Beyond Rest: Dreaming & Hope as Antidotes to Leadership Burnout

Don’t know about you, but lately I’ve found that rest alone isn’t enough. When our nervous systems are exhausted, when our calendars keep demanding, when leadership feels like sprinting a marathon, simply sleeping more doesn’t always restore us.

What I’ve been reaching for are two other forms of nourishment: dreaming and exercising the “hope muscle.”

It's Gloria Steinem who once said:“Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities.

Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.”

Dreaming can even be a form of resistance (by the way: so can napping!)

Another source of inspiration comes from a recent interview with Joan Baez, where she reflected: ‘I heard somebody say, “Hope is a muscle.” That made sense to me because I don’t have a whole lot of hope naturally…’”

I keep thinking about how these two ideas belong together.

Dreaming imagines. Hope sustains. One sketches the outline, the other keeps us moving toward it. Together they soften the grip of exhaustion and make space for renewal.

Why Rest Isn’t Enough

Addressing burnout is complex. It requires shifting how we work and, before that, shifting our beliefs about work and worth, the kind of beliefs that a good coach can help us untangle. It also requires compassion for our nervous systems, which are not designed for endless output.

Neuroscience confirms what most of us feel in our bones: the human brain doesn’t innovate well under pressure. Stress narrows our cognitive bandwidth. When cortisol is high, the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for creativity, problem-solving, and big-picture thinking, essentially goes offline. We default to survival mode.

This is why “pushing through” rarely produces the breakthroughs we need. Creativity requires space, safety, and a measure of play.

The 4B Rule: Where Creativity Actually Happens

Psychologists studying creativity have long noted the “4B rule”: the best ideas often arrive in (symbolically) bed, bath, bus, or bar. In other words, they surface not at the desk under deadline pressure, but in those moments when the mind is relaxed, wandering, in transit, or in flow. Often in good, friendly, relaxed company.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who coined the term flow, described it as a state where challenge and skill meet just right, and the mind loses track of time. Flow is restorative, generative, and deeply linked to innovation. Importantly, it’s almost impossible to enter flow when you’re running on empty.

“Play is the highest form of research.” ~ often attributed to Einstein

Rest helps, but dreaming and hope stretch us beyond recovery into creativity.

Practicing Dreaming and Hope Together

And here’s the key: both dreaming and hope require company. They don’t flourish in isolation. Dreaming needs witnesses, springboards, partners, friends, sometimes even just one trusted friend who says, “Tell me more.” 

Research consistently shows that even a single close friendship can buffer against stress, lower risk of burnout, and significantly improve resilience.

The Harvard Study of Adult Development, one of the longest-running studies on human wellbeing, has followed participants for more than 80 years and arrived at a striking conclusion: close relationships matter more than money or fame when it comes to happiness and health.

Robert Waldinger, the study’s current director, put it simply: “Good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period.” The research shows that friendships and supportive social ties not only protect our mental health and buffer against burnout, but can also extend our very longevity.

Hope, too, is practiced in conversation, in laughter, in shared rituals. Psychologist Charles Snyder, who developed Hope Theory, found that hope is not just a feeling but a cognitive process shaped by goals, pathways, and agency, and that social support is one of the strongest factors in keeping hope alive. In other words: we co-regulate our hope.

"At the height of laughter, the universe is flung into a kaleidoscope of new possibilities." - Jean Houston

Even artists and activists seem to know this instinctively. Joan Baez herself recently joined a circus (!), perhaps because play and joy are part of how we stay human, how we remain dignified and free.

Again, neuroscience backs this up too: collective joy releases oxytocin and dopamine, deepening bonds while replenishing our tired nervous systems.

We need spaces, even small and temporary ones, where alternative realities exist: meeting a friend and plunging into a cold lake together, creating art that nobody commissioned, telling absurd stories that make us laugh until our ribs ache.

These are not childish vanities, nor distractions from “real work.” They are leadership practices, because they cultivate imagination, resilience, and the hope that fuels our actions.

