My coaching supervisor shared John O’Donohue’s poem (I have added it at the end), and it landed with a quiet thud in my chest. Not long ago, I had a heart attack. The main cause was inherited high cholesterol, but I also know I was pushing too hard for too long, treating pace like a virtue rather than a warning sign.
These days, almost everyone I meet talks about being chronically tired, as if exhaustion has become the norm. My clients describe the same pattern: heavier workloads, relentless decision pressure, and a mind that never quite switches off.
So I wanted to unpack O’Donohue’s words, because they are full of small, sharp truths for anyone living in an always-on world.
There is a moment in John O’Donohue’s poem where the language stops being pretty and starts being uncomfortably accurate.
“When the rhythm of the heart becomes hectic,
Time takes on the strain until it breaks…”
If you have run a company, led a team, shipped a product, carried a target, closed a deal, kept a factory moving, kept a hospital ward staffed, kept a family afloat while doing all of the above, you know that feeling. Not as a metaphor. As a bodily fact.
Your heart is not a spreadsheet. It does not scale. It does not respond well to “just one more quarter”.
And yet, plenty of leadership cultures are built on an unspoken belief that a human being can be treated like a flexible container for more time. Stretch the day. Cram the week. Compress recovery. Ignore the cost. Call the cost “resilience training” when it finally shows up.
This piece is not an argument for softness. It is an argument for realism. If you are leading people, your relationship with pace is not a personal preference.
It is a strategic choice that leaks into everything: judgment, culture, risk, retention, ethics, and whether your best people still have a spark in their eyes by Thursday.
What O’Donohue offers is a map of what happens when pace goes from demanding to damaging. He also offers something rarer in business writing: permission to slow down without turning it into a productivity hack.
Not “rest so you can grind harder”. Rest because something in you is closing down, and pushing harder will not reopen it.
Business leaders do not need more slogans about wellbeing. They need a way to recognise the moment when speed stops being a virtue and becomes a kind of silent sabotage. They need language for it. They need practice for it.
And, frankly, they need the courage to protect “slow time” in organisations that worship urgency like a small god.
When your heart starts sprinting at your desk
Most people think burnout begins in the mind: too many emails, too many meetings, too many decisions. In practice, it often begins lower down.
The body notices first. The heart “becomes hectic”. Breathing gets shallow. Sleep becomes thin and strange: you are tired, but your system does not believe it is safe to go offline. You wake at 03:17 with a full-body sense that something is wrong, even if you cannot name what.
You can still perform, which is the trap. You can still chair the meeting. You can still deliver the update. You can still crack a joke at the right moment. But inside, the rhythm is off.
I have watched senior leaders do this with the eerie competence of someone carrying a tray of glasses across a dance floor. Steady hands, careful smile, eyes slightly too bright. One wrong bump and everything shatters.
The organisational danger is that high performers often get rewarded precisely when their system is starting to fray. They become indispensable. They get more scope, more responsibility, more meetings.
People begin to rely on their speed. The leader learns, quietly, that slowing down would disappoint everyone.
So they keep going. The calendar thickens. The heart races. Time “takes on the strain until it breaks”.
That break is rarely dramatic. It is usually banal. You stare at an email you have written a thousand times before, and it takes you twenty minutes to understand what it says. A simple decision feels like dragging a suitcase through wet sand.
Someone asks a reasonable question, and you feel a surge of irritation that surprises you. You do not like the person you are becoming, but you are too busy to investigate.
O’Donohue puts it plainly: “The light in the mind becomes dim.” That is not poetry for its own sake. It is cognition under load.
And it matters because leadership is, in large part, a job of thinking. When thinking gets dim, leaders reach for shortcuts.
They become more rigid. They default to familiar answers. They confuse decisiveness with wisdom. They take refuge in control.
This is where burnout stops being a private health issue and becomes a business risk.
The silent downgrade: when “easy” becomes heavy
One of the most accurate lines in the poem is also the simplest:
“Things you could take in your stride before
Now become laborsome events of will.”
