A Heart at Rest
By David Shrum | Ascend Leadership & Development
One of my favorite books is Beyond High Performance by Jason Jaggard. No surprise there—I find it unbelievably deep. In the last year alone, I’ve gone through it three times and still find myself revisiting sections, taken notes, and highlighting insights as a MetaPerformance™ Coach.
One of the chapters that resonates with me the most is called Tending the Fire. Jason describes rest as a rhythm deeply connected to work. To separate the two is foolish and has dire consequences.
He uses the metaphor of a furnace: MetaPerformers™ protect this furnace as much as they protect their commitments. We practice paying close attention to what stokes the fire (energy-giving) and what throws water on it (energy-draining). MetaPerformers and MetaPerforming teams build walls around this furnace because rest isn’t something we earn—it’s necessary if we want to see what we’re truly capable of.
Rest as a Struggle
I believe it resonates because it speaks directly to something I’ve wrestled with in leadership and impacts all areas of my life: rest.
It took me years to learn how to feed and protect the furnace Jason describes—and truthfully, I’m still learning. When I look back, I see how rest was something I resisted and how those beliefs showed up in real life.
Rest in my life used to occur as an escape for the weary, and for me to be weary was a sign of weakness. When I became a Director of Operations, I had continued with what had worked for me so far in life: more gasoline, more grind, more doing. It worked for a while.
But over time… I carried distractions that felt urgent but weren’t moving the ball forward. I sacrificed meals, story time, vacation, even worship, at the altar of “saving the day.” And while there are moments when urgent disruption is necessary, it started to feel like every moment was urgent.
I remember stretches of long shifts, interrupted nights, and anxious sleep. I would lie in bed waiting for my phone to ring, heart pounding at every buzz. It didn’t matter if it was a call or just a text—my blood pressure would spike instantly. I would do things that I thought were “rest” but were actually just escapes. These escapes were me coasting and were draining me of energy, not preparing me to return to work.
That all began to change from one disruptive sentence from my wife on a cold January night.
The Wake-Up Call
She was pregnant with our third child and experiencing Braxton Hicks contractions near midnight. We were both in bed when the phone rang.
I huffed, picked it up, and gave my usual curt greeting: “This is David.” As the team member described the issue, I tossed off the blanket, swung my feet to the floor, and reached for my shoes.
Then I heard my wife’s voice from across the bed: “What are you doing?”
“I’m heading in,” I said.
Her reply? “Like hell you are.”
That disruption slowed me down long enough to see other options. I called on the right people to step in. Did I handle it perfectly? No. I still hovered, keeping my finger on the pulse from a distance. But it marked the start of important conversations that created a shift in my mindset—and how I related to rest.
The Slow Impact of Restlessness
Looking back, I can see dozens of coaching moments from that season:
I had built a system where only I could swoop in to save the day.
I hadn’t cast a clear enough vision for my team.
I was addicted to distraction.
But the deepest lesson was how my broken relationship with rest slowly drained me—keeping me from fully showing up for my team, my family, and God’s calling in my life.
The very things that fueled my furnace—God, my wife, my kids—were being neglected. And without them, the furnace was running dry.
The Heart’s Rhythm
Over the last year, the image of the furnace has become almost a mantra. I use it with myself and my clients when talking about rest.
But there’s another metaphor that resonates even more deeply for me: the heart.
Our bodies are designed as a series of fine tune cycles. Every cell, hormone, and system has its rhythm. The cardiac cycle is my favorite—because it shows us what rest really does.
The systolic phase is the pumping, the work, the output. It’s what we think of as the heart “doing its job.” But just as important is diastole—the resting phase. That’s when the heart fills with blood, preparing for the next contraction.
Here’s the beautiful part: the heart muscle itself isn’t nourished when it’s working. It’s nourished when it rests. The coronary arteries refill during diastole, during rest. If that blood flow is blocked, if the cardiac muscle is starved of nutrition it will eventually experience irreversible tissue damage.
The same is true for us. If we never enter diastole—if we never protect rest—we may still keep pumping, but eventually we starve the very thing that powers the work.
The Real Tragedy—and the Practice
We can grind, hustle, and pump all day long. But without rest, the furnace dies out, the heart starves, and we never discover what we’re truly capable of.
Over time, I began carving out time with myself and great coaches to get curious about the things that gave me energy and the things that drained me.
The things that gave life? I practiced protecting them and intentionally weaving them into my rhythm to see the impact on my vision, mindset, and strategy.
The things that drained me? I practiced changing my relationship to them—or my proximity to them.
Either way, I had a choice. I could practice, experiment, and measure the impact of those choices.
A Question for You
So let me leave you with some questions:
Where do you get energy in your life?
What steals energy from you?
How can you place the energy-giving things strategically in your rhythm so they nourish you for the work ahead?
Like the heart, your work can only beat strong if your rest is protected.