Magnetic Authenticity Podcast with Jolynne Rydz

18: At Peace with Pace - a New Look at Productivity

• Jolynne Rydz • Season 1 • Episode 18

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Have you ever felt that flicker of guilt when leaving work "on time" even when you've completed everything you needed to do? That nagging voice wondering if colleagues might think you're not dedicated enough?

This subtle pressure to constantly appear busy and productive is destroying our effectiveness. Looking at shocking research from the Workplace Wellbeing 360 report, Australia's rate of presenteeism—showing up for work when not fully capable of performing effectively—stands at a concerning 44%, higher than the global average. This phenomenon costs Australian organisations an estimated $34 billion annually in lost productivity.

The mounting evidence is clear: our obsession with constant productivity is backfiring dramatically. South Korean researchers have found that working more than 52 hours weekly actually changes brain composition, particularly affecting areas responsible for focus, decision-making, and emotional regulation. When we try to fit 48 hours of work into 25 available hours, something has to give—and usually, it's our wellbeing and ultimately our true effectiveness.

But there's a powerful alternative approach. Being at peace with your natural pace isn't about working less—it's about working right. It means recognizing that each person has their own optimal rhythm and energy pattern. For some, that might mean intense focus in the morning hours; for others, creative bursts in the evening. Some thrive with intermittent rest periods throughout the day, while others need longer recovery after intense project work.

I share five practical steps to cultivate this healthier relationship with pace: pause to reflect on judgments, assess your optimal personal rhythms, align flexibility with business needs, plan realistically for downtime, and communicate clear expectations that normalize recovery and prevent burnout.

Ready to transform how you work?

Download my free ebook "Overwhelmed to Impact" at brilliance-inspiredkit.com/overwhelmedtoimpact for practical tools to help you reset your approach to leadership and work in a way that honors your natural rhythm while maximising your impact.

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I am a Confidence and Impact Coach for leaders, Organisational Development Consultant and independent Leadership Circle Profile® Certified Practitioner. Information shared about this tool is courtesy of Leadership Circle®, all rights reserved. www.leadershipcircle.com

Jolynne Rydz:

You know that awkward feeling when you leave work before your colleagues, even if you started two hours earlier than they did and you've wrapped everything up for the day. It's that tiny flicker of guilt or that worry of what might they think. Are they going to think I'm lazy? Are they going to think I'm not pulling my weight? We don't just feel these things, we internalize them and often then we try and push harder and work longer just to show that we are doing what we're meant to be doing and show up even when we're unwell, all in the name of keeping up. But what if the real productivity killer isn't slowing down? It's the pressure to never slow down. I'm going to say that again what if the real productivity killer isn't slowing down? It's the pressure to never slow down. In today's episode we're going to explore what it means to be at peace with pace and how letting go of that pressure to keep up with everyone else might be the boldest leadership move that each of us can make. So eight weeks ago I posted the last episode for this podcast, so if you've been watching live then, yes, you've had an eight week break. My apologies, and the reason is because I've been focusing on some really exciting projects, and even whilst I was doing that, I did have some guilt, because I know some people love to take time of their day to listen to this podcast. You've told me and thank you, and I appreciate that and I'm so honored that you would do that. And then I feel, oh, I'm letting them down and insert all this other negative self-talk. I did worry about the algorithm and how it was going to treat me, and the reality is I'm genuinely really self-aware about what pushes me to the point of being overworked, stressed and unwell and before I knew this, I used to get sick so many times throughout the year, and now it's much less and so I thought I'd share that, because it's an excellent real life example of this topic of being at peace with pace.

Jolynne Rydz:

In today's fast-paced world, we're almost compelled to keep up with others. We're constantly comparing ourselves to others about what they've achieved and what we haven't, what's showing up on LinkedIn and what we haven't posted, and if you drill down to the root of it, what I've found is that it's driven by fear of not being enough, and this relentless push can lead to things like overwork, sacrificing sleep, sacrificing personal time and relationships and our overall wellbeing. Yet when we consider slowing down so many of us I know, I know because I speak to clients, I speak to friends, I speak to family and they all raise these kinds of questions they have doubts about whether they should be slowing down. Are they just being lazy?

