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I talk to leaders every day about burnout and about their capacity.
What surprises folks is that I advocate not taking time off to recover from burnout as a first response. Staying in-situ and reshaping your role, while deepening your self-care, results in an outcome around double the effectiveness of either one. And most people do neither - they think taking a break will do.
This is the essence of our Full Flight Program. For those who silently try to cope rather than risking sharing where they are at.
So does this ring a bell?
Let’s look at a typical scenario. Say you've made a call about something on a Tuesday, and then you remake it in the shower on Wednesday morning, defending it to yourself in the car on Thursday.
And then on Friday, you've asked for another set of numbers before you'll commit to the thing that you'd already committed to.
The usual reading is that you've become indecisive or that the stakes are higher now, or that you're being appropriately careful or rigorous.
But what's actually happening is simpler than that. Judgment runs on our available capacity, and when there's less of it, the mind stops trusting its own verdict and goes looking for certainty instead.
Judgment is lost to certainty, and certainty is expensive. It's slow, and to be honest, it never quite arrives. So we look for another spreadsheet and another day.
Now, when capacity arrives or when capacity returns to you, you decide something once. It's not recklessly. You'll still be wrong sometimes (you always were) but the decision closes, the second-guessing stops, and the hours you were spending on reassurance go back into the work again.
Knowing in advance what would make this a good decision, so you can tell you've made one. Most senior people have never been taught that.
This is not a character flaw, it's just a missing skill.
So if any of this has landed, send me a message. Just one conversation, nothing on the record. If somebody else needs to hear it, send it on to them and I'd love to have a chat with them.
You know where to find me.
