Tea with Linda - EXCELLENCE

Tea with Linda - EXCELLENCE

Contributor: Linda Kavelin Popov, Co-Founder of TVP, December 2025

Excellence isn’t only a professional standard: it’s a spiritual practice. It asks us to bring the best of who we are, not just the most of what we can produce. Yet in a culture that rewards speed and constant output, we often forget that clarity, creativity, and true leadership emerge from moments of stillness.

Below you will find an excerpt from the book A Pace of Grace by Linda Kavelin-Popov, taken from pages 19–21. Her insights offer a powerful reminder of the role that rest, reflection, and intentional “Grace Time” play in sustaining our effectiveness and well-being.

This reflection reminds us that “Grace Time” is more than rest; it’s a necessary pause that restores our inner equilibrium. When we create space to breathe, listen, and realign, we strengthen the very qualities that make excellence possible: presence, discernment, and authentic engagement. In choosing restoration over relentless pace, we return to the source of excellence.

The need for Grace Time
One of our greatest unmet needs is time for solitude. Taking refuge in the bathtub just isn’t enough. Many fathers feel frustrated by a lack of “cave time”—time to unwind, free of the relentless demands of work or home. A friend once confessed to me his guilt over a habit he had developed of stopping and parking the car on the way home rather than getting there as quickly as his wife wanted him to, just so that he could put his head back against
the seat and breathe awhile. His children were taught to give him a grand welcome when he arrived, jumping on him, hugging, and doing a “show and tell” about their day. “I love them, but it is just too much after a long day of constantly dealing with people.”

When we are running on empty, we simply don’t have enough energy or time in the day to experience the abundance or grace or joy of life. At the end of the day, we are left wondering what we have really accomplished, and more often than not we have a sense that we have failed someone, something, somehow. We feel overwhelmed when the commitments we make to family, friends, and especially work is more than we can actually handle. I once wrote in my journal,“With my current schedule, which I continue to overfill, I have no time for free-floating thought, so instead I have free-floating anxiety.” It was shortly after that I became seriously ill.

The trap of self-importance in identifying totally with my work for “a wor-
thy cause” and the seduction of running on adrenaline had kept me from mind-
fullness and stolen away my life energy. We need what I call “Grace Time,” a term
that is more descriptive and positive than “down time”—to revive, to recover
our energy, to daydream, and to putter. Without it, we endanger our energy sup-
ply and court disaster in our health. 

The paralysis of fatigue
Failure to pause for a moment of grace, if chronic and constant, leads inevitably
to fatigue, no matter how healthy you consider yourself. One of the most trou-
bling symptoms of post-polio, chronic fatigue, or fibromyalgia is the paralyzing
fatigue. It closely resembles depression. Fatigue makes us too tired to think, to
dream, to remember. It keeps us from what is most important—a joyful life lived
mindfully, deliberately, and purposefully. Because fatigue is invisible, people
around us may not recognize its death grip. “Oh, you’re looking fine,” they say in
a reassuring tone, which just adds to the problem. Now we feel both invalidated
and exhausted! 

In “A Pace of Grace” workshops, I find this one of the greatest
complaints of people who suffer from fatigue. “I wish it were visible,” one
participant said. “If I had my arm in a cast, I would get more understanding.
Sometimes I feel people judging me as if I’m a malingering hypochondriac.”

Without habits of rest and rejuvenation to sustain us, even the most vigorous
person fatigue becomes cumulative and leads to disorientation and mem-
ory loss. Memory overload and disorientation associated with the fatigue of
living beyond our energetic means is now creeping into the lives of individuals
in their twenties and thirties.

Overwhelmed and never enough
The overwhelming lifestyle we have created continually feeds the belief that we
are not enough. For many of us, this is an old wound in our self-esteem, having
experienced that “not enough” sense as children, when our parents failed to

praise or appreciate and instead criticized and found us wanting. I remember a
time when I was about thirteen and hadn’t yet given up on my mother someday
loving me as she loved my brothers, the twin apples of her eye, born when I was
about two. One night, I swallowed my pride and did the dishes without being
asked. Shy, and awkwardly hopeful of her praise, I casually tossed the dish towel
down, saying, “There.” “Why can’t you do it cheerfully like your brothers? Why
do you have to be so sullen?” she said, missing the affirming moment by a mile.
Needless to say, that was my last spontaneous act of service in our house, and I
settled into a chronic sense of grief about not being enough for my mother, no
matter what I did.

The go, go, go routine of our overwhelming, unsustainable lifestyle both
feeds and alleviates the guilt of “not-enoughness.” The more we take on, the
deeper we dig ourselves into a hole of overwhelm, and at the same time, the pace
we keep cuts us off from our feelings. We are left with a vague disquiet that steals
away our grace.

Guilt, the gift that keeps on giving . . .
Unfortunately, we have become habituated to guilt. We all experience guilt to a
certain degree, although not all guilt is alike. For example, a friend of mine in
New York works as an editor of children’s books. She finds that on a daily basis,
she has far more to do than she can actually accomplish. Her guilt is the natural
result of having too much to do and not enough time to ever have a sense of closure

In the age of e-mail and cell phones, it sometimes feels as though we are
trying to empty the ocean with a teaspoon. Just when we feel we’re getting
through the day’s influx, a new wave comes in. Guilt is both the effect and the
cause of the sense that we are never enough. We feel as though we can never do
enough, or be enough.

Guilt also occurs because we know deep down we are neglecting the most
important things—our relationships, our bodies, and our souls. We strive to
survive and wonder, “When will I have time for myself and more time for my
family?”