Jolynne Rydz:

This internal conflict can often result in the workplace as presenteeism. So presenteeism simply is showing up and not really being in a state to be productive, but showing up because you have to show up. And now predominantly, when someone does that, often the first instinct is to think that maybe they're disengaged, they don't actually want to be here, they've checked out. But there's so many other reasons why people show up, but they're not actually fit to be fully productive at that moment. So a few examples when someone's sick, have you ever gotten out of bed going? Oh, I really don't feel like I can come to work today. Oh, but I have to because I've got that presentation and I can't reschedule it because it's going to affect too many people. I'm just going to do it. So people push through and in pushing through, they hop onto the train, they spread their germs to all the commuters that are also needing to go into the office that day they get into the office and potentially spread the germs to an immune, compromised colleague, or maybe a parent who's got a newborn and they're already sleep deprived and the last thing they want is to get your sickness. So often these thoughts don't necessarily come through people's minds, but or they do and they override it with no showing up, for that presentation is more important, and sometimes it might be, and sometimes it's important to stop and check whether it is truly as important as we think in that given moment.

Jolynne Rydz:

Now, I used to always use the analogy of unless you're a surgeon and there's someone open on the operating table, is it actually as much of a priority as you think? And in this example, if you're sick as a surgeon, you don't want to give the patient that illness either, right? So some other things that can happen is people show up when they're not in a fit state to work because they're not wanting to let their team down. Maybe the team's under-resourced and them being away is going to add extra pressure to the team and they care so much that they don't want to do that. So that's like the opposite of engagement. It's like they're so engaged and caring that they just show up at their own expense. Sometimes it can be because people are stressed and overwhelmed and they're there but they can't physically and mentally be there fully.

Jolynne Rydz:

And sometimes it goes to the other extent that people naturally know the rhythm at which they work but they feel like they're being watched or obliged and have to show up for this nine to five, 40 hour a week rhythm. That's considered the norm. And I find it hilarious when I hear what people do to get around these things, like when there's companies recording keystrokes. I've heard of people leaving a drill on their keyboard so it's constantly pressing, like the letter Z, or people very smart people smarter than me writing a program to make sure that the computer does some random keystrokes every intermittent sort of timing. So the fact that people are using all of this energy to try and show up and do the right thing but not actually be in the right headspace to do the right thing means that they're missing that opportunity to rest and recharge so they can show up fully engaged and present and productive. It's sort of like that same analogy of when the oxygen mask drops on a plane. In an emergency you don't go around and put the mask on everyone else first, you have to put your own on first so that you can help others. And if you fail to do this time and time again, yes, it might not be as immediate as on a plane, but over the months, weeks, months, years, you're the one that ends up really unwell and then you have to take a longer time out to recover.

Jolynne Rydz:

In 2024, the Workplace Wellbeing 360 report by Intellect found that presenteeism is on the rise and that Australia's rate of presenteeism is 44% versus 41.2% globally. Both of those numbers are high. If almost half of your workforce is showing up because they have to rather than because they are in a right state and they want to, that's a big problem. That means you're paying for only 60% of that salary that you're paying. You're only getting 60% value. Now I'm not saying that we manage people to this 100% thing all the time. What I'm saying is we really need to get at peace with pace, and I'll explain what this means. In 2019, a report done by the Centre of International Economics estimated that $34 billion annually is lost from lost productivity within Australian organisations because of presenteeism. That's a lot of money. So that's what it could look like if you're looking at that 44% spread out across all these different organisations.

Jolynne Rydz:

And what's even worse is when we spend so much money on wellbeing and engagement, and even personally, when people try and do all these meditations and exercise and eat well, and they spend so much energy on trying to be well, to outdo the overwork and the overburden, rather than just resting when it feels natural for them to rest, we're making it more complex than it needs to be. So what if? What if the solution were to be at peace with pace? So what this would mean for individuals is that there's better wellbeing, less stress, more energy and less risk of burnout when you actually honor your body's natural rhythms instead of overriding them.

