Episode Summary

Do you ever feel like you’re running on fumes—exhausted but still afraid to slow down because you don’t want to fall behind?

As the pace picks up in your business and life, the idea of true rest can start to feel like a luxury you can’t afford. But what if replenishing yourself didn’t require a vacation, a day off, or dropping a single ball? In this episode, you’ll discover how to resource yourself in ways that actually increase your capacity and momentum—so you can feel clear, grounded, and energized even in your busiest seasons.

In this episode, you will learn:

How to feel refreshed and recharged without taking a single day off
The science-backed micro-practice that rewires your brain for calm, clarity, and better decisions—and takes less time than scrolling a few posts on Instagram.
Why your version of rest might actually be keeping you tired—and how to find the kind that truly replenishes you.

Press play to discover how to move beyond “clear messaging” into true resonance—and watch how you start calling in ideal clients.

Episodes Mentioned:

Ep #71: How I Structure My 33-Hour Workweek

The Uncommon Way helps ambitious women entrepreneurs and leaders rewrite the rules of success with confidence and clarity. Hosted by top business coach Jenna Harrison, this podcast blends high-level strategy with deep mindset work so you can achieve more by doing less—without guilt, burnout, or compromise.

Each episode dives into topics like leadership for women, business growth strategy, time freedom, and mindset mastery, giving you practical tools and proven insights to simplify your path to success. You’ll learn how to create magnetic messaging, design offers that sell, and step fully into your authority as a visionary leader.

If you’re ready to scale your business sustainably, elevate your thinking, and finally experience spaciousness and flow while creating extraordinary results, you’re in the right place. The Uncommon Way is your roadmap to building a business and life that feel as good as they look—because training your mind to think uncommonly unlocks a whole new level of impact and possibility.

Work with Jenna

The Clarity Accelerator Mastermind — If you want to be surrounded by other visionary entrepreneurs while rapidly aligning your business to the conditions and strategies that let you thrive and excel naturally, this intimate mastermind will stretch you into your next level. Schedule your call today here or visit this page to find out more.

Private Coaching — If you’re craving the highest level of support, strategy, and partnership to create all the freedom, impact, and success you’re designed for, this is the space for it. Schedule you call today at the link

Social Media

Find Jenna on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theuncommonway/

Full Episode Transcript:

[00:00:00] In this episode, you'll discover four smart ways to replenish and rest without falling behind. Welcome to the Uncommon Way where high achieving women, entrepreneurs and leaders pitch the rule, book and design success on their own terms. I'm your host, Jenna Harrison, a top ranked business coach sharing business growth strategies of mindset, mastery, and power moves to help you attract ideal clients, leverage your unique genius and scale with freedom.

Let's dive in. Welcome, welcome to The Uncommon Way. If you are like most women, I know your life is probably getting pretty busy right now. You are heading into one of the busiest seasons of the year. Probably got lots going on. There's some caregiving in there somewhere. Children or parents or your fur baby.

And to top it all off, it's busy season at work too. Maybe you're planning for Black Friday promotions, you're in the middle of a launch, or you're just feeling the rush of clients who are ready to start spending down their budgets. Or they're feeling really motivated now that there's a [00:01:00] nip in the air.

All of that together feels at best, overwhelming, and at worst, just completely exhausting and unsustainable. If you are beginning to worry about burnout now or in the future, you wouldn't be the only one. I guess the obvious solution is don't do it anymore, but easier said than done. Right. One of the most common objections I get from high achieving women when I talk about decreasing the amount of stuff piling up for them is I can't afford to fall behind.

So today I'm giving you four smart ways to resource yourself, to replenish, to rest that are nourishing, but also completely doable and won't knock you off your game even if you are a type A overachiever. Who is halfway to burnout, but staring at really tight deadlines, so you just can't stop. In this episode, you'll discover how to feel [00:02:00] refreshed and recharged without taking a single day off.

You'll learn the science backed micro practice that rewires your brain for calm, clarity and better decisions, and takes less time than scrolling a few posts on Instagram, and you'll find out why your version of rest might actually be keeping you tired. How to find the kind that truly replenishes you.

I'm so excited you're taking the time to listen to this episode because my life is so much better now that I'm using these techniques, and I know yours will be too because I've tried them out with clients and they create huge changes in their lives too. So let's get down to it. The first is to normalize and habitualize micro rest.

This one's really important, so I'm gonna spend the most time on it. Here is a very happy secret. Big rest isn't the only kind of replenishment that [00:03:00] counts. In fact, if you're waiting for a vacation or a full day off to finally give yourself a break, you are missing the whole point of replenishing your cup.

