A lot of things can feel like burn out.
Being a senior business leader is hard work. And some days it’s a lot more difficult to stay motivated or energised about your to do list.
It’s not that you want to quit or even sell up – far from it – it’s that the energy that used to carry you through has diminished somehow. Which means that the effort costs you more, or feels heavier.
When that happens repeatedly, most leaders will jump to one diagnosis – they’ve got too much on, without enough recovery time in between.
So they focus on clearing their diaries, removing themselves from meetings.
Now that’s probably a part of it: and getting a better hold on your time is rarely a bad thing.
But in my experience, it’s usually not the whole story.
When overload isn’t the problem
I’ve worked with leaders who are objectively busier than they’ve ever been and report feeling more energised than they have in years. And I’ve worked with leaders who, on paper, have everything under control — reasonable hours, capable teams, a business that’s performing — and yet start each week feeling a bit depleted.
So it can’t purely be a question of workload.
To understand what’s happening, we need to appreciate the difference between feeling tired and feeling drained.
Whilst the former is usually a physical response – your body’s signal that you need more rest, less work, more time – feeling drained is something else. It’s what happens when the work is drawing on reserves that aren’t being replenished, because the day-to-day demands of the role have drifted away from the things that give you energy.
In short, it happens when the work you’re doing just isn’t that invigorating.
How the drift happens
This is one of those classic problems caused by success.
Early in your leadership journey, your role was probably built around your strengths — the things you were good at, the work that came naturally, the problems you found exciting to solve. (The infectious energy of that effectiveness is usually how people end up in leadership positions in the first place.)
Then the business grows or you take a new role and your responsibilities broaden.
The work that originally energised you gets delegated away, or crowded out by other demands, or reclassified as something too junior for your level. Nobody takes it from you deliberately, it just moves.
In its place comes work that is entirely legitimate — strategically important, well within your capability, clearly part of the job — but that doesn’t give you the same thrill.
So that each time you do it, each day you turn up, the balloon deflates just a little bit.
The change can be imperceptible at first, but over months and years, the drift accumulates.
How to take back control with a simple audit
Now if you look for solutions to “feeling drained”, you’re likely to hit upon a wide range of wellbeing programmes, supplements, even fitness or diet routines.
And I’m not going to dismiss them entirely, but for this specific kind of problem there’s a much simpler – and cheaper – fix.
It’s this:
Spending a week paying close attention to your energy level, not your output.
After each significant meeting or piece of work, ask yourself one question: did that leave me with more than I arrived with, or less? Not whether it went well, or whether it was important. Simply: what did it do to my energy?
Make a quick note each time: you could use a scale, noting net gain versus net loss.
The pattern that emerges is usually more revealing than any framework or course. Most leaders find that a relatively small number of activities account for the majority of their energy — and that a disproportionate amount of their week is running it down.
Interestingly, the “job demands-resources” model points to exactly this: burnout isn’t simply a product of high demands, but of a sustained mismatch between what the role takes and what it gives back. The leaders who sustain high performance over time aren’t necessarily doing less, they’re doing more of the right things for them.
What to do with what you find
This isn’t about redesigning your role overnight, or deciding that half your responsibilities need to change. That’s rarely practical, and often unnecessary.
It’s about knowing which parts to protect. Which to delegate more regularly — not because you can’t do them, but because someone else doing them costs you less. And which to stop pretending you find energising when you don’t.
There are plenty of tasks you can’t drop that will take up energy, but with small recalibrations you can start to redress the balance. And that starts with an honest picture of where your energy actually goes.
If you’d like to have a conversation about that, I’d be glad to talk it through. Drop me a line.
Kind regards,
Chris