You know this feeling if you have ever sat in your car outside your office (or outside your house) and needed a minute before you could go in. Not because you are scared. Because you are… heavy.
This is the part leaders often hide. Not deliberately, at first. They just do not have a framework for it.
So they interpret it as a discipline problem. They tell themselves to “push through”. They add more structure. They download another app. They book a personal trainer at 06:00. They become harder on themselves, which is like trying to fix a cracked bone by tightening the cast.
Meanwhile, “weariness invades your spirit”. That line might sound airy until you see it play out in a business setting. The weariness shows up as:
A shorter temper in meetings.
A loss of curiosity.
A creeping cynicism: “None of this matters.”
A need to be right rather than to understand.
A habit of treating people like obstacles.
And then the body adds its own commentary: “Gravity begins falling inside you, dragging down every bone.”
If you are reading this and thinking, “Yes, but I cannot take a month off,” good. That honesty is where useful leadership begins.
Not everyone can walk away. Many leaders are in roles where a sudden stop creates real harm: safety-critical operations, healthcare, public services, small businesses running on thin margins, and founders with payroll next week.
The point is not that you should disappear to a cabin and come back enlightened. The point is that you should stop pretending the cost is not real, and stop confusing endurance with excellence.
There is a kind of leadership bravado that treats exhaustion as evidence of importance. The joke about being “always on”. The pride in replying to messages at midnight. The quiet contempt for anyone who leaves on time.
It looks tough. It is usually fear.
“Empty time” is not wasted time
O’Donohue writes: “You have been forced to enter empty time.”
Most leaders hate empty time. Empty time feels like falling behind. Empty time leaves space for thoughts you have been outrunning. Empty time threatens the identity you built around being useful, sharp, and fast.
And yet, empty time is where repair happens. Not in a moral sense. In a practical one.
The nervous system needs cycles: exertion and recovery. Muscles need rest to rebuild. Sleep is when memory consolidates. Even a good conversation needs silence, or it becomes noise.
Workplaces have largely forgotten cycles. Many are built like bad software: always running, always consuming resources, slowly overheating. When the system crashes, we act surprised.
I once sat with a managing director who had done everything “right” by the usual standards. Intelligent, decent, ambitious.
He had grown a business through an ugly market. He had been the calm one during crises. He had taken on more, so his team could breathe. He was proud of that.
Then one Tuesday, he woke up, and his body refused the day. Not metaphorically. He tried to stand, and his legs felt wrong, like they belonged to someone else. He went to the office anyway (of course, he did), sat down, opened his laptop, and could not remember the password he had used for years.
He told me later, with a kind of stunned embarrassment, “It felt like my brain had turned its lights off.”
That is empty time arriving uninvited. It is not laziness. It is the organism enforcing a boundary that the mind refused to set.
The uncomfortable truth is that you will either schedule recovery, or your body will schedule it for you. The second option is rarely tidy.
The story leaders tell themselves about rest
Here is the story I hear most often from high-performing leaders:
“I can rest once we get through this.”
“This” might be the merger, the product launch, the audit, the restructure, the next funding round, the next quarter, the next crisis. If you lead long enough, there is always a “this”.
The poem calls it “the race of days”. It is a brilliant phrase because it captures how time becomes competitive. You do not simply live the week. You race it. You try to beat it. You try to win against your own calendar.
But racing time changes what you sacrifice. You sacrifice the self you have “forsaken”. You sacrifice friendships that do not fit neatly into the diary.
You sacrifice the small sensory pleasures that make you feel human: the smell of rain, the feel of cold air, the stupid comfort of cooking something slow.
The business consequence is not just burnout. It is a narrowing. A leader who cannot feel much also cannot perceive much. Subtle risks go unnoticed.
The tone of a team shifts, and they miss it. A decision that needs patience gets forced into speed.
And speed is not neutral. Speed amplifies the loudest voices. Speed rewards confidence over accuracy. Speed makes it easier to ignore the quiet person in the room who is about to save you from a bad decision.