We replenish the cup now so we can continue to pour from it. Now, imagine you have a garden. Your watering can's getting low and it's obvious that you need to fill it up so you don't just keep watering the plants with no water. That's a total waste of time and energy. Obviously. It's ineffective. The plant withers.

It has to spend so much energy resuscitating itself. Once it finally does get the water again, and yet we do that to ourselves a lot. You start to feel withered. You can feel that in your body, right? And parched and shut down. But then you tell yourself it's just the season you're in right now, even though the next season might be like that too, and the season after that, [00:04:00] when the truth is you have the capability to not even need a vacation.

I know that's controversial. I'm gonna put it out there. Not even needing a vacation because you feel so good and restored all the time. Again, like a thriving plant. A plant doesn't need a break from thriving. It just keeps thriving. The truth is that high achieving women don't burn out because they can't handle everything that business or life is throwing at them.

You burn out because you're not resourcing yourself or 'cause you're not lit up at all by what you're doing. But that is a convo for another time. So let's talk about the real life equivalent of filling up your watering can. It's small moments. It could even be several seconds. It's really not a big thing.

These small moments of micro rest or micro vacations as I like to call them. I discovered it by accident one day. I was feeling very [00:05:00] stressed out and unhappy. I can't remember the exact circumstances, which is telling right. At the time, everything always seemed so urgent and important, but in hindsight, we can't even remember all these things that kept us, you know, burning the midnight oil.

Anyway, it was a weekend and I'm sure I had a million things that I needed to get done, but I couldn't because I had my son who so hyperactive and we needed to get him outside and getting exercise and it was winter, and so there happened to be this fair going on and we took him to the fair. He was bouncing around in a bouncy castle, and I just had just the worst attitude.

You know, when you're just feeling really sorry for yourself. Like it wasn't what I wanted to be doing, but I had to be giving more and more of myself, and I just felt done, like just done. And so I just laid back down in the grass, exhausted, and then my husband laid down next to me. Well, as I was laying there, [00:06:00] I had the thought like, oh, only I were in my yorker.

And then I thought, what would I be doing if I were in Myorca and it hit me in a flash that I would probably be doing exactly the same thing, at least in my dream scenario? My dream scenario was I would be laying on the beach in basically the exact same position. And once I thought about that, I started to imagine the sun on my skin and the sound of the waves, the smell of salt air.

I kind of played with the grass, but I imagined it was sand, and when I opened my eyes back up again, I felt so refreshed. It was the quickest reset ever. I didn't fully understand why it worked back then. I just knew it worked. I've since done a certification in somatic coaching. I've researched the nervous system.

I got really, really into it. I have all sorts of language and data [00:07:00] to explain what's working, but really all that matters is does it work? Right? We don't even need to know the the how just does it work. So I've carried that with me since then, and I really credit it with my sanity, especially this last year during our move.

It just feels so good to know I can reboot myself. I have that control. Kinda like, you know, reboot yourself like a computer. You know, I don't need to get a sugar hit or a caffeine rush or anything. And I'm so much a kinder to myself and others now. I used to feel like there was a little devil on my shoulder who had a whip and was just whipping me to keep going.

You know, don't drop the ball. Try harder, be better. Ironically, I now have so much more capacity than I did then I do so much more. But my days feel so much better. And of course [00:08:00] when things start working for you and you feel better, you keep doing more and more of it, though it's a virtuous cycle. We'll link to an earlier episode where I talk more about what it's like in the day-to-day for me.

I think that's really important for those of us that really can't quite imagine it yet. And you really need someone to like. Really spell it out and talk about their experience so you can kind of juxtapose it to the one you're having now. But there is data to support this, this idea of like a micro rest, micro vacations.

Now here's just one study in his book called The Power of Awe Psychotherapist. Jake Eagle talks about how he was running a, a working group and. The goal was to meditate for 10 minutes a day. He himself was, had been meditating for years and knew how life-changing it was for him. So he was having suggesting to these people that they do the same, [00:09:00] but so many of them were so busy that he ended up just kind of saying on the fly, well just try doing it for a little bit.

Like even if it's just, I don't know, less than a minute, at least tune in. Well, what was interesting is that those people reported the same or even sometimes better results than the ones that had meditated 10 minutes a day. So he shared this with a colleague of his, and then they ended up bringing it to the leading researcher on the emotion of awe, someone at uc, Berkeley, and he was completely wowed, and he suggested that they collaborate on putting together a large study with about 500 people.

