Why slowing down is the fastest way forward
By Vicki Abelson, MBA PCC
My neighbor spent three consecutive summers wondering why her vegetable garden never quite worked out. She planted. She watered. She waited. And every August, she’d walk away with a handful of tomatoes that didn’t justify the effort.
The fourth summer, she did something different. She stopped obsessing over the plants and started paying attention to the conditions. The soil pH. The drainage pattern after rain. The way the afternoon sun hit the south corner differently. She didn’t plant more. She planted smarter — into an ecosystem she began to understand.
That summer, she couldn’t keep up with the harvest.
There’s a version of this story playing out in businesses every single year, and summer is exactly when it tends to surface.
The summer arrives, and the calendar suddenly breathes. Key clients are on vacation. Decisions get delayed. The pace that felt relentless in Q1 softens just enough that most leaders quietly coast, floating on the current of activity from the months before, letting one day blur into the next. Before they know it, September arrives, Q4 is knocking, and they’re scrambling to make up ground they didn’t realize they’d lost.
But here’s the thing: Coasting and slowing down are not the same thing. One is passive. The other is a strategy. The leaders I’ve seen build the most momentum don’t use summer to slow their output. They use it to examine their ecosystem.
The uncomfortable truth is that most of us spend the busiest months of the year producing, executing against plans, hitting deliverables, and moving from meeting to meeting, without ever stepping back to ask whether the conditions we’re operating in actually support what we’re trying to grow. We’re planting seeds in soil we’ve never really examined.
Summer offers a slightly lower tide that reveals the rocks beneath the surface. This is the time to ask the questions that get buried under urgency the rest of the year. What’s the actual culture of your team right now — not the culture on the website, but the one that shows up on a Tuesday afternoon? Where is energy being spent that isn’t generating return? Which relationships need tending that have been running on autopilot? What do the people around you actually need to do their best work?
These aren’t soft questions. They are the structural questions that determine whether everything you build in Q4 holds. The trap most leaders fall into is believing that progress only counts if it’s visible.
A signed contract. A launched product. A completed project. These are the tomatoes — and they matter. But the conditions that produce them? Those are invisible until suddenly they’re not, and you’re either flush with results you can barely keep up with, or you’re standing in a garden wondering what went wrong.
Momentum that looks like acceleration often starts with a season of apparent stillness. The most important work you can do this summer might not show up in any report. It might be the honest conversation with a team member who’s been quietly disengaging. It might be clearing out a structural confusion about who owns what. It might be getting genuinely clear — not performatively clear, but actually clear — on what your business is trying to become and who you need to be to lead it there.
None of that is drifting. It’s deliberate movement. There’s a meaningful difference between reacting to the future as it arrives and building it before it does. Most of us live in the first mode more than we’d like to admit, moving from yesterday to today as passengers who are responsive rather than intentional, carried by the current of circumstance rather than steering through it.
Summer is an invitation to step out of that current for a moment and look at where it’s actually taking you. The seeds you plant now, the trust you build, the clarity you create, the ecosystem you tend, will determine the harvest you bring in come fall.
So slow down. Not because it feels good. Because it’s the fastest way forward.
VICKI ABELSON, MBA PCC, is a Certified Professional Coach with over 20 years of health care administration experience and the founder of The Defined Leader. She offers executive coaching and workshops. If you’re ready to see if leadership coaching is for you, visit thedefinedleader.com.
