It doesn’t happen by accident and most of us are optimizing toward a target we never chose
Read time: 8 minutes
I’ve been practicing yoga for 20+ years. When I started, it was entirely about what my body looked like. I went to the hot classes because they burned more calories, I pushed into poses my body wasn’t ready for, and I treated the last five minutes (where you lie still on the floor) as the part to skip, because there were more productive things I could be doing.
In my own process of burning out and subsequently building my business, I hired my first coach. One of my first realizations was that I had inherited a whole heap of personal and professional standards that I never actually chose. In this yoga example: thinner is better.
I watch capable people do this in their careers all.the.time.
The leaders I worry about usually aren’t the ones who are struggling. Struggling is more tangible, something isn’t working or hurts, so you go looking for a solution.
The ones I actually worry about are the leaders who seem to have it handled. They put out the fires, make the decisions, and have the answers. Nothing hurts enough to make them stop and ask what they’re actually optimizing towards. When they finally do, they often find out it was never a target they chose, just one they absorbed from everyone around them.
This article is about building the conditions that allow you to think more clearly, so you can define success for yourself and build towards a target that matters to you.
And if you’re thinking that this is a nice-to-have, let me tell you up front that this work doesn’t just make your own life more aligned and meaningful. It changes what your team, your family, and everyone downstream of you gets from you too. You’re not the only one who benefits when you get honest about what you’re actually aiming at.
Clear thinking is a condition, not a personality trait
The instinct, when leadership gets hard, is to look for a missing skill. Better delegation, better prioritization, better communication.
And sometimes that’s right, but oftentimes we try to teach or learn new skills without any time to think, apply, and integrate it. Then it doesn’t stick and behavior doesn’t shift and the hard thing is still hard. (I’ve written about how to tell those apart here.)
Underneath our skills are a set of conditions that make clear thinking possible, which is the first step to applying skills in effective ways. These conditions aren’t built by accident, we have to build and tend to them, otherwise they erode because everything about our modern working lives are designed to consume them.
There are three conditions:
Know what you’re aiming at
Build room to be wrong
Protect space to think
1. Know what you are aiming at
"Aligned action" is a phrase I use constantly, but it’s meaningless without an answer to the obvious question: aligned to what?
You’re told to prioritize, to be effective, and to focus on what matters. But if you don’t know what you’re measuring against, the default becomes whatever is loudest or whatever someone else already decided was important.
You probably started reading this article because thriving sounds good. Everyone wants to thrive. But wanting it and actually knowing what it means for you are two different things, and most of us skip past defining it for ourselves because we’ve absorbed someone else’s version of thriving.
Here's why: you’ve spent years building the skill of having an answer, for your team, your board, your clients, or whoever is in the room. That skill is real, and it is valuable, right up until the question turns inward.
What I notice when I ask a capable leader what thriving actually looks like for them is that same reflex fires: produce the answer that sounds right.
For a moment, pause and stop ‘shoulding’ on yourself. Don’t reach for what a “good leader” would say, reach for what is TRUE for YOU.
If you’re having a hard time, listen to your body. It already knows the difference between a standard that you inherited and one that is actually yours (even if your mind is still negotiating).
Here’s the test: Ask yourself what thriving would look like if no one but you was ever going to hear the answer. Notice what makes you tense → typically someone else's version of success, absorbed so long ago. Notice what makes you exhale → typically closer to true for you. I spent two decades on a yoga mat learning that lesson before I thought to apply it anywhere near my leadership.
I worked with a business owner whose definition of success was growing revenue year over year. Once we said this out loud, she realized she never chose it on purpose. It was a definition she'd absorbed: if she wasn't making more each year, she was failing. Once she got honest about what she wanted (more flexibility and time with her kids), she rebuilt her business around fewer, better-fit, higher-paying clients instead. Check out the email she sent me about a month after this realization:
What you value hides inside that definition of “success” or “thriving”. Not the values you think you should have, but the three or four you feel in your body for a week when you violate them. Values aren’t something fluffy, they’re the criteria you decide with. Without them, every choice carries tension because you have no way to tell a good trade-off from a bad one. And with as many decisions as you're making in a single day, no wonder so many of us have decision fatigue!