So for three weeks, these 500 people were asked to focus on something that was life enhancing, that it was remarkable or amazing. Three times a day for just 20 seconds each. That's it. 20 seconds. And at the end of this time, the [00:10:00] researchers saw very significant reductions in depression, anxiety, pain, discomfort, and an increase in wellbeing.

It's interesting because before the study and those results came in, the authors talked to another researcher who said, you know what? It's foolish to run a study on awe, because awe is, it's like the Gucci bag of emotions. You know? It's nice to have, but nobody needs it. But it turns out that's not true.

So for you, these micro moments might look totally different from someone else's. Some of my clients find it critical to go outside or to lay down right, or put a warm compress over their eyes to really get into it. Otherwise, they can't really go inward. Find your own uncommon way, of course, but just know that even a 22nd time timeout between client calls can make a massive difference for you.

[00:11:00] These resets, they do more than give you a breather. They retrain your nervous system to stop bracing all the time. They signal safety and it unleashes your creativity and problem solving and amplifies your ability to be resilient. So you don't need a whole day off. What you really need is to give yourself permission to pause.

And you also need awareness. That was a problem for me to actually remember that I had to do it to turn it into a habit. I'd just forget the day would go by. I would be so busy and then I'd be like, oh my gosh, shoot. I didn't pause even once. So if you're like, me too, set a timer or create visual cues. You know, when you go in to make your lunch, you have a post-it there, whatever works for you.

And commit to actually doing it when the timer goes off, because we've all been there where our timer goes off telling us to do something and we like just clear the [00:12:00] notification, maybe grab a friend or two and make this into your own 30 day challenge so that the habit really sinks in. And then see what happens in your life.

See what changes. Don't be surprised if your capacity actually goes up too. And I wanna hear about the results, definitely DM me or just reply to any email that I send out. But this really is what sustainability looks like. You are not closing up shop or ghosting your list or firing your team because you just can't handle it anymore, and you're not crawling through the days until you can finally get to your vacation and then going through a big depression when you get back to real life.

You are learning how to put your foot on the brake before you hit the wall. Alright? Number two is to make any rest sensory, not just still. You [00:13:00] will get so much bang for your buck this way because reset is not just about lying still. I mean, how many nights have we lied awake in bed? Perfectly still, but our mind is racing.

True rest is giving your system a chance to replenish. It's creating a sense of safety for your limbic brain so that it no longer believes there's a threat, which is what's happening when you are stressed out or when you're just living in modern society with all of the stimuli that we have. When you stop rushing and you activate the joy or the pleasure sensors in your brain, it is like a secret code that tells your body and your mind to relax.

Or if you wanna say it in nerdy words, it engages the parasympathetic nervous system. So maybe you light a candle and you just focus on the delicious aroma, or you put on a favorite song, or you go outside and take your shoes off and just feel the blades of grasp between [00:14:00] your toes, scent, touch, sound.

They can all be used to signal safety and relaxation. It tricks your body out of hustle mode through this subconscious shortcut, and it's so much better than trying to tell yourself to calm down or trying to lay there and not think at all. This is why the mini vacations work so well. You are imagining the breeze, you're smelling the salt air, you're feeling the sun on your skin, and that's all without UV rays too, and the part of your brain that matters here.

It doesn't know the difference between fantasy and reality if you get the feeling that those things aren't working for you. But I will say, if you get the feeling that the things I just mentioned are not working for you, that is a sign that you're really spun up and you need to move your body like much more energetically.

Maybe you run in place, you do some squats, you pound the air. All of these things mimic the fight or [00:15:00] flight responses that would help you survive a threat if you were out in the wild. So your brain thinks, okay, whew, got away from that one coast. Must be clear. So you get the full effects of actually experiencing those things.

It might take some practice at first, might feel a little weird. That's okay. Maybe the first time you imagine one sensory detail, the second time you notice two and before long, you'll be so transported that you have to start setting an alarm to bring you back out of it so you don't get so lost in flow.

That time totally gets away from you. Okay? The third way to rest without breaking your momentum is to build in one tiny buffer at a time. Often spaciousness begins long before you actually experience it. It's okay to build space slowly. In fact, this is often how I coach clients to prep for a three day work week without guilt or panic.[00:16:00]

Each week, do one thing that'll free up time for the future you, or make an exit strategy for one recurring task on your to-do list. I had a client who always had packed weeks and she really wanted to free up at least an hour a week for some restful CEO time. She could really kind of daydream and think ahead and gather her thoughts and work on the business rather than in the business.