The unglamorous discipline of receiving yourself again
O’Donohue does something that most leadership books avoid: he describes the early stages of recovery as grim.
“At first your thinking will darken
And sadness take over like listless weather.
The flow of unwept tears will frighten you.”
If you have never been close to burnout, this can read like melodrama. If you have, it reads like a diary entry you forgot you wrote.
Recovery is not instantly soothing. Often it is disorienting. When you stop, the backlog of feeling arrives. Grief you postponed. Anger you swallowed.
Exhaustion that was masked by adrenaline. The brain, deprived of its usual distractions, begins replaying old scenes like a faulty projector.
This is where leaders tend to panic and restart the engine. They book more meetings. They volunteer for more tasks. They decide they “need structure”. It is understandable. Still, it is often the wrong move.
The poem offers a different instruction: “There is nothing else to do now but rest and patiently learn to receive the self you have forsaken.”
Receive is a strange word in a business context. We prefer words like build, drive, and execute. Receive sounds passively. It sounds like weakness.
But receiving yourself again is active work. It is learning to notice what your body has been saying for months. It is learning to sit through discomfort without trying to outrun it. It is re-learning how to be a person when you are not producing.
Leaders who can do this become better leaders. Not because they become nicer. Because they become clearer.
The senses: an underrated leadership tool
“Take refuge in your senses, open up to all the small miracles you rushed through.”
This line is easy to dismiss as spiritual wallpaper. But sensory attention is one of the fastest ways to pull the nervous system out of panic.
It is grounding. It is a reset. It is also something leaders are strangely bad at, because we train ourselves to live two steps ahead.
Try this, not as a wellbeing exercise, but as a leadership experiment.
Next time you feel yourself speeding up, do not go to your phone. Do not rewrite the plan in your head.
Look around and name, silently, what you can see: the colour of the wall, the angle of light on the desk, the smear of fingerprints on a glass door.
Listen: the hum of ventilation, a keyboard clacking, someone laughing down the corridor. Feel: your feet in your shoes, the texture of your shirt, the temperature of the air.
It sounds trivial. It is not. It pulls attention out of the abstract future and back into the real present, where your body can actually operate.
And it has a workplace effect. A leader who is present has a different energy. They interrupt less. They hear more. They notice the tiny flinches and hesitations that often tell you more than words.
I once watched a head of sales defuse a room that was sliding into blame. Not with a clever intervention. With calm presence. He slowed his voice, took a breath, asked one person to repeat what they meant, then waited. The silence was almost physical. You could feel people coming back into their bodies.
That is slow time in action. It is not indulgence. It is the control of pace as a leadership instrument.
The people who make you faster, and the people who make you human
“Stay clear of those vexed in spirit. Learn to linger around someone of ease who feels they have all the time in the world.”
Every organisation has an urgency culture, and it often has a few unofficial priests.
They send messages at 23:00. They celebrate busyness. They speak in a tone that implies that anything less than an immediate response is negligence.
They create a low-grade panic that spreads. Teams begin to mirror it. Work becomes performative speed.
Leaders sometimes keep these people close because they seem productive. They get things done. They appear committed. They also tend to burn through colleagues like sandpaper.
What O’Donohue hints at is emotional contagion: we catch pace from each other. If the people around you are frantic, you become frantic. If the people around you are calm, you have a chance to calm down too.
This is not about avoiding ambition. It is about choosing your atmosphere.
A practical question for any leader: Who makes you feel you are always behind? And who makes you feel the day is wide enough to live in?
You do not need to banish the urgent person. But you do need to stop letting them set the tempo for everyone else.
Four lived-in moments where “slow time” changed performance
Let me make this concrete, because poetry can float away if you do not pin it to the floor.
One: the founder who stopped “winning” Slack
A founder I worked with used to treat responsiveness like a virtue. She replied instantly to everything. Investors loved it. Her team admired it.
