Is it guilt—or is it control?

A University of London / Foundology “Founder Resilience” Report (2024) found that 57% of founders reported feeling guilty when they took a break from their business.  It also found high levels of mental health strain (93%) and loneliness (76%), all signalling that guilt around rest is a significant resilience challenge.  A Harvard Business Review–referenced survey found 64% of entrepreneurs and small business owners experience guilt when they rest, with 35% feeling daily overwhelm.  Broader workplace research also shows that 1 in 5 employees (not just founders) across studies reported vacation guilt, often leading to shortened holidays or skipping them altogether.

From Guilt to Growth – What the Guilt Is Really Telling You

The discomfort you may be feeling after your summer break isn’t a red flag, it’s actually a super valuable growth signal.  It might be showing you:

• Where your self-worth is still tied to output
• Where your business model requires you to be “always on”
• Where your systems haven’t matured enough to let you step out without fear

If your inbox silence caused anxiety, you haven’t failed. You’ve simply uncovered what the next layer of work to do on your own development.

Guilt is Guidance

Across business and your wider life, guilt isn’t always a sign of wrongdoing. It’s a signal of conflict between your values and your expectations.  It often arises when the inner business owner story goes along these lines.

• If I’m not online and working, I’m being lazy and showing a bad example to my team.
• I don’t deserve rest until I’ve earned it, and I am not there yet.
• I have to be available at all times for my team and my clients.

However, pause and ask. What story am I telling myself here? Is it actually based on truth or more on habit and fear?  It’s a sign that you’ve placed your with, your control and your fears in the wrong spots.

A simple exercise I was taught by my coach was this.  Write the sentence: “I feel guilty when I… because I believe…”  Then follow it up with: “And if I didn’t believe that, what else might be true?”  As an example, I felt very guilty when I first moved to Portugal as I believed that clients might see my new lifestyle as a combination of overcharging and underdelivering if they saw and heard of me on beaches or visiting new places.  I was challenged by my coach to dive deep on that; afterwards I reframed that our decision to move to Portugal was totally family orientated, it was to give my son a chance to experience a new culture in his teens, and for my wife and I to slow down and spend more time with each other.  From a business perspective, I felt completely honest and open with my clients at the time that their outputs and value delivered were completely unaffected, and indeed improved by the better efficiency of a virtual only operation.  

That one exercise took an unjustified fear and enabled me to highlight a valuable USP for my business which has since led to many new projects in the subsequent years.

Constant Presence does not equate to Growth

Do you say this? If I am not in it, it doesn’t happen?  It’s very common to mistake presence for progress. But growth doesn’t come from micromanaging every task. It really comes from designing systems, roles, rhythms and decision-making frameworks that don’t need your constant presence to function well.

This isn’t about disappearing. It’s about creating the space for others to lead, for your model to evolve, and for you to become more of an orchestrator than an operator.

If your presence is the only way your business runs, you haven’t scaled, you’ve just stretched and everything that stretches eventually breaks.

Ask yourself:

• What exactly required my attention while I was away?
• What came back to me by default, not design?
• What could be clarified or documented so I’m less essential next time?
• You’re not abandoning the business — you’re making it resilient.

Your Value is being Unavailable

Similar to above you might think being instantly responsive equates to the most valuable thing you can do for your business.  

But your value doesn’t lie in your inbox response time.  It lies in your vision, your clarity, your ability to focus on what really moves the needle.  Being perpetually available can feel like gold level service, but it often becomes a trap:

• You have to keep saying yes when you mean to pause.
• You jump into fires that aren’t yours.
• You feel resentful, but useful.

Availability feels like leadership, but it’s actually not. Clarity is leadership.

“Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.”
– Anne Lamott

Start focussing on:

• Creating office hours that work for you (even if just for you).
• Write default replies that others can use and protect your thinking time.
• Train your team to better define urgent and handle common “urgencies.”

If you’re always reachable, you’re actually never focussed on the true growth.

Summary

Don’t feel guilty about a break from your business. Question why you feel that way and instead ask:

• Is this guilt, or am I actually being shown a critical systems gap?
• Am I being drawn into this because it matters, or simply because I am the one that is most familiar with what needs to be done?
• If I solved this well once, could I never have to solve it again?