What Happens When You Actually Let Yourself Feel It

 

Last time, I left you with a question: what happens once you stop resisting an emotion and actually let it move?

Here’s what I’ve learned, mostly from doing this myself, imperfectly, over and over.

An emotion, felt fully, doesn’t stay the same shape for long. It starts as a heavy feeling in your gut. A few seconds later it becomes a burning sensation across your shoulders. Then a tightness in your chest. If you sit with it and just breathe – if you don’t reach for your phone, don’t start problem-solving, don’t get up to go do something – it moves through you almost like a wave breaking over you in the ocean.

And if you sit with it long enough, it breaks. It releases. It transforms into something lighter, something brighter – something constructive instead of corrosive.

This is the part most of us never discover, because we don’t stay long enough to find out. We treat the first uncomfortable sensation as the whole story and bail before the wave finishes breaking.

The belly of the whale

There’s an old idea – the hero swallowed by the whale, sitting in the dark of its belly before being released onto shore, changed. It’s a strange image, but it’s a fair description of what this actually feels like. You go into something. It’s dark and uncomfortable and you have no idea how long you’ll be in there. You don’t get to skip that part. But you don’t stay there either – the belly of the whale isn’t the destination, it’s a passage.

Most of the discomfort in this process isn’t the emotion itself. It’s the not-knowing how long the wave will take, and the fear that if you let it in, it’ll never let you out. It will. Emotion, actually felt, is remarkably efficient. It’s emotion resisted that lasts forever, because resistance is what keeps it circling instead of completing.

What’s underneath

Here’s the part that surprised me most: underneath the emotion, there’s energy. Strong, powerful, unharnessed energy that doesn’t disappear when the wave passes – it just changes form. It becomes available for something else. Creativity. Clarity. The ability to see a solution that wasn’t visible five minutes ago, or an opening between two things that looked like a wall.

It also becomes something you can offer other people. Not by narrating your process to them, not by making your feelings their responsibility – but as a kind of steadiness that’s actually earned rather than performed. People can tell the difference between someone who’s calm because they’ve processed something and someone who’s calm because they’ve buried it. One holds space. The other just holds the door shut.

This is why I don’t think of feeling your emotions as a detour from getting things done. It’s closer to maintenance. Skip it long enough, and the exhaustion I wrote about last time – the kind no amount of sleep fixes – is the bill coming due.

A place to start

You don’t need an hour of stillness or a retreat to try this. You need a few minutes and a willingness to notice a sensation without immediately trying to fix it, explain it, or push it away. Where do you feel it in your body right now? Can you stay with that sensation for thirty seconds without doing anything about it?

That’s the whole practice. It’s smaller than people expect, and it’s also the thing most people never actually try.

I’m working on a short, guided version of this – a few minutes, nothing fancy, just something to walk you through it the first few times so you’re not doing it cold. I’ll let you know when it’s ready.

If you’re wondering why this pattern – suppress, perform, go numb – is so easy to fall into in the first place, that’s really what the Real Leader Revolution Manifesto is about. This is one way to interrupt autopilot in the moment. The manifesto goes into where autopilot comes from and what it actually takes to come out of it for good.

In the meantime, there’s a bigger question underneath all of this: why does any of this matter for the work you actually do all day? Turns out, more than you’d think – especially right now. That’s next.

What if You’re Not as Fine as You Look?

 

 

Someone I love is suffering. Which means I am suffering.

As I’ve tried to navigate this most unpleasant experience, I’ve become aware of something: more people are suffering right now than I ever realized. Clients. Friends. Family. Neighbors. Strangers in passing. The next time you’re surrounded by people — in a meeting, at the grocery store, scrolling past faces on a screen — take a look around. Chances are someone you see is suffering. Or maybe it’s you.

And suffering has a way of tearing you apart, because despite your best efforts to make everything better, you eventually run into the truth: some things are outside your control.

Here’s what I’ve noticed. Regardless of the cause, suffering brings emotions that are uncomfortable, inconvenient — the kind we’re conditioned to hide. We live in a culture that prides itself on having it all together. Social media rewards the highlight reel. And work asks for a particular kind of performance: leave your problems at the door, put on the happy face, get the job done.

So we suck it up. We push it down. We deny the feeling, deny the reality that we’re suffering at all.

It’s a survival tactic, and it’s socially rewarded. You can put on a semi-happy face, tend to the business at hand, show up, produce. You can muster the energy to keep moving while leaving your heart behind you. You can hold everything and everyone at a polite, boundaried distance.

But it comes at a cost. And the cost is steeper than it looks.

What denial actually costs you

It takes an enormous amount of energy to resist an emotion that’s already welled up inside you. That effort shows up as exhaustion at the end of the day — the kind no amount of sleep touches, because it was never physical to begin with.

What I’m realizing is that our attempts to escape pain wall us off from the very thing that has the power to relieve it. Shutting the door on your heart will, in fact, keep the pain out. But it’ll also keep out joy, connection, inspiration, presence — everything on the other side of that same door.

Something vital departs. The work goes stale. Conversations become droll. Meetings get attended by a version of you that checked out somewhere around the parking lot. You go through the motions, check the boxes, but you yourself are not really there.

