Rest Was Never Supposed to Be Something You Grind Toward

In this solo episode, Vivianne talks through Rest and Resist Week, the decision to close HmntyCntrd, what pulled her back to the States for the first time since moving to Mexico, and why she believes entrepreneurship can be a healing practice rather than an extraction. Note: this post may have affiliate links and we donate 100% of those funds to non-profits and a children's group home🫶🏾 

Every fall, the Choose Courage Inc. team goes fully offline for a week. No client calls, no content calendar, no exceptions. Vivianne calls it Rest and Resist Week, a practice she built years ago inside HmntyCntrd, her first business, and carried forward into this one. The belief underneath it is simple to say and hard to live: rest is not a scarcity. It does not have to be grinded toward, earned through enough hours logged, or fought for once the real work is done. One week in the fall. One in the spring. Two consecutive weeks in the summer, which the team calls Rest and Resist Month. The schedule is planned a year out, mandatory, and non-negotiable, because the alternative is the corporate default most of us were trained into, where exhaustion reads as commitment and stillness reads as risk.

That belief is doing more work than it looks like on the surface. Vivianne has spent the last several years trying to design a life where rest does not have to be defended, and this particular Rest and Resist Week landed at a strange, specific moment. She is flying to Chicago, her first time back in the States since she permanently relocated to Mexico in May of 2025. Part of her wanted to wait until the current administration was over before setting foot back on U.S. soil. She left, in part, because she did not want to spend four more years managing her mental health and her creativity against a political climate she knew would cost her both. What finally moved her was smaller and more specific than politics: her partner's encouragement, and missing her nephews enough that fear stopped being a good enough reason to stay away.

Choosing to Stop Enduring

There is a pattern Vivianne keeps naming across her work, and this episode names it again. Corporate systems condition people to increase their capacity to endure. Take on more, shoulder more, absorb more, and call the absorbing itself a form of growth. Vivianne describes wanting the opposite: more capacity to live, to wonder, to build, to hope. For her, that meant an exit from the United States entirely. For the people she coaches, it more often means something quieter, a slow renegotiation of how much of themselves a job gets to require.

She is careful to draw a line between growing old and growing. A lot of people do the first without ever touching the second, logging years without anything underneath them actually changing. The Chicago trip is not framed as a reward for surviving a hard season. It is framed as evidence that a differently designed life is possible, dinners with clients-turned-community, time with her best friend, her nephews, the specific people who make a place worth returning to even under duress.

From Retention to Release: Why HmntyCntrd Closed

Vivianne wound down HmntyCntrd at the end of 2025. Toward the end, most of that work involved helping companies and executives retain their employees, and somewhere in the middle of doing that work well, she noticed she no longer wanted to help organizations hold onto people. She wanted to help those people get free.

That shift sits underneath one of her clearest working distinctions: commerce is not the same thing as capitalism. Commerce is real economic activity, sales, value exchange, entrepreneurship, and it implies mutual benefit. Capitalism, in the hyper-extractive form most people have only ever experienced it, implies hoarding. Regenerative commerce is the term she uses for the alternative, a model of business built on active replenishment rather than depletion, of communities, ecosystems, even the nervous system of the person running it. A business, in this framing, can give back more than it takes. That is the contrarian center of gravity for everything Choose Courage Inc. builds, and it is the reason her own healing has been so tied up with building businesses that operate this way. Entrepreneurship, done with intention, will surface a person's relationship with money, value, time, and every system that conditioned them long before they ever filed an LLC. That confrontation is uncomfortable. It is also, she argues, where the healing actually happens.

You Don't Have to Leave Corporate to Start

One of the more practical threads in this episode is easy to miss under the personal reflection: Vivianne works with a lot of people who have no intention of quitting their jobs anytime soon. Some are giving sixty, sixty-five percent of themselves to a nine-to-five and building something of their own with what is left. The mindset shift she coaches toward is not dramatic. It is a reframe. Treat the job as the thing that funds the real project, rather than treating the real project as a hobby squeezed into whatever time the job leaves behind. Entrepreneurship, in her view, is one of the most creative mediums available to a person precisely because it forces self-confrontation. It asks more of you than most jobs will, and it gives more back in return, provided the model underneath it is regenerative rather than extractive.

What's Coming, and Why She's Not Planning Ahead the Usual Way

Choose Courage Inc. hit its revenue goal for the year in mid-June, without a sales funnel built on manufactured urgency or fear. Vivianne is treating that as a signal to give more rather than plan more. Normally her next-year planning starts in late October. This year she is skipping it in favor of something more immediate: ten free webinars and trainings running between the end of September and the end of January, built from years of listener feedback about what would actually help. The first is a live session on September 16th with her attorney, covering what AI creativity and intellectual property actually mean for someone building a business, what you legally own when AI tools are part of your process, and how to protect it. A replay goes out to anyone who registers and can't attend live.

She closes the episode the way she opens most conversations lately, somewhere between faith and stubbornness. The world feels heavier right now, and she is naming that plainly rather than smoothing over it. Her response is not optimism. It is closer to what Tricia Hersey has written about rest as resistance, the idea that refusing to let a brutal system dictate your relationship to your own body and time is itself a form of defiance. Vivianne can't fix everything wrong with the world from Mexico or from Chicago. What she can do is keep building a business that gives more than it extracts, keep making rest something her team doesn't have to earn, and keep showing the people paying attention that a radically different life is buildable, one Labor Day week at a time.

Originally aired as "Some Reflections with Vivianne" on the Choose Courage Inc. podcast, September 6.