Jolynne Rydz:

Now, from a human design perspective, there's some of us are designed to work, work, work, work, work, work. On one condition that we are actually engaged and lit up by the work that we're doing, that we are actually engaged and lit up by the work that we're doing. Now, that alignment it's not the majority or the norm that I come across, and it's part of a lot of the work that I do with my individual clients is finding that alignment for them, so they can feel energized by their work rather than drained. And so for other people, they're designed to work in a much more intermittent way. They might have an energy that is designed to get something started, so thinking of like an entrepreneur get this project up and running and then hand it off. So there's this incredible push. So if you have seen those strong people in the Guinness World Book of Records like pushing an airplane, the amount of force and energy that needs to just get the plane moving, and then, once it's moving, it's easier and they can step back and someone else could keep pushing it. That's what I'm talking about.

Jolynne Rydz:

Some people are designed for that, so you need to let them go hard and early and then let other people take over for them. And then there are people that just intermittently throughout the day, need a lot more rest because they might be super productive, way more productive than anyone else, and they can do that in two, three hours and then need the rest of the day to recover. But the thing is, our society and our traditional way of working doesn't allow for that. So if we do allow people to be at peace with pace, we can also improve focus and productivity. People to be at peace with pace, we can also improve focus and productivity. So if people aren't constantly rushing or multitasking, your attention can actually deepen and you can drop into your own individual flow much better.

Jolynne Rydz:

You build stronger self-trust. So if you learn to listen to your own needs and your capacity, not just external expectations that are placed on you, this actually builds your own self-respect and trust that you actually know what's best for your body. An easy example is I actually know when I start to get run down because I've been excited, I've been pushing really hard, because I've been so excited about what I've been doing that I've been going to bed late because I just want to keep working. And then, if I ignore that and keep pushing, I'll then want something like a coffee to help give me energy the next day. And then, once I do that, my body just doesn't like it. It then can't sleep and then it doesn't get enough rest and then I tend to get sick, and it's happened so many times that I know that it's a pattern for me. So building that self-trust to know when you thrive and when you need to pull back is so important.

Jolynne Rydz:

And then the fourth thing is that this helps sustainable success. So then, when you know your natural rhythm, when you're at peace with your pace, you can show up consistently and not do this boom and bust cycles that are overcompensating for that overwork cycle, because your pace becomes aligned with your life and your energy. So when you're at peace with pace for leaders and teams, it creates a healthier culture because your team will feel more psychologically safe to rest Like it's okay. It's okay to take time after a big project to recover. It's okay to work in ways that suit them. Some people are so switched on at six, seven o'clock at night versus, you know, 9am at the morning. So if it's not critical for the business for them to show up at nine, then let's be okay with them showing up later. It can increase engagement. So when people feel trusted to manage their own pace, their motivation and commitment can rise because they feel like you see them and you're not just forcing them to this arbitrary nine to five movement. And it creates this ability for someone to be autonomous and have respect.

Jolynne Rydz:

I liken it a lot to when I was growing up. I went to a Montessori school and the whole premise of Montessori is that the student is responsible for their learning. So we never really had a teacher out the front presenting a lot of information or learning. There was just a lot of different activities and we chose them at our own pace. We chose when we wanted to work on something, for how long we wanted to work on it, and we just had like a weekly guideline that we had to get through each week and so at the end of the week you'd review and see how you went. So that is so much more empowering and individualized that you don't have to control your teams as much because you're just allowing them to flow in the way that they work best. Which leads me to the third point, which is when you're at peace with pace with your teams, there's more flow and less friction. So when your team understand and respect each other's rhythms, there's not this chitter, chatter of like why is that person always leaving early or why do they get more time off than they do? It takes away that negativity and people can just respect and collaborate with each other much more effectively. It can reduce turnover and burnout.

