Why You Can't Afford to Skip Rest This Summer

This is Week 1 of Steady for Summer — a four-week series for school leaders who are ready to rest, reflect, and reset with intention.

I want to tell you about a version of myself I am not particularly proud of.

For the first several years of my administrative career, I worked through July.

Not a little. A lot. I told myself it was necessary — that the work required it, that the school needed it, that a good leader didn't just disappear for two months when there was planning to do and systems to build and emails to answer. I was, I believed, being responsible.

What I was actually being was afraid.

Afraid that if I stopped, something would fall apart. Afraid that rest was a luxury that other people got, not people who cared as much as I did. Afraid — though I wouldn't have named it this way at the time — that my value was tied so tightly to my productivity that stopping felt like disappearing.

And so I worked through July. Every July.

And every September, I walked back into the building with a full calendar and an empty tank. I looked fine. My plans were solid. My goals were written. But something underneath all of it was depleted in a way that took until November to really feel — and by then the year was already in motion and there was no good time to stop.

It took me longer than I'd like to admit to understand what was happening. I wasn't preparing for September by working through July. I was borrowing against it.

Rest is not a reward.

Here is the reframe that changed everything for me, and the one I offer to every leader I coach:

Rest is not a reward for surviving the school year. It is professional preparation for the one ahead.

Read that again. Because the culture of school leadership does not say this out loud. The culture of school leadership celebrates the leader who never fully disconnects, who is reachable in August, who arrives in September having already done three months of next-year work over the summer. That leader is held up as dedicated. Committed. A true professional.

That leader is also, almost without exception, the one who hits a wall in February.

The nervous system does not run on willpower. It runs on recovery. And recovery — real recovery, not just a long weekend or a vacation where you check email from the pool — requires sustained periods of genuine rest. Periods where the brain is not problem-solving, where the body is not in alert mode, where the identity is not organized around being the principal.

When leaders skip that recovery, they don't arrive in September fresh. They arrive already behind. Already drawing on reserves that were never replenished. Already one hard week away from the kind of depletion that makes good leadership nearly impossible.

What rest actually produces.

Let me tell you what happened the first summer I actually rested.

I was terrified for the first two weeks. I kept reaching for my laptop. I kept thinking about the calendar. I kept waiting for the guilt to subside — the nagging sense that I should be doing something, planning something, proving something.

It didn't fully subside. But somewhere around week three, something else happened.

I started thinking differently. Not about school — just in general. I had ideas that weren't connected to problems. I noticed things I had stopped noticing. I had conversations with people I loved where I was actually present, not half-managing a mental to-do list. I remembered things about myself that nine months of being the principal had quietly pushed to the edges.

And when September came — the first September after a real summer — I walked into the building differently. Not with more plans. With more presence. With a clarity about what mattered and a patience with what didn't that I had not had the year before.

That is what rest produces. Not laziness. Clarity. Presence. The capacity to lead from a full place instead of a depleted one.

What gets in the way.

I know what you're thinking, because I thought it too.

But the work doesn't stop. The emails come in July. The new initiative needs to be planned. The staff changes need to be navigated. The building needs someone thinking about September.

All of that is true. And none of it means you cannot rest.

Rest is not the absence of all responsibility. It is the intentional protection of recovery time — a boundary around the part of summer that belongs to your nervous system, not to your role. It means deciding, in advance, that July belongs to you. That there are hours and days and stretches of time that are not available to the school calendar. That you are a human being first and a school leader second, and human beings require recovery to function at the level your school deserves.

This is not selfish. This is the most responsible thing you can do for your building.

Because the version of you that walks in on the first day of school having genuinely rested — having slept, played, been present to your life, let your nervous system come down from nine months of alert — that version of you is a better leader than any amount of summer planning can produce.

This summer, we do it differently.

The Steady for Summer series is about building the practices — rest, reflection, and reset — that make September possible. Not the September where you survive the first month. The September where you lead it.

Over the next four weeks, we are going to do the real work. What rest looks like in practice. How to reflect in a way that actually moves you forward. What to leave behind and what to design intentionally for the year ahead.

It starts with this: give yourself permission to stop.

Not forever. Just for the part of summer that belongs to you.

You've earned it. More importantly — your school next year needs you to take it.

Pulse Check Reflection:

What does real rest actually look like for you — not the idea of it, but the specific, practical version that is actually available to you this summer? And what has been getting in the way of allowing it?