and connecting with the thing that makes what you do completely unique. And then simply deciding that you in all your imperfect glory are already a leader, and you get to make choices and take aligned action in your business based on deciding that. Don’t forget the book quietly ambitious is available on Amazon worldwide. And if you head to Ruth poundwhite.com forward slash book, you can get a whole selection of juicy bonuses when you buy it. Thank you so much for listening to another episode of quietly ambitious, if you have a moment to rate and review know that it really does make a difference. And if you’d like to carry on the conversation, then you can connect with me on Instagram at Ruth Poundwhite Join me in the Facebook group or my personal favourite. Sign up to my newsletter letters to quietly ambitious humans. Just go to Ruth poundwhite.com forward slash newsletter to subscribe and keep doing what you’re doing because your work really does matter.