Re-awakening, Not Just Recovery from Leadership Burnout

So here’s a thought: What if healing leadership burnout requires us to connect with impossible, absurd, dreamlike realities, because they stretch our capacity to imagine new futures?

It feels countercultural right now, with authoritarian storms blowing across the globe and daily headlines eroding optimism. Yet that’s exactly when we need spaciousness: the spaciousness of positive belief, and the spaciousness to dream, to get excited about possibilities again.

And in a rebellious act, we can assign value to doing so.

Most of us don’t think of dreaming as practical, and we certainly don’t treat practicing hope like a discipline. Yet without them, strategy, action, even leadership itself, becomes brittle.

One way to reawaken this capacity is to practice lateral thinking, stretching our imagination by combining concepts that don’t usually belong together.

Try this: find 20 similarities between a woodpecker and a can opener - or: what game for 6 year-olds could you invent using only an orange, chalk, a piece of string, and a sheet of white paper?

Once you’re warmed up, take it a step further.

The question that surfaces our goal-setting from inspiration, not from desperation, is this:

“If you had unlimited money, no fear, and no need for recognition or approval, what would you do or create?”

Exercises like these aren’t frivolous; they build the muscle of hope and possibility.

The point isn’t to arrive at a perfect solution, but to stretch our imagination and laugh a little along the way. Playful creativity creates space for new pathways, reminding us that even when we feel exhausted, something in us is still capable of clearing mental clutter and preparing for what’s next.

When was the last time you played What if… or Would you rather… game?

• What if gravity worked backwards every Tuesday?

• Would you rather have wings like a bird or gills like a fish?

• Would you rather be invisible or be able to predict future?

Rest helps, but at times we need a deeper departure from the tight grip of the familiar. A healthy escape, daydreaming, playtime, or even traveling to somewhere we haven’t been in a while, can loosen our perspective, whether that journey is metaphorical or literal.

The Invisible Muscles—And How to Exercise Them

So perhaps the real question isn’t whether we rest enough. It’s whether we’re also exercising these invisible muscles: (day)dreaming, hoping, sometimes even humorously, absurdly, until they carry us into a future we can’t yet see, but need to believe in.

Here are a few ways to begin:

• Micro-dreaming breaks: give yourself five minutes a day to stare out the window, doodle, or let your mind wander. No phone, no agenda, just space for imagination to surface.

• Dream chronicles: keep a notebook by your bed and jot down your dreams as soon as you wake up. Then, instead of rushing into the day, linger for a few minutes with a cup of coffee in hand, reflecting on themes or images. Whether they’re absurd, profound, or funny, dreams can remind you that your inner world is alive and resourceful.

• Hope journaling: each evening, jot down one small thing that makes you feel hopeful, an interaction, a possibility, a shift you noticed. Over time, this trains the “hope lens" and thus "the hope muscle.”

• Creative rest: swap one hour of output for one hour of playful input: read poetry, sketch badly, take a close-up photo of tree bark, or wander slowly without headphones. This is rest that restores imagination and brings play back into your day.

• Shared dreaming: talk with a friend, colleague, or coach about your “impossible” ideas. Speaking them out loud makes them more real, and invites others into the practice of hope.

  
  

An Invitation - You Deserve to Thrive

I truly hope you are not experiencing burnout. But if you are, please reach out. You deserve not only to recover, but to thrive, to regain your sense of vitality, clarity, and creative energy.

With the right support, it is possible to do more than patch yourself back together. It is possible to re-awaken, to rediscover your imagination, and to rebuild optimism in both life and leadership.

If this resonates, I’d be honoured to walk alongside you. [Contact me here] to begin a conversation.

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Hi, I’m Monika, Strengths Coach and facilitator. I help individuals and groups cultivate resilience, emotional intelligence, and well-being through strengths-based coaching. Passionate about transformative and creative leadership, I empower leaders to drive meaningful change within themselves, their organizations, and beyond.

I hope you’ll visit often, and I look forward to connecting and working together!