This Executive Coach Says Women Are Making a Dangerous Mistake When It Comes to Rest

Jackie B. Grice has been a successful entrepreneur for a quarter century, having built a multimillion-dollar transportation company with her husband. But the always grind, never rest life of a small business owner eventually took a toll on her.

“I’ve run Agape for over 24 years now, and in transportation there is always something—a driver calls out, a contract deadline is moving, payroll is due, a client needs an answer five minutes ago. There’s always a fire,” she says.”

“My burnout came from carrying too much for too long and never giving myself permission to put anything down. For a long time, I thought that’s what strength looked like: being the one who never stops,” Grice continues. “I had to come to terms with the fact that I could not build something that lasts while I was running on empty myself.”

Now a certified professional and executive coach, Grice has created Launching Deeper, a coaching and wellness practice, where she works with women entrepreneurs to position rest as a business strategy rather than a reward. She wants women to understand that it’s possible to build something without losing your soul to get it done.

“I kept running into powerful women who looked completely successful on paper and were exhausted in their souls. They were leading, building, producing, pouring out constantly, and almost nobody was pouring back into them,” she says.

She’s even launched Soul Sabbatical retreats, which she describes as a “sacred pause” for women who lead, serve, and give endlessly: “I want women to leave with clarity, with rest, with revelation, and with permission to come back to themselves.”

Here Grice shares some of the biggest mistakes she sees women entrepreneurs and executives making when it comes to getting the rest that they—and their businesses—need:

Stop being constantly go, go, go

Stillness gives you back something constant motion will steal right out of your hands: clarity. When you’re moving nonstop, it’s easy to mistake urgency for direction. You’re busy, but busy isn’t the same as building the right thing.

Some of my clearest next steps for Agape didn’t show up while I was grinding. They showed up when I got quiet enough to actually listen. Stillness brings me back to center. It’s where I hear God most clearly, and it’s where I make decisions from peace instead of pressure.

Stop treating rest like it’s optional

We confuse rest with stopping completely, and stopping feels dangerous when you’ve got people depending on you—employees, clients, family. So we wait until we’re already running on fumes before we even consider it.

Rest shouldn’t be the thing you do after you fall apart. It needs to be built into how you lead, how you listen, how you make decisions in the first place. I don’t look at rest as laziness anymore. I look at it as stewardship. God gave me this assignment, and burning myself out isn’t honoring it.

Stop skipping vacation

We treat vacation like something we have to earn instead of something we need to function. We’ll plan everybody else’s life, run the business, hold the household together, and then feel guilty the second we try to sit down ourselves.

The lie is that stepping away means you’re being unproductive. Honestly, some of my best decisions for my business didn’t come from another long night at the desk. They came from getting far enough away that I could finally see the whole picture instead of just the part that was on fire.

Stop handicapping your success with your exhaustion

I teach the women I coach through Launching Deeper that rest isn’t separate from strategy, it is strategy. A tired woman can still be gifted, but exhaustion will cloud her judgment, shrink her creativity, and make every decision feel three sizes too heavy.

One of the first practices I teach is silence. Not just slowing down, but actually getting quiet enough to hear what your business and your spirit are trying to tell you.

Using rest as a strategy means you put pauses on the calendar before life forces them on you. It means you build in time to think, to review what’s actually working, to realign with what matters before you’re three deadlines deep. Rest is how you start leading from overflow instead of leading from depletion.