Episode 13 – The Power of Rest: When Doing Nothing Is Everything

In this episode of Decoding the Unicorn: The Podcast, let's turn down the noise and tune into something far more radical: rest. 💤

Downtime isn’t laziness—it’s medicine. Whether you're a sensitive soul, a creative powerhouse, or just someone trying to keep up with the chaos of modern life, rest is not optional. It heals. It replenishes. It’s necessary.

If you've ever felt guilty for slowing down or unsure how to give yourself permission to be still, this one’s for you. Let’s normalize rest, celebrate quiet, and remember that even unicorns need a nap sometimes. 🦄💙

#DTUPodcast #RestIsProductive #CreativeRecovery #SlowLiving #MentalHealthMatters #BurnoutRecovery #UnicornWisdom #PermissionToRest #HealingThroughRest #SelfCareIsSacred #StillnessIsPower #IntrovertLife

Transcript

Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Rest, downtime, American culture, hustle and grind, Decoding the Unicorn, Sara Causey, artist date, Julia Cameron, mental replenishment, self-employment, communication, quiet holiday, nature, self-love, creativity.

Welcome to the Decoding the Unicorn podcast. Here's your host, Sara Causey.

Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in. Welcome to Episode 13 of decoding the unicorn the podcast. In today's episode, I want to talk about the importance of rest, the importance of downtime. All too often in American culture in particular, we tend to think of downtime and rest as something that's dirty, something that, oh, it's shameful, it's sloth. I shouldn't be doing this. I'm supposed to be hustling and grinding and performing 24 hours a day. If I'm resting, then my competition is not they're going to get ahead of me. I'm I'm losing some race I didn't even know I was running that is not the healthiest of lifestyles. And the more that I pull away from that, the more I realize just how unhealthy it truly is. If you find yourself in the same predicament, stay tuned.

So what's new with you? Work sucks. My boss acts more like a tyrant than a manager, and my coworkers are just caught in the mix.

Oh, I know more than half of them don't seem to know what they're doing. They just toss buzzwords around. It's a joke.

I feel like those 90s infomercials. There's got to be a better way.

There is a better way. Every manager should be required to read Sara Causey's book, Decoding the Unicorn: A New Look at Dag Hammarskjöld it's an amazing book about an even more amazing man. 

I usually don't read biographies I've tried in the past, but they're often so academic and boring. 

Nope, not a dry biography. You should check it out on Amazon. I think you'll like it. 

I will. Thanks for the suggestion.

Decoding the Unicorn by Sara Causey, available on Amazon.

