Why the hardest work in leadership doesn’t look like work at all
You take a month off. You rest. You pray. Then January arrives, and within days, December feels like another lifetime.
Every year for the past decade, I have taken a month off over Christmas. It is a discipline I guard carefully, and it is hard every single time. My mind and body seem to need that long to properly reset. To find what actually matters again.
And every year, I am struck by how quickly the clarity fades.
It doesn’t take a crisis. It just takes a full inbox, a few decisions that need making, and a calendar that fills faster than you expected. Within weeks of returning, the formation conversation I had been sitting in all through December starts to feel like something I read about rather than something I lived.
I know formation matters. I believe it deeply.
But knowing and actually living it are two very different things
I lead a leadership formation organisation. I’m also an Enneagram 3. The irony isn’t lost on me.
My natural measures of success are goals, numbers, and how much I can get done. If I’m honest, I also care about how others see me. Whether I look like I’m leading well. Whether Arrow looks like it’s successful. These aren’t bad things in themselves, but they’re not formation metrics.
And yet here I am, leading an organisation whose whole reason for existing is the slow, unhurried, often unmeasurable work of shaping Christian leaders from the inside out.
God has been nudging me lately about a very specific practice: sitting with him. No agenda, no prayer list, no petition. Just silence. Just presence.
It sounds simple.
Show up before you feel ready
The first barrier to silence is waiting until conditions are right.
We tell ourselves we will begin when things slow down. When the audit is finished. When the new team members are settled. When the budget is sorted. But if the past few months have taught me anything, it is that there will always be a reason to delay.
Ruth Haley Barton, in her quietly essential book Invitation to Solitude and Silence, describes the experience of many Christian leaders who long for contemplative space but cannot seem to find their way into it. She observes that the very busyness we are trying to escape becomes the reason we never stop long enough to begin.[^1] The leader who waits for the right conditions will wait forever.
So I set a timer. Ten minutes. Sometimes five. I sit down before my mind has agreed to cooperate. I show up imperfectly, often distracted, sometimes resentful of the clock. But I show up.
There is something quietly profound about this. Formation, like most things that matter, begins not with inspiration but with a decision. You don’t have to feel ready. You just have to begin.
Jesus himself modelled this. Again and again in the Gospels, he withdrew. Before the crowds gathered. Before the decisions were made. Before the demands of the day had a chance to crowd out the voice of the Father. He didn’t wait for a good time. He made one. It is, in fact, one of the hardest things I do.
Let go of the need to produce
This is where it gets harder.
For a leader wired toward achievement, silence without output feels dangerously close to failure. My mind, in those early minutes of stillness, begins to generate. To-do lists surface. Brilliant ideas arrive. Problems I had forgotten about suddenly demand attention. And underneath all of it, a quiet but persistent question: Is this working? Am I doing this right?
Research into the neuroscience of silence is instructive here. A study published in Heart found that when human participants were exposed to periods of silence, their heart rate, blood pressure, and breathing rate all dropped below baseline levels. The body did not simply return to neutral. It moved into a state of deeper rest than where it had started. [^2] In other words, silence is not nothing. It is actively restorative. But that restoration is not something we can manufacture or measure in the moment. It happens beneath the surface, outside our control.
Formation works the same way.
Jesus, in Matthew 11:28–30, does not offer a program or a productivity system. He offers himself. “Come to me,” he says, “and I will give you rest.” The yoke he describes is not a framework for getting more done. It is an invitation into a different quality of presence. A different way of being in the world.
The most honest thing I can tell you is that I am still learning to let go of needing silence to produce something. Some mornings I finish those ten minutes and feel that nothing measurable has happened. But I am beginning to trust that the work of formation is mostly invisible, and that God is doing something in me that I cannot track on my task app.
Return, again and again, without judgement
Here is what actually happens in silence, at least for me: my mind wanders. Repeatedly. Within thirty seconds of settling, I am thinking about a conversation I need to have, a decision I have been avoiding, or what I need from the supermarket.
And then I return. Back to Jesus. Back to the present. Back to the simple intention of being here.
This returning is not a failure. It is the practice.
Curt Thompson, a psychiatrist who writes at the intersection of neuroscience and Christian spirituality, notes that the repeated act of noticing distraction and gently returning attention is itself a formative discipline. It reshapes not just our neural pathways but our posture toward ourselves and toward God, training us in self-compassion, patience, and trust.[^3]
This matters for leaders, because how we treat ourselves in silence is often how we treat ourselves in difficulty. The leader who berates themselves for a wandering mind in prayer will likely berate themselves for imperfection in leadership. But the leader who learns to return without judgement, gently, repeatedly, without shame, begins to develop a resilience that no leadership course can manufacture.
I set a timer. My mind races. I bring it back to Jesus. It races again. I bring it back again.
That is the practice. That is formation.
A final thought
The gap between knowing formation matters and actually practising it is one of the most honest places a Christian leader can begin. I know it because I live in that gap regularly.
But what I am discovering is that formation does not require perfection. It does not require a long retreat, a silent monastery, or a cleared calendar. It requires showing up before you feel ready, releasing the pressure to produce, and returning without judgement every time your mind wanders away.
That transformation begins in ten minutes, before the day takes hold, with a timer and an open heart.
And it begins with a question worth sitting with: What would it mean for your leadership if you started tomorrow not with your to-do list, but with five minutes of simply being with Jesus?
[^1]: Ruth Haley Barton, Invitation to Solitude and Silence: Experiencing God’s Transforming Presence (Downers Grove: IVP Books, 2004), 22.
[^2]: Luciano Bernardi, Cesare Porta, and Peter Sleight, “Cardiovascular, Cerebrovascular, and Respiratory Changes Induced by Different Types of Music in Musicians and Non-Musicians: The Importance of Silence,” Heart 92, no. 4 (2006): 445–452.
[^3]: Curt Thompson, Anatomy of the Soul: Surprising Connections between Neuroscience and Spiritual Practices That Can Transform Your Life and Relationships (Carol Stream: Tyndale House, 2010), 154.
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