The Power of the Pause: Dr. Moniek Garside Is Challenging Entrepreneurs to Rethink Hustle, Burnout and Leadership
For entrepreneurs who believe success requires nonstop work, Dr. Moniek Garside offers another strategy: slow down, protect your capacity and build a business—and life—you can actually sustain.
LEADERSHIPENTREPRENEURSHIP
Julian St. John
8/15/20264 min read
Entrepreneurship has long celebrated the hustle. Wake up early. Stay up late. Answer every email. Take every meeting. Keep pushing until the goal is reached. But Dr. Moniek Garside is challenging business owners to ask a different question: What is all that success costing you? The therapist, speaker, author and educator recently completed her doctorate while preparing to release her second book, The Power of Your Pause: From Autopilot to Awareness—The Transformative Power of Stillness. Managing both major accomplishments taught her something every entrepreneur can understand—capacity matters. Garside shared that there were days when she had to ask herself whether she truly had the capacity to continue, then give herself permission to pivot, regroup and return. For her, that became leadership in action: practicing the same principles she encourages others to follow.
That lesson could be especially important for founders because entrepreneurship can make exhaustion look like ambition. Garside believes our culture has trained people to fear slowing down because they worry something will be missed or dropped. Yet constantly operating at full speed can come with another cost: losing ourselves. She explained that people can sacrifice relationships, peace, mental wellness, physical wellness and their ability to recover while trying to accomplish incredible things. Rest, in her view, is not the opposite of productivity. It can create the space needed to think clearly, recognize what is no longer working and move from survival mode toward more intentional decision-making.
For entrepreneurs, this turns the idea of a "pause" into a business principle. A pause does not necessarily mean taking a two-week vacation or shutting down operations. It might begin with a founder asking, "Am I okay?" before opening email in the morning. It could mean turning the phone to Do Not Disturb after a demanding day, creating quiet before an important decision or simply stepping away long enough to regain clarity. Garside makes an important distinction: entrepreneurs should not treat pausing as another task they have to squeeze into an already packed schedule. Instead, it can become part of how they manage themselves and, ultimately, how they manage their businesses.
Garside learned this lesson long before writing a book about it. During college, she was trying to be a student, care for other people and handle multiple responsibilities while maintaining few boundaries. Eventually, the pressure began affecting her physically. That season forced her to stop and ask herself what she actually needed. Her answer was simple but life-changing: she needed to choose herself. That pause helped redirect her purpose and challenged her to stop building her life around everyone else's expectations. The business lesson is difficult to ignore. Sometimes the smartest decision a leader can make is not another expansion, partnership, launch or investment. Sometimes it is recognizing when the person responsible for carrying the vision needs attention too.
Her journey into therapy also offers a lesson about finding the business and career opportunity hidden inside your natural abilities. Garside said she believes she was doing the work before she even knew what to call it. She had always cared for people, solved problems and helped others navigate difficult situations. She originally pursued nursing and worked in hospitals, but found herself more interested in what was happening beyond a patient's medical condition. She wanted to know what was happening at home, what resources they needed and what challenges they would face after leaving the hospital. What others saw as going beyond her assigned job was actually pointing her toward her purpose. For new entrepreneurs, that is worth studying: sometimes your strongest business direction can be found in the problem you naturally keep trying to solve.
Garside's message also challenges established entrepreneurs to examine whether they are running their businesses on autopilot. She describes autopilot as moving from one responsibility to another without being fully present—finishing something significant and feeling nothing, automatically reaching for the phone every morning or completing daily routines without considering whether they still serve you. In business, that same pattern can show up when founders chase revenue goals, launch products, manage teams and pursue the next milestone without stopping to ask whether the company they are building still matches the life they want. Growth without awareness can leave even a successful entrepreneur feeling empty.
The leadership implications may be even greater. Garside believes pausing can increase a person's capacity, which can change how leaders communicate with employees, respond to problems and enter difficult conversations. Imagine taking a moment before walking into a team meeting after a stressful morning. Instead of allowing frustration to control the room, the leader decides how they want to show up. Garside explained that meaningful change does not always come from one dramatic decision. Often, it is created through smaller actions repeated consistently. That is an important reminder for CEOs and founders: company culture is not built only through mission statements and employee handbooks. It is also built through the energy, habits and behavior leadership brings into the room every day.
Perhaps the strongest business lesson from Garside's conversation is that entrepreneurs do not need permission to take care of themselves. New founders may believe they have to prove themselves by working around the clock. Veteran entrepreneurs can become trapped by the company they successfully built, believing everything depends on them. Garside's work offers both groups another definition of strength. The goal is not to stop being ambitious; the goal is to build enough awareness to know when ambition needs direction, boundaries and recovery. As she explained near the close of the conversation, we cannot always control the environment around us, but we can change how we show up within it. For the modern entrepreneur, that may be the difference between simply building something successful and becoming the kind of leader capable of sustaining it.