I'm recording this episode on Monday, May the 26th which is a holiday in the US and where I'm at in the Midwest, it's just rainy. It's kind of drizzly and gross. Today. It's the kind of day that's perfect reading weather. This is like the day to either curl up with a fantastic book or one of your favorite old movies and just hang out in the house. I'm picturing dag in his favorite reading chair with his thinking pipe and some classical music coming from the record player, and just decompressing having some real quality time alone. I would also add that, in addition to the hustle and grind and performance and always be working, rest is a reward after you've worked all day, after you're tired and bone weary, that's when you get to sit down and read. You know, when you're so exhausted that you can't even make it through a chapter without falling asleep, or that's when you get to sit down and enjoy one of your favorite old movies, and then 20 minutes into it, you've nodded off because you're exhausted. You're not supposed to enjoy leisure. You know, for Leisure's sake, I've been reading Julia Cameron's book, The Artist's Way, and I've been discussing week by week what the exercises have meant to me and what I've discovered about myself over on my other broadcast, the Causey consulting podcast. And Julia is very big on having one evening, one afternoon, whatever it is that works for you and your schedule to take yourself out on what she calls an artist date. And it can be whatever you want. It to be shopping, antiquing, a museum, a bike ride, a walk, curling up with a book, renting a movie, going to a theatrical production. There's no hard and fast rule, so long as it's something that you enjoy and something that you want to do, not something that you need to do. It's not like, Well, my artist date is going to be mowing the lawn or raking the leaves, and you're also not supposed to include other people. So it's not supposed to be rolled into date night with your spouse, or girls night or guys night out. It's about you. It's about you pleasing yourself and doing something that is important to you, not that's important to your gaggle of friends or your significant other, but something that you are purely doing for yourself. And one of the things that this does is it replenishes your mind. Ideas start to come to you. Synchronicities start to happen because you're not distracted by junk and other people's stuff. I'm also thinking back to my first iteration of self employment, when I was still in staffing. There was a mentor that I worked with named Gary staubel, and one of the things. That he taught me was email, text messages, voicemails, communications like that are somebody else's agenda for your day. You may have had a to do list. You may have decided how you wanted to structure your morning or your afternoon, but the minute that you get pulled into the to those other communications, you're falling in line with what somebody else wants you to do with your time. And that was powerful for me. It really helped me to see that he's absolutely right. I may have planned on spending nine to 11 doing something else and then taking my lunch break and then doing something else, but no, if I get derailed by an email that's so called urgent, I have to stop what I was planning to do with my time and deal with that. I get it that there's only so much we can do in the business world, but I'm thinking for myself as an artist and a creative that's not my life anymore, and it's not how I want to live. And I would add to that, there's nothing wrong with having a quiet holiday. I mean, in this case, the weather is making it awfully prohibitive to want to do anything outdoors. But there's nothing wrong with saying I want to be by myself. I don't want to go to a loud party. I don't want to get pushed and shoved. I don't want to go sit outside at a picnic and be bothered by insects and drink a lot of lukewarm beer. That just doesn't sound like a good time to me. No hate, no shade, if that's something that you want to do. But you know, just I like the idea of having a nice, quiet, calm holiday to myself to have that mental replenishment, mental and spiritual, I would argue, replenishment, you can definitely go on a bike ride. You can go for a picnic, maybe in a less insect filled area than what we have in the Midwest right now. It's all muddy and gross, and the mosquitoes have come out. Ants are everywhere. I don't think this would be the most ideal time to go outside with your sandwiches and your thermos of tea. But you know, some other time it might be nice a walk around the park or a walk around the lake, something that just soothes you, gets you away from the screens. It gets you away from the chatter and the breaking news and the bad news. Frankly, we need that time to replenish. Dag found that time. He was an avid outdoorsman, even though he was cooped up a lot when he was at the UN he wasn't avid outdoorsman. He loved to camp, to ride bikes, to hike, just get outside in nature and mill around. Sometimes he went with friends, and sometimes he went by himself. And he could be as content having a sandwich or a can of beans or something like spam or at a black tie dinner. In fact, I would argue that he was more content being outside in nature, keeping things very simple, than he was putting on a tuxedo and having to jazz hands play the game. I was thinking about that this morning when I was considering my schedule for the day, and I'm like, you know, I don't feel like being on camera today. For one thing, it's a holiday. I just don't feel like combing my hair and putting on makeup and turning the camera on. I would much rather do this episode audio only, and I really want to be more aware of my own feelings on that, so that I don't feel the pressure to perform on YouTube. Some of you watch via YouTube, and some of you listen via audio on a platform like Spotify, and you're not seeing me anyway, but for the youtubers who do see me, it's like, I, I don't always want to be on camera. If I have a guest on the episode, I don't mind it. I can plan ahead for it. But on a day like this, no thanks, I'd rather have my hair up some some messy hat hair in a messy bun, and an old t shirt and no makeup and just ah, I can just be I can just be. There's something so powerful about that. It also makes me think of Dad's commitment to knowledge of the self, knowing thyself. And I think that when we get into that kind of comfort with our own body, our own skin, our own personality, as Oscar Wilde said, If you love yourself, it's the beginning of a lifelong romance. If you don't love yourself, it's the beginning of a lifelong dysfunction. So you are better off learning how to love yourself. And if there's something that you want to change, if you feel like there's something in your character that doesn't feel true to you, make some changes to it, but being in that space where you're like, I just enjoy my own company. I can sit and read today undisturbed, or I can sit and watch a couple of old movies, or maybe binge watch a TV show that I've been itching to see. It's such a blissful feeling. We just need to. Remember that rest has a function. It does serve a purpose, replenishing yourself, mentally and spiritually. And for those of you that are artists and are creatives, I would definitely challenge you pay attention to these times of rest. I have had some of my best ideas when I wasn't trying to conjure an idea. I could be up, dusting the furniture, watering the lawn, riding my bicycle, loading the dishwasher, getting ready for bed, brushing my teeth, and I'll have an idea that totally changes a story, or I'll have an idea for something I want to write in the future. I'm like, I gotta get I gotta get somewhere. I gotta get to a scratch pad and write this down before it escapes me, not because I was sitting at my desk trying to conjure anything, but because the magic happened when I wasn't trying. There's something really powerful about that, and it doesn't only apply to artists and creatives, per se, it can also apply to business problems. You may be trying to figure out how to solve something within your business or at your job, and the solution comes to you when you weren't intentionally pressing for it. So wherever you're at this week, I hope that you do find some time to take it easy, to get some rest and to enjoy your own company, I will see you in the next episode.

Thank you for tuning in. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to this podcast and share it with others. We'll see you next time.