After a while, she could not read a book without checking her phone every page. Her partner stopped bothering to talk to her in the evenings because she was always half elsewhere.
She did not burn out in a dramatic collapse. She just became brittle. Decision-making got jumpy. Strategy shifted week to week. People began waiting for her mood before taking the initiative.
Her slow-time move was small and almost embarrassing: she stopped replying for the first two hours of the day. No Slack, no email. She wrote on paper. She thought. She walked to a café and sat there, watching people order and fumble coins and exist at normal speed.
Within a month, her team reported fewer priority changes. Within three months, her leadership team stopped escalating every issue to her. She had accidentally trained them to self-manage by refusing to be instantly available.
Two: the operations director, who learned to stop “absorbing” everything
In a logistics business, an ops director had become the sponge for every problem.
A driver was late, a customer complained, a warehouse system glitched, and a supervisor called in sick. He fixed it all. He prided himself on it. His heart rate did too.
He began getting chest tightness during meetings. He told himself it was coffee. It was fear, plus exhaustion, plus a body that had had enough.
His slow-time shift was structural: he created an on-call rotation and an incident protocol, like a proper engineering team. Most issues were no longer routed straight to him.
The first-line team had authority to act within clear boundaries. He still handled the true emergencies. But “emergency” stopped meaning “anything that interrupts my lunch”.
That change did not make the business slower. It made it steadier.
Three: the CFO who swapped one heroic week for twelve ordinary ones
A CFO in a mid-sized firm was famous for sprinting. Every month-end became a heroic push. People talked about her stamina with awe.
Her team also quietly hated month-end. They made mistakes. They stopped learning. They worked with clenched jaws.
She began forcing a different rhythm: shorter daily closes, a more disciplined work-in-progress approach, fewer last-minute surprises, a refusal to accept non-urgent changes during certain windows.
It sounded dull. It was. It also reduced the frantic week, which reduced errors, which reduced rework, which reduced franticness.
Slow time, at scale, often looks like boring competence.
Four: the senior partner who re-learned how to walk
This one is almost laughably simple. A senior partner in a professional services firm told me he did not have time to walk. He said it with the pride of a man confessing to a noble vice.
Then his doctor told him he had to, or things would get worse.
He started walking in the evening, no phone, just streets and trees and dogs. He noticed, with mild surprise, that his mind began solving problems while he walked. Not because he forced it. Because he stopped strangling it.
He began using walking time for the hardest problems: the ones that needed space rather than pressure. His colleagues thought he had become “more strategic”. He had. He had also just stopped living entirely in his head.
What leaders can change, without turning it into theatre
Some leaders read about rest and turn it into a performance. They make a big announcement about wellbeing, then keep sending emails at midnight.
Nobody trusts it.
Slow time only works if it shows up in decisions, not slogans.
It shows up when you set a realistic capacity.
When you stop praising martyrdom.
When you protect recovery after peak periods.
When you stop treating every request as urgent by default.
When you model pace in meetings: fewer agenda items, more thinking time, less frantic talking.
A useful exercise is to look at your organisation’s calendar and ask: where does recovery actually exist?
Not a “wellbeing webinar”. Recovery. Time where output is not demanded. Time where people can catch up, think, learn, breathe, and be human. If the answer is “weekends”, you are relying on private life to subsidise your business.
That may work for a while. It tends to end badly.
The honest caveat: slow time is not equally available to everyone
This is the part that can get awkward.
Not everyone has the same control over their day. A single parent on shift work does not have the same freedom as a senior executive with an assistant. A junior employee on a visa may feel they cannot say no. A founder may genuinely have a narrow runway.
So slow time is not just an individual practice. It is also a fairness issue.
Leaders can widen access by changing norms. If you only talk about rest as a personal choice, you will mostly help the people who already have power. If you build it into the operating system, you help the people who need it most.
Also, there are contexts where speed is necessary. A cyber incident. A safety breach. A crisis that threatens lives.
