Rest as Infrastructure: How Nonprofit Leaders Can Break the Burnout Cycle - with Josh Feldman

From learning differently to leading differently, Josh Feldman shares how a childhood shaped by learning disabilities became the foundation for redesigning work culture around rest, humanity, and sustainable impact.

Josh Feldman is the Founder and CEO of R&R: The Rest of Our Lives, a practice dedicated to helping mission-driven organizations build cultures where people can actually thrive. With over 20 years of experience as a master facilitator, coach, and community builder, Josh has worked across nonprofits and social impact spaces, bringing deep empathy, creativity, and systems thinking to leadership development. His work challenges the assumption that productivity and exhaustion must go hand in hand, especially for changemakers doing meaningful work.

Josh traces this philosophy back to his childhood, sharing a formative fourth-grade memory of seeing beauty in New York City buildings while struggling to read. Navigating a learning disability with the support of thoughtful parents and teachers taught him early on that there are many valid paths to success. Those experiences shaped his belief that differences can become superpowers—building collaboration, empathy, and inclusive leadership skills that would later define his career.

The conversation explores why so many leadership programs fail to create real change: people are simply too burned out to absorb what’s being offered. Josh explains how this realization led to founding R&R and advancing practices like sabbaticals, Break Weeks, and redefining rest as organizational infrastructure rather than individual self-care. He emphasizes that leaders must model rest themselves, normalize practices like naps and meeting-free time, and reject false urgency that keeps teams trapped in constant sprint mode.

Josh is calling to redesign work around life, not the other way around. Josh and Ron reflect on hustle culture, nonprofit scarcity narratives, and the opportunity to use this moment of technological change to re-center humanity at work. Listeners will walk away with a more expansive understanding of rest, permission to experiment with what restoration looks like for them, and a vision for building workplaces that can sustain impact for generations to come. Tune in for a thoughtful, restorative conversation that just might change how you think about leadership, productivity, and what really matters.

Chapters
🎙️ 00:39 Meet Josh Feldman and His Mission to Transform Work and Leadership
📚 01:24 Publish your book at https://leveragepublishinggroup.com/
🌱 09:45 Founding R&R the rest of our lives
🛌 13:37 Why rest belongs at the center of leadership and work culture
✍️ 22:40 Find support for writing your impact-driven book at booksthatmatter.org
🧭 29:26 Reflections on leadership maturity and personal growth
⏰ 31:23 Flexibility, autonomy and trusting people at work
❤️ 32:55 Redefining rest and well-being beyond self-care
🏗️ 39:13 Redesigning work culture for long-term sustainability
🤝 47:44 If you are a leader or changemaker looking for support, check out geniusdiscovery.org
✨ 52:17 Final reflections and an invitation to rethink work
🎧 57:09 Want a podcast just like this one? Check out podcastsmatter.com

Links
Website: https://restofourlives.org

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshua-josh-feldman-4a84297/

Explore Josh Feldman’s work at R&R: The Rest of Our Lives to discover research, tools, and practical frameworks, like Break Weeks, sabbaticals, and glimmers, that help organizations and individuals build more humane, sustainable ways of working.

Connect with Ron: www.linkedin.com/in/rapatalo
Check Out Ron's Book: www.amazon.com/dp/1613431473

Leverage Publishing Group: www.leveragepublishinggroup.com
Publish a Book That Matters: http://booksthatmatter.org
Start a Podcast That Matters: http://podcastsmatter.com
Go from Expert to Thought Leader: http://geniusdiscovery.org

For more great podcasts like this one, visit: https://podcaststhatmatter.org/