You worked really hard this year. Now it's time to rest.
Happy Boxing Day Friends!
I hope these next few days between Christmas and New Year bring you a little rest and time to recharge.
If you’re like most people in fundraising, December is one of your busiest times of year.
And while the rest of the world is taking time off and truly disconnecting this next week, you’ll be on in some form or another.
Even if you’re off here and there the next few days, I know you’ll be popping into your email from time to time, checking on the progress of your year-end campaign, sending those last few emails, or occasionally helping people make last-minute gifts.
That’s just fundraising, and it comes with the territory, but it does not come without a cost.
It shows up in tired eyes, shorter patience with the people we love most, and a low-grade anxious hum in the background even when we’re supposed to be ‘off.’
At some point or another, we have to figure it out. We have to learn to rest.
Or as this 2016 article from the Harvard Business Review puts it:
“The key to resilience is trying really hard, then stopping, recovering, and then trying again.”
In other words, we were made to move between rhythms of work and rest. We are hardwired with tremendous capacity to do hard things.
But hard work without rest is not sustainable. It’s just depletion.
You’ve worked really hard this year, pouring yourself out to make the world a better place for others.
And now it’s time to stop and recover.
If you haven’t been able to rest or recharge much the last few weeks because you’ve been carrying the mental load of a year-end fundraising goal, I hope you will block off time in January to do both.
No one is going to force you to rest. This invitation from me may be as close as you’ll get.
But you have to do it.
If you want to play the long game, you have to make rest a priority.
We were never meant to go and go and go without stopping to rest and recover.
You worked really hard this year.
Now it’s time to rest.
