The Rules I Broke This Summer

Consistency is a virtue until it becomes a cage.

I have a confession to make.

If you follow this blog, you may have noticed something. Or rather, you may have noticed nothing, because there was nothing to notice. No June post. No July post. No August post. My last entry went up in May, and then I went quiet. LinkedIn, where I used to show up faithfully, week after week, got quiet too.

For someone who builds businesses around consistency, who tells clients that showing up is half the strategy, this was practically scandalous. I broke my own rules. On purpose.

And I couldn't help but wonder, why did it feel so good?

Every business owner I know carries a rulebook. Some of it is written down. Most of it isn't. Post every month. Answer within the hour. Never let the pipeline go cold. Be visible, be available, be everywhere.

These rules usually start as good ideas. They create rhythm, they build trust, they keep us honest when motivation dips. A rule that serves you is a beautiful thing.

But nobody talks about rules that have a shelf life. The rule that built your momentum in one season can quietly become the thing draining you in the next. And because we're proud of our discipline, we rarely stop to ask whether the rule is still serving the work, or whether we're just serving the rule.

This summer, I stopped to ask.

Now, before you picture me on a beach somewhere with my phone off, let me be clear about something. Going quiet did not mean going idle. This was one of the fullest working seasons I've had in years. Client work was deep, demanding, and genuinely energizing. I was building, launching, training, and problem solving daily.

What I wasn't doing was performing my productivity in public.

That distinction matters more than we admit. There is the work, and there is the broadcasting of the work, and somewhere along the way we started treating them as the same thing. They're not. One creates value. The other creates visibility. Both have their place, but only one of them was where my energy needed to go this summer. So I chose.

And refreshingly, I don't feel behind. I feel more clear and centered.

Which brings me to what I think the summer was teaching me. We talk about time management like it's the whole game, but time was never the scarce resource. Energy is. You can have a wide open calendar and still have nothing to give, and you can have a packed week and feel lit up the entire way through, because energy doesn't follow the clock. It follows attention.

Mastering your personal energy, learning when to tune out and when to tone down, is the skill underneath every other skill. It shapes the entire day you move through, from the inside out. It decides the quality of your decisions, the steadiness of your leadership, and honestly, the experience of being around you. A scattered leader scatters the room. A grounded one settles it, often without saying a word.

That's the piece we forget when we talk about self-care like it's a spa day. Grounding isn't a reward you earn after the work is done. It's the state you best work from. When you're grounded, you hear more, you react less, and you make choices from a settled place instead of an activated one. Getting refreshed might be the most generous thing you do for the people you love and lead. Your calm is contagious. Unfortunately, so is your chaos.

So how do you know when a rule deserves to be broken?

For me, the test is simple. A healthy rule break is a vetted choice, not an escape. I didn't stop posting because I ran out of ideas or hid from the work. I stopped because my energy was needed somewhere specific, and I trusted that decision enough to let the feed go quiet without apologizing for it.

Unhealthy rule breaking is reactive. It's the flake, the ghost, the slow drift you never actually decided on. Healthy rule breaking is deliberate. You know what you're setting down, you know why, and you know it's temporary or it isn't, but either way, you chose it.

The difference between the two isn't visible from the outside. Both look like silence. But you know which one you're in. Your body knows. One feels like guilt. The other feels like a deep exhale.

A real break gives you perspective that pushing through never will. Coming back to this page after three months away, I can see how I want this space to feel, am more in-tune with what I want to say, and what no longer deserves my energy. That clarity was not available to me in May. It's the dividend of the pause.

You're allowed to break a rule you wrote yourself. You're allowed to step back from something good in service of something necessary. You're allowed to let people wonder where you went while you quietly become someone worth returning as.

The rules were always yours. Which means the exceptions are too.

So I'll leave you with the question I sat with all summer. Which of your rules is still serving you, and which ones are you simply afraid to break?