You know you are running low. You feel it in the shorter fuse, the flatness, the sense that you are managing everything and enjoying none of it. And you know, in theory, what you are meant to do about it. Rest. Disconnect. Take a break. Every leader knows this, and knowing has never been the problem.
The problem is that rest has moved to the bottom of a list that never ends. You will rest once the quarter closes. Once the hire is made. Once the crisis passes. Because there is always a next quarter and a next hire and a next crisis, the rest never comes. You are not failing to rest for want of discipline. You are failing to rest because you have come to believe you cannot afford it, and that belief is the thing draining you.
Why the most capable leaders run themselves emptiest
The trap is straightforward. The better you are at carrying load, the more load you are given, and the more it seems that everything depends on you staying switched on. So you stay switched on. You check the phone at dinner. You answer the email at eleven. You keep the whole thing running in the background of your mind even when you are technically off. Running that background process, all day, every day, is precisely what empties you. Not the work itself, but the never being off from it.
You do not run out of energy because you work hard. You run out because you never let yourself be completely off.
Rest is not the absence of work, then. It is the presence of genuine disconnection, the moments where the background process actually stops, and it does not require a holiday you cannot schedule. Small real breaks where you are fully off turn out to be more restorative than the long-promised week away that never comes. Research on recovery found that what predicts sustained energy is not working fewer hours but detaching completely from work during non-work time, even briefly (Sonnentag and Fritz, 2007).
This is also the behaviour with the widest gap between knowing and doing in our own data. More than half the senior leaders in our sample report allowing themselves genuine disconnection, whether from screens or into open air or without an agenda, less often than once a fortnight.
THE EXECUTIVE PRESENCE MINDSET SHIFT From: I will rest once everything is handled, because rest is what I have earned when the work is done.
To: Rest is not what I earn at the end. It is what keeps me able to lead, so it goes in first rather than last.
3 ways to practise this week
- Put your phone in another room for one meal a day. Not “use your phone less”, which is a state rather than an action. Physically leave the phone in a different room while you eat. The distance is the point, because you cannot check what is not in reach, and one genuinely disconnected meal a day is a real break your nervous system will register.
- Take ten minutes outside with no input. Not a walk while you take calls. Ten minutes outside with nothing playing in your ears and the phone left behind. Block it in your calendar like a meeting, because the things in your calendar are the things that happen.
- Pick one evening this week and declare it fully off, out loud. Tell your partner, your team, yourself: after seven on Thursday I am off, and I am not checking. Saying it aloud makes it real and harder to break. One genuinely off evening resets more than three half-off ones, because half-off is not off.