Jolynne Rydz:

When people are not constantly feeling overwhelmed or judged for managing their own energy. Feeling overwhelmed or judged for managing their own energy, they're more likely to stay and commit and show up fully. And I think there's a big debate at the moment which is around, return to office and what that means for people who prefer to work at home versus people who prefer to work in the office, and there's so much judgment being lobbied at both ways, and I think what's missing from the conversation is that some people work best in an office environment with lots of people around, some people work best in a quiet environment that they have a lot of control over, and some people work best with a mixture of the two, and so when we don't honor that, that's when people just show up because they have to and you're tapping into that obligation energy rather than that passionate, vibrant energy, that discretionary effort, energy that, when you tap into, is so powerful and so much way more productive than the obligation one, and it's a smart use of resources. So when people aren't pretending to be productive and sitting there like they're looking, like they know what they're doing, they can actually rest, recover and be way more productive tomorrow, and you can make more accurate decisions about workload and staffing and priorities. In 2025, researchers from three South Korean universities studied some healthcare workers and they found that working long hours may actually change your brain composition. So for people working more than 52 hours a week, they actually saw a noticeable change in the parts of the brain that helped with focus, decision-making and emotional regulation, and so, while the brain was adapting they don't know necessarily whether that's a good thing or not they are thinking at this early stage that it might be the brain's way of coping with stress, but over time that it could make it harder to regulate emotions and think clearly. And I don't know about you, but I'm seeing a lot of people struggling to think clearly at the moment and maybe struggling to regulate emotions where previously in the past they would have been able to. And I think it's because it's this boiling pot scenario where our stress, our baseline stress level, has gone up and up and up and up and up and we haven't paused to go hang on. This is not actually healthy for me and it's not actually helping me to work at my optimum pace.

Jolynne Rydz:

As an example, 18 months ago I joined a program. It was a speaker's program and part of it was to develop your core model that you could speak about, and during that program I came up with an idea and I ran with it and it never felt right. And after that program everyone else was running with their stuff and I remember comparing myself to them going. Why can't I just do what they do? Why can't I be clear on who I want to work with? Why can't I be clear on what my model is? Why is everything so complex and just floating around my brain in overwhelm?

Jolynne Rydz:

And it wasn't until 18 months later that it just suddenly clicked and landed for me, and that's when I realized I needed to be at peace with my pace, because I was comparing myself to people that had a different life situation to me. They didn't have kids, you know, they didn't necessarily. Some of them didn't even have a partner. Some people had different hobbies and interests. Some people had a different capacity to work than I did, and that's okay. Some people had different priorities, and that all of that's okay. But it's about knowing and being at peace with pace for yourself and forgetting what everyone else is doing and just doing what you can and what you know best when you honor your own rhythms. So how do you be at peace with pace?

Jolynne Rydz:

So, to cultivate a culture that really embraces people's individual work rhythms, there's five steps I want to go through. The first step is to pause and reflect on whether you are maybe judging others, even if it's just in your head, or it's the subtle way you look at someone, or maybe it's you're judging yourself for not working hard enough. So an example of this that I encountered was once I was working in an organization and I was speaking with a manager about putting someone forward for a high potential program and the manager didn't want to support this person to go on the program because they thought they lacked commitment. And when I delved deeper, the reason they thought they lacked commitment was because this person, intermittently throughout the day, actually got up and walked away from their desk, and this would happen multiple times a day. Now, when I spoke with the actual staff member, they actually had a physical condition where they had to get up and walk and move around to be able to sit there comfortably and keep working.

Jolynne Rydz:

So unless you know deeply what people's rhythms are and why they do them, it's really important to check whether you're applying an assumption about why someone's doing what they're doing, rather than you actually know for a fact. So the second way to be at peace with pace is to assess, so determine that optimal pace for yourself. It might need some testing and then, once you know that for yourself, you can set the example and seek to understand that of your team. Be really open about this. The third step you can take is to align. So, once you know everyone's individual rhythms, how do you integrate this with the business need? So ensuring there's flexibility where possible and also meeting the needs of the business. And so ensuring there's flexibility where possible and also meeting the needs of the business. And that's the piece that sometimes people don't do. So then they get resentful when they feel like employees are taking advantage or they go too far the other way and they don't allow that flexibility because they want to control everything. But then the end outcome is actually less productivity than what they would get if they allowed that bit of flexibility. So there's a real fine line that you've got to. It's nuanced and it's different to every single team.

