Sustaining the Self: What Seven Conversations About Self-Care Have Taught Me
When I began this series, I didn’t set out to provide definitive answers about self-care. I set out to understand it better.
Across sport, medicine, and leadership, self-care is often spoken about loudly but practiced quietly, if ever at all. It’s promoted in moments of crisis, yet forgotten in moments of success. And for those in caring, leadership, or performance roles, it can feel both essential and elusive.
Over seven blogs, I explored self-care through different lenses: energy, burnout, reflection, self-awareness, time, relationships, and daily practice. What follows is not a conclusion in the traditional sense, but a synthesis, a bringing together of insights that now feel inseparable.
Because self-care, I’ve learned, is not one thing. It’s a system.
Self-Care Begins With Energy, Not Time
The series opened by reframing self-care as a leadership skill rather than a personal indulgence. Research from sport and performance psychology is unequivocal: sustainable performance depends on recovery as much as effort. Yet many leaders continue to manage their time meticulously while remaining largely unaware of their energy.
Energy; physical, emotional, cognitive, and relational, is the currency of leadership. When it’s depleted, decision-making narrows, empathy fades, and presence diminishes. Self-care, in this sense, is not about doing less; it’s about leading from a state that is resourced rather than reactive.
This reframing set the foundation for everything that followed.
Burnout Is Not a Failure - It’s a Signal
From there, the conversation moved to burnout, not as a weakness or lack of resilience, but as an understandable response to prolonged imbalance.
Across coaching, healthcare, and organisational leadership, burnout consistently emerges when care outpaces recovery, and meaning becomes obscured by demand. What struck me most in the research, and in conversations with practitioners, was how often burnout is missed precisely because people remain competent. They keep functioning, until joy, creativity, or connection quietly disappear.
Understanding burnout as a signal rather than a flaw changes the response. It shifts the focus from “coping better” to recovering more intentionally.
Reflection Is Not Optional, It Is Restorative
One of the clearest insights from medicine, coaching education, and leadership development is that reflective practice is not merely a learning tool, it is a form of care.
Reflection allows experience to be processed rather than accumulated. Without it, pressure compounds. With it, meaning is restored.
Across the series, reflection emerged as the mechanism that links self-awareness to resilience. It creates the pause where leaders can notice not just what they are doing, but what it is costing them, and what it is giving back.
Importantly, reflective practice does not need to be elaborate. Its power lies in regularity, not sophistication.
Leadership Is Physiological Before It Is Cognitive
One of the more challenging and transformative insights came from exploring leadership as a physiological experience.
Long before we articulate stress or fatigue, the body has already registered it. Breath shortens, muscles tense, attention narrows. Leaders who are unaware of these signals often mistake physiological dysregulation for external pressure or interpersonal difficulty.
Self-awareness, then, is not just emotional or cognitive, it is embodied. Leaders who can regulate their own nervous systems are better able to regulate environments, relationships, and teams. Calm, it turns out, is not a personality trait; it is a practiced state.
Managing Energy Requires Rhythm, Not Control
When we shifted from time management to energy management, a recurring theme surfaced: rhythm.
Sport has long understood this through periodisation, cycles of stress and recovery designed to optimise performance over time. Leadership, by contrast, often operates as if constant intensity is both normal and necessary.
The research suggests otherwise. Sustainable leaders work in waves, not sprints. They build recovery into the design of their days and weeks, rather than waiting for exhaustion to force a pause.
This approach requires letting go of control in favour of attunement, noticing when effort is productive and when rest is restorative.
Relationships Are Not a Distraction From Self-Care, They Are Central to It
Perhaps the most quietly powerful insight across the series was the role of relationships in recovery.
Self-care is often framed as solitary. Yet evidence from social neuroscience, healthcare, and team performance repeatedly shows that connection regulates stress more effectively than isolation. Safe relationships, those characterised by trust, understanding, and shared reflection, restore energy at both an individual and collective level.
For leaders, this reframes care as something that is co-created. Sustainable cultures are built not through individual resilience alone, but through relational practices that allow people to recover together.
Self-Care Is Sustained Through Practice, Not Intention
The final blog brought these insights into daily practice. What became clear is that self-care does not survive on good intentions. It survives on systems.
Small, repeatable practices, reflective pauses, physiological regulation, protected boundaries, meaningful connection are what translate insight into sustainability. Over time, these practices shape not only how leaders feel, but how they lead.
Self-care, then, becomes less about self-focus and more about stewardship of energy, attention, and presence.
What This Series Has Changed for Me
As a researcher in self-care, this series has not closed my inquiry, it has deepened it.
What I now hold more firmly is this:
Self-care is not an individual responsibility detached from leadership. It is a leadership responsibility expressed individually.
To care for others well, over time, requires caring for the system that enables that care of one self. Not perfectly. Not constantly. But intentionally.
This series has been one step in that ongoing practice.
Closing the Series, Opening the Next Conversation
With this blog, I bring the Sustaining the Self series to a close.
Not because the work is finished, but because it has reached a natural pause, a moment to reflect, integrate, and ask what comes next. The next series will build on this foundation, exploring new questions at the intersection of leadership, care, and performance.
For now, the invitation remains simple:
Notice your energy.
Design for recovery.
Reflect often.
Lead from a place that can last.
Because sustainable leadership is not about doing more.
It’s about becoming someone who can keep going, without losing themselves along the way.