Writing down what matters to you measurably changes how your body responds to pressure. Values affirmation lowers your body’s cortisol response to stress, so you’re not spending as much of your capacity, which leaves more of it available to actually think.
Knowing your values is also a buffer.
Pause for a moment and think about who you are becoming. Not who you think you should become, but the version of you that your next chapter needs… which is usually not the version that got you here.
Growth is uncomfortable and so is drifting, and from the inside they can feel the same. So knowing your values helps you determine which version of discomfort is worth it and aligned.
2. Build the room to be wrong
Our best thinking happens when we let go of how we look while we do it. This may sound soft, but stick with me here because the evidence says otherwise.
In 1999, Amy Edmondson did a study of 51 work teams and found that psychological safety was what predicted whether a team actually learned and improved as they worked. We think it's confidence, but confident teams weren't the ones getting better results, it was the safe teams because safety is what allowed them to learn, make mistakes, and grow together. And that learning is what drove their performance.
Safety doesn't directly improve performance. However, it is what makes learning possible and helps skills take root, which in turn improves performance. I commonly receive questions about how to cultivate psychological safety within teams and organizations, and my first answer is always, "It starts with you."
I learned what this actually looks like a decade ago, in a meeting room at Airbnb built to look like a Japanese noodle house. I was rattling off updates to my manager at top speed, and he stopped me and told me to slow down. Then he named the thing I felt every day and assumed no one else could see, my white-knuckle grip, and told me about his own burnout years earlier, in a company just like the one I was in. He went first, that's what made it safe for me to be honest after. (Full story here.)
Psychologist Paul Ekman called this nonverbal leakage: You can suppress an emotion, but you can't fully hide it. And your team is reading it, whether you mean for them to or not. Researcher Shu-Chen and his colleagues confirmed this inside actual workplaces: when leaders expressed negative emotion, employees picked up on it, and it shaped how safe they felt speaking up at all.
The most useful thing you can do for the people you lead is to be regulated enough that being near you cultivates safety. When you push harder on the outcome it costs your team their own capacity.
3. Protect room to think
This is where most good intentions collect dust and die.
You’ve probably been on that offsite where you blocked time to think and see the forest from the trees, and left with clarity and a plan. Then you got back to the day-to-day and most of it died in a google doc somewhere.
Sound familiar? Here’s why: your day-to-day is fragmented. Sophie Leroy calls it attention residue: when you switch from one task to another, part of your attention stays behind on the first task, especially if it was unfinished, and that drains the cognitive resources available for whatever you’re doing next.
Most of my clients think their exhaustion is a time management problem, but it’s usually capacity drained by constant context switching.
The other issue is what researcher Sabine Sonnetag calls the recovery paradox: high workload is linked to a lower ability to mentally disconnect from work during non-work time, which increases the risk of burnout. Typically the people who need recovery most aren’t able to get it because of their high workload.
This is why a vacation doesn’t solve this, and why protecting thinking time has to be structural rather than aspirational. A block on your calendar that you defend the way you’d defend a meeting with someone important.
An action you can take today & the honest limit
One of the first things I’ll do with a client in this situation is a calendar audit, it’s simple and something you can do on your own.
Run a Calendar Audit:
Once you know what you’re aiming at, open your calendar for the last month and look at the data. Where did your time actually go? Which of those choices were really yours? What was your energy like throughout the day and during different activities and time blocks?
The distance between what you say matters and what your calendar says you did is some of the most telling information. It gives you the answers to how you can adjust your calendar to focus on what actually matters to more effectively and efficiently reach what you’re aiming for.
I know that some of this assumes a degree of control that you may not have in your work.
For example, if you are early in your career, or if your calendar belongs to someone else, or if you work somewhere that has crushed the space to think, the pause can create awareness but it cannot cultivate safety that your environment is actively removing. This is real and it’s not your failure, but it is data.
The bottom line
As you get clear on what you’re aiming at, you can tell the difference between a season of work that is worth enduring and a situation worth leaving.
The bottom line is that nobody builds these conditions by accident, and nothing in a modern working life will build them for you. The pace will not slow down on its own, your to do list won’t ever be completely done, and your calendar won’t clear itself. And if you don’t define your target, something or someone else will.
You will spend the next year moving fast either way, so the question is whether it’s pointed at something that you chose, something that matters to you, or not.
