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You Don’t Have to Earn Your Rest
December 2025 Newsletter
Sharon Podobnik Peterson
18 Dec
Welcome back, Conscious Leaders!
Welcome to our monthly newsletter, For the Love of Leadership, where we share practical tools to support your leadership journey.
🌀 Note from Our Founder: A December dispatch on slowing down, building systems around humanity, and leading from alignment.
📚 Fresh from the Blog: This month's articles put humanity at the center of leadership—and challenge the status quo strategies that break trust.
🧠 On the Nightstand: Tricia Hersey on why rest is the most radical thing you can do in a culture built on exhaustion.
🌱 On the Horizon: See you in January.
But First, A Note From Our Founder.
No one is going to tell you it's okay to rest.
It still is.
Your organization may speed up. Your inbox may flood. People will talk about "closing strong" and "finishing the year right." The pressure will be real.
Rest anyway.
At The Center for Conscious Leadership, we practice what we teach. This month, our team has full agency. There are no mandatory meetings, and no expectations. People choose whether they work, what they work on, and how much energy they desire to give. Our coaches decide if they want to coach. Our writers decides if they want to write.
This is what trauma-informed structure looks like: systems built around consent and autonomy, not control and compliance.
Sandra and I are still facilitating our Trauma-Informed Leadership cohort in December. Not because we have to, but because we want to. Because when you lead from alignment, the work sustains you instead of draining you.
As this year closes, I'm asking myself the same questions I'm asking you:
What am I doing because I want to?
What am I doing because I think I have to?
No one will offer you permission to rest. Rest anyway.
With warmth and integrity,
Sharon
Alright, Change-Makers, Let's Get to the Juicy Stuff
Hot Off the Digital Press.
What looks like team dysfunction is often a collective survival response. What if resistance, apathy, and chaos aren’t performance problems at all?
What if the challenge isn't choosing between stability and change—but learning to hold both at once? Most leaders collapse one side. Here's how to hold the tension.
Not all leadership strategies are as smart as they seem. Explore how well-meaning tactics backfire, and what to do instead.
Before you decide, ask: Are you protecting the outcome or the people who make it possible?
On Sharon’s Nightstand.
Rest isn't a reward for productivity. It's a prerequisite for being human. Here’s Sharon’s top pick of the month:
“Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto” by Tricia Hersey
"Tricia Hersey’s work isn't about self-care—it's about refusing to let a culture built on exhaustion define your worth.
Her manifesto names what we struggle to admit out loud: that grinding until you collapse isn't productivity, it's a system designed to extract everything from you and give nothing back. Rest isn't weakness, it's liberation; it's the most radical thing we can do in a world that demands we produce until we die.
This December, as we practice what we teach, her words anchor me: choosing rest is choosing to exist outside the logic of exploitation." – Sharon Podobnik Peterson
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On the Horizon.
Interested in our next Trauma-Informed Leadership cohort? We'll be opening registration for Q1 2026 soon.
Until then, may your days be slow, your mind be quiet, and your body remember its own rhythm.
Before You Go…
This season, the world seems to run on overdrive. You don’t have to.
Thank you for being part of this community that refuses to equate exhaustion with commitment. You remind us that another way is possible.
Rest well. We're here.
With deep respect,
Founder & CEO, The Center for Conscious Leadership