I remember the first time I read Toni Morrison’s Beloved. It was late at night in my college apartment, a stack of other assigned books glaring at me from the desk, each one adding its own quiet pressure to the evening. But I couldn’t move past Morrison’s sentences: the way she set a scene, the way she let a character’s emotion sit on the page without ever over-explaining it. I remember thinking that words, chosen with that kind of care, could stop a reader cold and pull a “whoa” out of them, followed by a slower, quieter “wow.”

That night sent me on a lifelong habit: paying attention to words. Not just what they mean, but what they do. As leaders, we forget this constantly, how much impact lives not just in what we say, but in how we say it. We move fast, we default to shorthand, and we rarely stop to look closely at the words carrying our intent.

I was reminded of this recently while thinking about summer break. Or so I called it, until it occurred to me that what I actually needed wasn’t a break. It was a brake.

Subtle distinction. An important one.

A break implies repair, something is broken and needs fixing. It can also mean departure: a prison break, a heartbreak, a clean split from what came before. To me, a break tends to carry a heavy, negative connotation.  A brake is different. A brake is a pause, a slowing down, what you do before you speed back up, not instead of it.  When we pump the brakes, we get a chance to reflect.  

This year has been strong. There’s nothing in it that needs repairing, nothing I’m trying to leave behind. What I need is a brake: a chance to come to a stop, look around, and actually take in what’s around me.

I’ve had break seasons before, the kind that shade into burnout, where you need something substantial to reset: a real disconnect, time in the wilderness, space to sit with hard questions. Those seasons call for a break. This one doesn’t. What I need now is simpler: time to count what’s working, and space for my brain to catch up with everything it’s been taking in.

So why does the distinction matter? Because it’s not wordplay for its own sake, it’s about intention. Brake or break, the point is the same: naming precisely what you need is what lets you actually go get it. Vague fatigue gets a vague response. A named need gets met.

The rest of this year is going to ask a lot of us, the way every stretch does, whether business is strong or we’re grinding to hit quarterly targets. A brake, or a break, is a gift you give yourself so you can meet it well. A break can hand you the courage to start something entirely new. A brake can hand you the room to think your way into something better than what you’re already doing.

Use your words with intention, and you build the same thing Morrison built for me that night in my college apartment: sentences that stop you in your tracks, that carry weight because every word in them was chosen on purpose. As she wrote in Beloved: “Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.”

Naming what you actually need, a brake, not a break, is how you claim it.