The Day That Got Away
Jourdan hits “Send” on the email to her team. Agenda attached, pre-read materials linked, ready for tomorrow’s 8:00am staff meeting. She closes her laptop, leans back, and feels it all at once — the tightness in her shoulders, the dull ache behind her eyes, the kind of tired that has its own weather system. She glances at the clock. 6:47pm. Wait. How is it 6:47? It feels like she was pouring her first cup of coffee a minute ago. She has no memory of most of today. She was in meetings, she solved things, she answered a hundred messages, she ate lunch at her desk (she thinks). But if you asked her to tell you what actually happened, she’d struggle. And tomorrow she gets to do it all over again.
If you’re reading this and quietly nodding, welcome. You’re in good company. This is one of the most common experiences of modern leadership and one of the least talked about, because admitting it out loud feels a little like admitting you’re not cut out for the job. So we don’t say it. We just keep going.
The Bill Always Comes Due
Here’s the uncomfortable truth about the go-go-go version of leadership. It works. For a while. You get things done. Meetings happen, decisions get made, fires get put out. From the outside, you look competent, maybe even impressive. And it’s seductive, because motion feels like progress and output feels like impact.
But there’s a bill quietly accumulating in the background. It shows up as sleep that isn’t really sleep. As patience that runs out faster than it used to. As a sharper edge in your voice than you meant to have. As that strange flatness that settles in on a Sunday evening. As a body that starts whispering and then, eventually, yelling. The bill comes due in health, in relationships, in the quality of the decisions you’re making when you’re running on fumes. Burnout isn’t a dramatic event. It’s the slow compounding of a thousand days that got away.
So the question most leaders are actually sitting with, even if they haven’t named it, is this:
How do I keep performing and leading at the speed and level that’s expected of me without hitting a wall?
That’s the pivot. And the answer, I promise you, is not “work harder” or “be more disciplined” or any other version of pushing yourself through it.
Lead More, Do Less
Stay with me here, because this sounds backwards.
Lead more, do less.
The first time I heard something like this, I thought it was the kind of thing people say on retreats when they’re trying to sell you something. But it’s turned out to be one of the most useful frames I’ve come across for leaders who are starting to feel the wall getting closer. “Do less” isn’t a license to stop caring or coast. It’s an invitation to slow down enough to actually check in with yourself before you launch into the next thing. To take stock of how you are, not just what’s in front of you. To give yourself a beat to consider options before reacting.
Rick Carson, in his book Taming Your Gremlin, invites us to simply notice the inner voice that narrates our days — not to fight it, not to argue with it, just to observe it. That act of noticing creates a tiny bit of separation, and in that separation is where choice lives. Most of us live without that separation. Something happens, we react, next thing. Something happens, we react, next thing. A whole day of that and we've made a hundred decisions and we haven't actually been anywhere for any of them."
Don Miguel Ruiz, in The Four Agreements, offers something else worth holding onto here. His fourth agreement is to always do your best, with the important qualifier that your best is not a fixed quantity. Your 100% today is not your 100% from yesterday, and it will be different again tomorrow. That’s not weakness. That’s being a human being who has a body and a nervous system and a life outside of work. Our ability to recognize that, to let ourselves pause and recharge, to sometimes ask for help — that’s not giving up. That’s wisdom.
And here’s where I want to bring in the athletes. Ask any serious athlete when they actually get stronger. They’ll tell you it’s not during the workout. It’s not during the game. Strength is built at rest. The training breaks the muscle down. The rest is what lets it rebuild bigger and better. A coach who only trains their athlete and never lets them recover isn’t a coach. They’re a saboteur.
Leadership is the same. The meetings and decisions and conversations are the training. But you don’t grow during any of that. You grow in the spaces between. And if there are no spaces, there’s no growth. Just erosion.
This isn’t about preventing fatigue. Fatigue is going to happen. Anything worth doing creates some. But accumulated fatigue, the kind that never gets metabolized, is what hurts your performance, your judgment, and eventually your health. Giving yourself small moments to recover isn’t indulgence. It’s maintenance on the instrument you lead with.
Three Practices for Doing (Almost) Nothing
The body, it turns out, is the doorway. You can’t think your way into presence, but you can breathe your way there. Here are three practices you can use depending on how much time you’ve got. Pick one and try it tomorrow.
The one-minute version: Three breaths. Between one thing and the next, before you open the next tab or walk into the next meeting, take three slow breaths. Not quick ones. Slow ones, where the exhale is longer than the inhale. As you’re doing it, notice where your body is tight. Shoulders? Jaw? Chest? Don’t try to fix anything. Just notice. That’s it. That’s the whole practice.
The five-minute version: Step away. Close the laptop. Stand up. Walk somewhere that isn’t where you’ve been sitting. A different room, the hallway, outside if you can. Let your eyes look at something far away — out a window, down a corridor. Our eyes spend most of the day locked at screen distance, and letting them stretch is a strange, quiet kind of relief. Feel your feet on the floor. Take a few more of those slow breaths.
The ten-minute version: A walk without cargo. No phone. No podcast. No agenda. Just a walk. Let your attention land on whatever it lands on — a tree, the sky, the sound of your own footsteps. Your brain will try to use the quiet to plan or rehearse or worry. That’s fine. Notice that it’s doing that, and come back to the walking. Ten minutes of this is worth more than you’d think.
None of these are going to blow your mind. That’s the point. They’re small, they’re repeatable, they don’t require anything you don’t already have. And if you do one of them four or five times a day, something starts to shift. You arrive at the next thing instead of collapsing into it.
From Who We Are to How We Are
Brené Brown has a line that Monique and I quote often: “Who we are is how we lead.” It’s a powerful idea, and it’s true. The character, values, and identity we bring into our leadership shape everything downstream.
What we’d add, building on that, is this: how we are is how we lead too. Not just who you are in some enduring sense, but the state you’re in right now, today, in this meeting, with this person. Are you present, or are you still in the last conversation? Are you settled, or are you carrying residue you haven’t metabolized? Are you in your body, or are you floating three feet above it?
Most leaders have spent very little time building the capacity to know how they are. It wasn’t on the curriculum. We learned strategy, execution, communication, finance. We didn’t learn how to feel our own feet on the floor at 2pm on a Tuesday. But that inner capacity — the ability to pause, check in, and meet ourselves with a little honesty — is what lets us meet everyone else with more of what they actually need.
Leadership really is an inside-out game. It starts with creating a small amount of inner space, and then a little more, and then a little more. And the work isn’t to stop being busy. The work is to stop letting the busyness run the show.
Jourdan’s day got away from her because she wasn’t in it. Tomorrow doesn’t have to go the same way. Three breaths. A walk to the window. Ten minutes outside with no phone.
Lead more. Do less. See what happens.