Jolynne Rydz:

Now the fourth step to be at peace with pace is to plan for downtime. And when this hit home for me was when I was talking to someone about full-time work and they said yeah, when you have a full-timer, you've got to allow for at least six weeks off, because there's four weeks of annual leave and about a week of sick leave, and the thought had never occurred to me. I mean, it might have occurred to you, but it never occurred to me that you literally, if you're going to plan out people's work, you've got to only account for, you know, 10 and three weeks of the year being work time. And now, if you layer onto that all of the sort of social and collaborative commitments that people might have which are valuable for the business, actual productive individual doing their own work time drops even more. And if you layer onto that bureaucracy of things that people need to do just to tick off certain I don't know policies, procedures or risk mitigate, again that adds an extra layer into what is actually productive work time. So the more you can one be really clear about the true available time, the better.

Jolynne Rydz:

And it actually hit home even more once when I was trying to work out why was I feeling so overwhelmed? And what I did was I sat down and I mapped out all of the things that I did and how long it took and I compared it to the hours I actually had available. So what I realized was I was trying to fit 48 hours of work into 25 available hours. No wonder I was doing my head in and I was constantly stressed Once I was at peace with this pace of okay, you've only actually got 25 hours, so what is the best use of those 25 hours? And the rest will have to wait? Why? Because I am being really intentional about how I want to spend my time, because I've been there.

Jolynne Rydz:

If you know me and I'm not going to go into this story in depth, but I was the person that used to get up at 5.30 AM, hop on a bus, go into work to try and get as much as I could done and clear my emails not that that was ever possible and come home. I would get home at 9.30, 10 o'clock at night and do the whole thing again and again, and again. So it's not like I'm not committed to work, but I didn't realize how unproductive I was and that my own expectations on myself was causing me to burn out, and that impacted me and it impacted my team. So the fifth step in being at peace with pace is to communicate. Once you know all of this, be really clear about your expectations so that people can take time off without guilt and prevent burnout.

Jolynne Rydz:

One example I've seen of people doing this really well is if someone's even remotely sick, there's actually no tolerance for them to be at work. They actually need to go home and rest. And what that teaches the team is that actually me resting is really important so I can perform at my best. Because if you put, if we think let me use a sports analogy just for fun If you put a player on that's got an injury, that maybe if you rested them a week longer, would come back for full productivity, full ability for the rest of the season. But you decide to play them even though they're injured, and then they're out because they deepen their injury, and then they're out for the next, the rest of the season, when they could have been playing. It's the same thing in a workplace, but it's just so much more subtle. The cost is the emotional toll, the overwhelm, the stress, the overburden, and then we try and fix it down the track with other band-aid fixes. So let's get to the root cause. So normalizing, taking a break and using your holiday time as an example for full holiday disconnect and actually recharge is so, so important. So those are the five ways to be at peace with pace To pause, assess, align, plan so important. So those are the five ways to be at peace with pace to pause, assess, align, plan and communicate.

Jolynne Rydz:

And if today's episode has stirred something in you maybe a moment of guilt you felt for slowing down or a reminder of how much pressure has been applied that's driving your pace, I want you to know this You're not lazy and you're not falling behind.

Jolynne Rydz:

You're human, and being at peace with your pace might be the very thing that allows your best work to come out and your fullest self to show up. So if you're ready to be at peace with pace in a way that actually honors your energy and your values, I've created something for you, honors your energy and your values. I've created something for you. It's a free ebook called Overwhelmed Impact, and it's packed with practical tools and reflection prompts to help you reset how you lead and work in a way that maximizes your impact. So you can download it now at brilliance-inspiredkitcom., and I'll pop the link in the show notes too. And if this episode spoke to you, I'd love for you to share it with a friend or leave a quick review. It helps more and more people find their way back to their own true pace. So always remember you were born for a reason. It's time to thrive.