Last week I co-led a retreat with a dozen women who own home inspection companies, and we all did the same thing to get there: we left something running that doesn't usually stop for anyone. A business. A family. A list that was still moving whether we were paying attention to it or not.
Here's the sentence that opened the weekend, and it's the one I haven't stopped thinking about since: rest is not a reward you earn after you've done enough. It's a requirement — for being the kind of woman, friend, wife, mom, and business owner you actually want to be, every single day, not just on a retreat in the mountains.
I've built a career on paying close attention to systems — what's holding up, what's quietly failing, what looks fine until you look closer. I'm good at that with houses. I'm not always as good at it with myself. So the question that actually stopped me wasn't complicated: am I rested and full in every area — physical, spiritual, emotional, financial — or am I just managing to look that way?
On the second day, we hiked partway up a mountain and did something I didn't expect to affect me the way it did. We each picked up a rock — something to represent an expectation we'd been carrying that wasn't actually ours to carry. Mine was easy to name once I stopped and looked for it: the belief that I had to have the answer, every time, for everyone, or I wasn't doing my job. I set it down on that trail.
Then we picked up a new one. Smooth. Blank. Something to draw our own next chapter on, instead of someone else's expectations.
