Kent Murawski on Why Rest Is a Leadership Strategy, Not a Reward

We’ve been sold a story about high performance that goes something like this: the harder you grind, the further you get. Rest is something you earn after the work is done. And if you’re running on fumes, that’s just part of the deal.

Kent Murawski came on No More Mondays to push back on all of that — and he did it with data, stories, and a framework built on 20 years of working with leaders who learned the hard way.

Rest Isn’t What You Think It Is

The first thing Kent said that reframed everything for me: most high achievers either say they don’t know how to rest, or they assume rest means doing nothing. But rest is often not inactivity — it’s activities that replenish rather than deplete.

Kent’s framework, which he calls the REST acronym, breaks it down into four categories: Relational rhythms, Emotional and mental rhythms, Spiritual rhythms (whether that’s faith or a robust philosophy of life), and Tangible rhythms — eat, sleep, exercise, finances. The seven types of rest most people talk about all live somewhere in that framework. It just makes them easier to actually use.

The insight underneath all of it: burnout doesn’t always come from doing too much. Sometimes it comes from doing too much of the wrong things — things outside your zone of genius — which means you’re constantly depleting without ever replenishing.

Kent knows this firsthand. At 27, he had what he describes as a fall-down-on-the-floor nervous breakdown. He was working full time, leading multiple ministries at his church, and running on empty. He curled up and cried for two hours and spent the next two to three months climbing out. What he learned from that experience became the foundation of everything he now teaches.

The Brandon Story

The most compelling thing Kent shared was the story of a client named Brandon — owner and founder of an education tutoring company — who was working 12 to 15 hours a day, seven days a week, for five to six years straight. He couldn’t remember a thought walking from one room to the next. He was angry, frustrated, burned through.

Kent asked him a simple question: when’s the last time you had a day off?

Brandon’s answer: not once in five or six years.

So Kent introduced him to a modified version of the Sabbath concept — not religious necessarily, but the idea of ceasing. Stop doing things related to work. Not stopping everything, just stopping that. He asked Brandon to go from 6pm Friday to noon Saturday. Brandon negotiated: if it only goes to 6pm Saturday so I can work Saturday night, I can do 24 hours.

He did it. And he never looked back.

Two months later, Brandon had gone from 12 to 15 hours a day, seven days a week — to two to four hours a day, six days a week. By the time Kent and I talked, Brandon was down to an hour a day, had made great hires, had a manager in place, and had started writing a book and a podcast.

That 24-hour pause broke a belief system. The belief that he was the only one who could do it. Once that cracked, everything else followed — delegation, better hires, clearer thinking, more capacity.

Rest Creates Clarity. Clarity Creates Courage.

Kent connects the dots this way: when you’re in it all the time without stopping to replenish, you can’t think straight. Leaders working head-down in the business never step back to work on it. Rest creates the headspace to see clearly — and that clarity is what gives you the courage to make changes, say no, and stop doing what doesn’t serve you or your people.

He shared another story to illustrate this. Years ago he was going through a painful leadership situation — a yearlong disagreement with a mentor he’d trained that ultimately ended with that person leaving the organization. Kent was emotionally spent in a way he didn’t know how to fix. So he went to the garage every night and started refinishing furniture. Every piece in the house, over the next three months. And somewhere in the doing of that, he started feeling replenished again.

He referenced a line from rabbi and philosopher Abraham Heschel that I think is worth carrying around: if you work with your hands, Sabbath with your mind. If you work with your mind, Sabbath with your hands.

That’s the whole idea. Switch the muscle. Let the depleted one recover.

And one more story Kent shared that I hadn’t heard before — Roger Bannister, the first person to break the four-minute mile. Before his record-setting race, instead of training harder, he stopped training entirely. Went hiking with friends for two weeks. Came back, took more rest, did some light training a couple days before the race. That deliberate deload — physically and mentally — is what got him there.

Nothing is meant to go 100% all the time. Not humans, not inanimate objects. The rhythm is built into the world. We’re just stubborn about listening to it.

Give this episode a listen — especially if you’ve been telling yourself rest is something you’ll get to eventually.