She had thought of delegating a task or two to free up that time, but she just thought it would take so much more work than to just do the thing herself. So she'd never actually done it. She imagined she'd have to really stop everything and take a full day to think through all this stuff and to train someone up.

But instead, we just broke it into baby steps. And one week she found time to outline the steps of one of these tasks she was gonna delegate. And the next week she wrote it up into an [00:17:00] SOP, and then the next week she walked the employee through it, through doing the task, I mean, and then the following week she let her employee do it, but she kept a close eye and offered feedback.

But pretty soon that employee did become really proficient with the task and totally removed it from the CEO's plate. And my client did get that hour that she wanted. And of course with that hour, she created so much more value for the company and just felt on top of the game. She didn't feel like she had a million balls in the air anymore, and she was probably dropping 99 of them behind her back.

It felt like she knew what she had to do and where her priorities were. That helped her end her day at a reasonable time, knowing exactly what she had to do the next day. And those kind of effects. When you have a CEO who's operating like that, those effects trickle into all areas of the business. So it didn't cost her momentum at all.

All right, [00:18:00] here is the fourth one. Choose a rest identity. If you only identify as productive, then rest will always feel like failure. So try on new identities like I'm the kind of woman who blank. I had a client who had an epiphany watching a Will Ferrell movie, probably not even one of his best movies.

It's called Daddy's Home Too, and there are these two families, and one always seems better than the other. They're just cooler. They have the cooler jobs, they drive the cooler cars, they're super gorgeous, couple, et cetera, et cetera. There's one woman in this, one family who does everything right. She's like a supermom, but the other one, which is part of this cooler family, she is laid back.

She doesn't sweat the small stuff, and she's also kind of, I don't know, naughty but super sexy. Oh my gosh. These are such awful female [00:19:00] stereotypes, right? But anyway, my client got to thinking. She's like, I've always thought that when I'm managing everything well and I'm crossing my T's and dotting my, i's that I think of that as something really powerful and superior basically.

But what if I believed the opposite? What if I believed power was about being able to roll with it and trusting myself and being super secure in my own skin? And it was just like a different lens, like putting on a different pair of glasses. She just started looking around and just seeing things differently and so she started channeling her inner Alessandra.

So the actress in the movie was the supermodel, Alessandra Ambrosio. So she'd be like, what would Alessandra do? I mean, we just gotta do what works for us, right? But really, roleplaying a new identity is something that pro athletes do, that Beyonce does. You know, the US Army teaches people to step into [00:20:00] the new identity of being a US soldier, not just working a job as a soldier.

There's a huge difference between those two. So there's no reason you shouldn't use some of this same stuff for yourself. This is actually work that we take very seriously inside the Clarity Accelerator. We really dissect the identity of the future you, the version of you that you're stepping into, and we reverse engineer all the thoughts and beliefs and the ways of being that get you there, plus all the resistance that comes up with those new ways of being.

So maybe play around with the identity of the woman who takes midday walks, who schedules in really slow mornings, who protects her energy like a pro athlete who doesn't need to be exhausted to be successful. Remember replenishment, it's part of your uncommon edge now. It's something that makes sure you outperform, not a detour from it.

This is [00:21:00] you protecting the version of you who's on stage, who's leading or launching, or just really, really like soaking every bit of juice out of life, and next time you're waiting in a doctor's office and there's no cell phone reception, then maybe just kind of contemplate what does the version of you who's rested and replenished create or decide.

That the burnt out version of you never could. The beauty is that you can do all of this stuff without changing anything in your business, without losing any momentum, so you won't fall behind. But once you start to lean into that identity, you'll probably start making different choices that lead to more replenishing behaviors and very likely a bunch of decisions.

That bring even greater results with less burnout. Alright, let's [00:22:00] recap these four so you can walk away with them clear in your mind. First you wanna normalize and habitualize micro rest, minimum three times, 20 seconds each. That's one minute out of your day you can do this. Number two, make your rest really sensory, not just still when you do rest.

Number three, build in one tiny little boundary, little inch of space at a time. Number four, pick a rest identity. Something you can start to slip into easily until it becomes something you're more familiar with. And you don't have to do all of this stuff. You don't have to be perfect. Just pick one to try today.

Remember, you don't earn rest after success. You unlock success by replenishing yourself now, just like in your garden. Alright, my friend, let's [00:23:00] talk again on Tuesday.