Rest as a Revenue Strategy with Kristin Brabant – The Nourished CEO Episode 65

What if the reason your revenue feels capped isn’t that you’re working too little, but that you’ve never been taught how to rest in a way that actually feeds the business?

This week I’m talking with Kristin Brabant, who helps ambitious women business owners scale their revenue while resting more. 

We get into why rest is far more subjective than most of us assume, the seven different types of rest most high achievers neglect, and how the old “outwork everyone in the room” model breaks down the moment your life gets bigger than your calendar can hold.

Kristin walks through her zone of genius framework and the four-quadrant sorting process she uses to pull clients out of their golden handcuffs, plus the real story of a client who scaled from 750K to past a million in revenue while shutting down work at 5:30 every day and taking monthly getaways. 

If you’ve hit a number that impresses everyone around you but leaves you feeling like you’re dying, this conversation will reframe what growth is actually supposed to cost you.

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Most of us learned how to grow a business the same way. You work harder than the people around you, you use every available hour, and the results follow. 

For a long stretch, that model holds up well enough to keep you committed to it. Then your life gets bigger, a child arrives or your capacity shifts, and the math that used to math stops working. 

This episode is about what to do when you hit that wall, and why learning how to grow your business while working less is a real strategy rather than wishful thinking.

My guest, Kristin Brabant, has spent about nine years coaching ambitious women through exactly this transition. The pattern she speaks to is one I recognize in my own history and in most of the people I advise.

 

Where the Outwork Everyone Model Comes From

Kristin traces her own version of this back to her mother, a full-time high school teacher who also ran a candle business and taught college courses at night. Sixteen-hour days were the model she absorbed for what success required.

So when she graduated and started working, her strategy was the one she had watched at home. Outwork everyone in the room. Use every minute. Push through.

That approach carried her through inner-city teaching and a graduate program in Boston, right up to the mornings she woke with a kind of anxiety she couldn’t reason away, and the regular trips to urgent care for symptoms that had no obvious cause.

The body keeps a tally even when the calendar doesn’t.

 

Why the Outwork Everyone Model Eventually Breaks

The reason this model feels so durable is that it produces results. You work more, you see more output, and the connection between effort and reward gets reinforced every time.

In the United States especially, there’s a cultural message underneath it. We’re treated as valuable when we’re producing, and our worth gets tied to output. 

So the fear of resting isn’t only about money. It reaches into whether we’re a good person, whether we measure up to the people we admire.

That’s why telling a high achiever to simply rest tends to land as naive. The belief that working less will shrink your income is supported by years of personal evidence. 

Kristin’s point is that the evidence comes from operating inside one particular model, and the model is the thing worth questioning.

 

What Rest Actually Means

One of the more useful moves in this conversation is that Kristin refuses to let “rest” stay vague.

Drawing on Claudia Hammond’s book The Art of Rest and the Rest Test it’s built on, a study of 18,000 people worldwide, she defines rest as how you recharge your energy and calm your mind. 

The definition matters because the same activity lands differently for different people. A massage recharges one person and leaves another mentally cataloging everything she’s not getting done.

She also points to Dr. Sandra Dalton-Smith’s framework of seven types of rest: physical, mental, spiritual, emotional, social, sensory, and creative. 

Most high achievers cover one or two of these by habit and starve the rest. The categories you’re neglecting are usually the ones a few small changes would repay the most.

 

The Litmus Test for Your Own Rest

The practical filter Kristin offers is a question you can ask of any activity. Does it recharge your energy? Does it calm your mind?

Scrolling fails the test for almost everyone, even though we reach for it. An hour of decompression has its place. Past that, it tends to leave you more depleted than before.

What counts as rest is specific to you, which is why she treats each person’s rest plan as a custom build rather than a formula.

 

Why Working Less Can Grow Your Revenue

Here’s the bridge between rest and revenue, and it runs through brain chemistry.

When you’re depleted, stress hormones keep you locked on whatever is directly in front of you. Most of the time, that’s a fire. Your whole world narrows to putting fires out.

When you’re rested, your body produces the hormones that restore you and fuel creativity. 

Your sense of what’s possible widens. You notice the client worth following up with, the collaborator waiting in the wings, the opportunity you couldn’t see while running on adrenaline. 

This is the mechanism behind how to grow your business while working less. Rested attention simply makes better decisions than depleted attention.

 

Start With Your Zone of Genius

Before Kristin builds anyone a rest strategy, she starts with their zone of genius, a term from Gay Hendricks’ The Big Leap. It’s the set of skills where you create extraordinary results with ease.

She sorts everything a client does into four zones. 

• Your zone of incompetence is the work you do badly because someone has to. 
• Your zone of competence is the work you do passably while someone else does it better. 
• Your zone of excellence is the dangerous one. You’re very good at it, you were paid well to learn it, and it drains you anyway.

Want to build a business that runs on the work only you can do? Explore coaching programs built for who you are.

 

Why Your Zone of Excellence Is a Trap

Kristin calls the zone of excellence your golden handcuffs.

Because you’re skilled and well compensated, the market keeps handing you more of that work. You blink and your whole business is built around it. 

The catch is that this work took study to master, doesn’t come naturally, and leaves you tired rather than energized.

Your zone of genius is the opposite. It comes easily, you lose track of time inside it, and you finish with more energy than you started. 

The reliable clue that you’ve found it is that you assume everyone can do it. People overlook their genius precisely because it feels effortless.

This is the lesson I learned the hard way with a done-for-you offer I tested. I’m excellent at a lot of things after fifteen years in this work, and that offer paid well. 

The doing of it, though, drained me completely. 

My actual genius is ideation, helping someone find the idea they then run with. Once I saw the difference, I stopped selling the thing I was merely excellent at.

 

What This Looks Like in Practice

Kristin shared the story of a client, a vice president at a wealth management firm, whose phone buzzed every twenty-five seconds at a retreat. She believed that if she wasn’t running everything, it would all fall apart. That belief held until she had a baby, and then it didn’t.

They rebuilt her business around her zone of genius and built a rest strategy alongside it. 

A hard shutdown at 5:30 instead of working until midnight. Monthly getaways to reset. Real delegation, which meant learning to let people do things differently and sometimes better.

Over twelve to eighteen months, she stopped doing everything herself. She did fewer things, and the fewer things drove more revenue. Her team described her as calm, which for someone who had treated every task as an emergency was the bigger transformation. 

The business grew from 750K to past a million in that window.

 

Final Thoughts

The thing I want you to take from this conversation is that the model is the variable, not your work ethic. You already have the capacity. The question is whether you’re spending it on the work that compounds or the work that merely impresses.

Learning how to grow your business while working less starts with naming the few things only you can do well, then building the rest of your business and your calendar to protect them. The rest follows from there, in both senses of the word.

Ready to build a business that fits how you’re actually wired to lead?

Take the “What’s Your CEO Type?” Quiz to identify your natural leadership style so you can stop forcing a model that was built for someone else.

 

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