Slow time is not about moving like treacle. It is about not living in crisis mode when you are not in a crisis.
The discipline is knowing the difference.
The soul that comes to take you back
O’Donohue writes: “You have travelled too fast over false ground; now your soul has come to take you back.”
You do not need to believe in souls to understand the point. Something in you keeps score. You can outrun it for a while. You can distract yourself with performance, applause, money, status, adrenaline. But eventually your system asks for payment.
Leaders often treat this as an interruption: “I cannot afford to feel like this right now.”
But what if it is information? What if the fatigue, the dimness, the heaviness, are signals that your leadership mode has become unsustainable?
In business, we love dashboards. We want leading indicators. Burnout symptoms are leading indicators, just not ones we like.
The poem ends with a promise that feels earned, not sugary:
“Gradually, you will return to yourself, having learned a new respect for your heart and the joy that dwells far within slow time.”
A new respect for your heart is not sentimental. It is operational.
It means you stop treating your body like a taxi you can flag down at any hour. It means you stop building an organisation that only works when people ignore their limits. It means you make pace a design choice, not a side-effect.
And yes, it means you might disappoint people who are addicted to urgency. You might lose the thrill of being needed every minute. You might have to face a quieter self, one who does not get dopamine hits from constant motion.
But you gain something else. You gain judgment. You gain steadiness. You gain the ability to lead without burning a hole through yourself and everyone around you.
There is a particular kind of leader I trust now. They are not the loudest. They do not brag about how little they sleep. They are not always available. They are present when it matters. They move at a pace that makes room for thinking.
When a crisis hits, they can speed up without falling apart, because they are not already running at redline on an ordinary Tuesday.
That is a slow time as a leadership skill. Not a spa day. Not a perk. A way of working that keeps the lights on in your mind, and keeps gravity from falling inside you.
If you take nothing else from O’Donohue, take this: when your body starts closing down, it is not betraying you. It is trying to bring you back to life.
If any of this feels uncomfortably familiar
If you recognise yourself in the “always on” pattern, the dimming focus, the constant decision pressure, the sense that rest has become a luxury you have not earned, then do not leave it as a private worry you carry alone.
A short conversation can be enough to name what is really going on, spot the pressure points, and work out what needs to change first (without burning down your life or your career to do it).
If you want, you can book a free 30-minute discovery call with me. We will look at your situation, what you have tried already, and what a steadier pace could actually look like in the real world you live in.
Details on my website: pietropazzi.com
A Blessing for One Who Is Exhausted
By John O’Donohu
When the rhythm of the heart becomes hectic,
Time takes on the strain until it breaks;
Then all the unattended stress falls in
On the mind like an endless, increasing weight,
The light in the mind becomes dim.
Things you could take in your stride before
Now become laborsome events of will.
Weariness invades your spirit.
Gravity begins falling inside you,
Dragging down every bone.
The tide you never valued has gone out.
And you are marooned on unsure ground.
Something within you has closed down;
And you cannot push yourself back to life.
You have been forced to enter empty time.
The desire that drove you has relinquished.
There is nothing else to do now but rest
And patiently learn to receive the self
You have forsaken for the race of days.
At first your thinking will darken
And sadness take over like listless weather.
The flow of unwept tears will frighten you.
You have traveled too fast over false ground;
Now your soul has come to take you back.
Take refuge in your senses, open up
To all the small miracles you rushed through.
Become inclined to watch the way of rain
When it falls slow and free.
Imitate the habit of twilight,
Taking time to open the well of color
That fostered the brightness of day.
Draw alongside the silence of stone
Until its calmness can claim you.
Be excessively gentle with yourself.
Stay clear of those vexed in spirit.
Learn to linger around someone of ease
Who feels they have all the time in the world.
Gradually, you will return to yourself,
Having learned a new respect for your heart
And the joy that dwells far within slow time.
Also read:
Competence Gets You the Role. Character Defines You in Uncertainty.
AI is Killing Knowledge Work. What Remains Is Wisdom and Connection.
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