And you can’t connect to others when you’re not connected to yourself. People feel the distance — and they tend to meet it with more distance. It becomes a quiet, compounding cycle that alienates the very people you love and lead. Left unchecked, you risk becoming a hollow shell of what you once were: still moving, still producing, but lifeless underneath it.

So is the answer to swing the other way?

Is the fix to run around telling everyone what’s going on — airing every frustration, narrating every hard day, making your suffering everyone’s business?

No. That’s not it either.

The answer is simpler, and considerably less dramatic: it’s to feel what you’re already feeling. Not necessarily at work. Not while you’re on the hook to deliver something. But somewhere in your life, to actually be present with the emotion that’s asking for your attention.

Emotion is, quite literally, energy in motion. It has a charge. It’s trying to get you to notice it — not so you’ll perform it publicly, but so you’ll let it move.

That’s the part most of us skip. We treat emotion like a problem to solve or a weakness to manage, instead of something that simply needs to pass through. And when it doesn’t get to pass through, it doesn’t go away — it just gets buried under the effort of holding it together.

There’s another way through this

What if, instead of walling yourself off from the sadness, the frustration, the tenderness, you let it move through you the way it wants to? Underneath the discomfort, there’s energy — real, unharnessed energy that doesn’t have to just sit there. It can be redirected into creativity, into clarity, into the kind of presence that lets you actually show up for the people around you.

That’s not a small shift. It’s the difference between a leader who’s performing steadiness and one who’s actually offering it.

I’ll be honest — I don’t think feeling your way through something is the whole answer. It’s the doorway. What happens once you actually let an emotion move — what it feels like, what it turns into, and why sitting with it changes its shape entirely — is worth its own conversation. That’s next.

What I’ve Come to See About the Leaders Running on Empty

 

A while back, I wrote about what it takes to become real — the question at the center of The Pinocchio Principle. The distance between how capable a leader appears and how alive they actually feel.

Since then, I’ve been sitting with that question in a slightly different way.

Because in the intervening years, I’ve watched the pattern deepen. The leaders I coach are more accomplished than ever. And more depleted than ever. They’ve read the books. Been through the workshops. Listened to the podcasts. They know what good leadership looks like. And yet they arrive at coaching sessions with the same quiet exhaustion I have been watching for three decades.

Something is running them. And it is not the workload.

I made a video about what that something is — what I’ve come to see beneath the surface of the leaders I work with, and beneath the surface of my own life during the years I was living out the same pattern.

The video is about sixteen minutes long, and it lays out the whole picture: the invisible modus operandi that runs us underneath our conscious awareness, the false beliefs most of us would never consciously choose but are living by anyway, the five movements that make change actually possible, and — most importantly — the picture of what becomes available when you stop running on the wrong fuel and start running on the right one.

I’ve also put all of it down in a manifesto. It’s called The Real Leader Revolution, and it’s meant to be read slowly. You can download it free at RealLeaderRevolution.com.

Why I’m writing this now

I share the video and the manifesto because they feel like the fullest expression yet of the work I’ve been building for thirty years. The Pinocchio Principle named the question. This new work is my current answer.

Not because I have finished figuring it out — I haven’t. But because I’ve watched enough leaders make this shift that I know it is possible. And I know the map exists.

If you have felt yourself running on empty, and no amount of rest is quite fixing it — this is for you.

If you have wondered why what used to work isn’t working anymore, and no framework or strategy seems to reach whatever the actual problem is — this is for you.

If you have started to suspect that the more you’re looking for is buried beneath the very habits and beliefs that got you here — this is for you.

Watch the video. Read the manifesto. Sit with it.

And if any of it lands, I’d love to hear from you.

Diane

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What I Wish I’d Known Before Writing a Book Called “The Pinocchio Principle”

 

When I tell people I wrote a leadership book called The Pinocchio Principle, they usually assume it’s about honesty.

It’s not.

Or rather — it’s about a different kind of honesty. Not the honesty of telling the truth to others, but the far more difficult honesty of telling the truth to yourself. About who you are. What you want. Where you’ve been performing a version of leadership that looks good from the outside but feels hollow from the inside.

Pinocchio, in the original story, starts out as a puppet — animated but not alive. Capable of movement but controlled by strings he can’t see. And the journey of the story, at its heart, is about what it takes to become real.

That metaphor has never left me. Because I’ve lived it.

How the book began

I didn’t set out to write about Pinocchio. I set out to solve a problem I kept encountering in my work: the gap between how capable leaders appeared and how alive they actually felt.

I had been working in organizational effectiveness and leadership development for over a decade. I’d worked with executives at Fortune 100 companies, facilitated culture change initiatives, designed and taught leadership programs. I had seen every kind of smart, accomplished, well-intentioned leader you can imagine.

And so many of them were exhausted in a way that went deeper than workload. They had achieved what they had worked for — the title, the influence, the results — and found that it didn’t feel the way they thought it would. Something vital was missing.

I recognized that feeling. Because somewhere along the way, I had started living it too.

I was running a consulting practice, raising three kids, trying to do everything well — and I had slowly become a very efficient version of myself who wasn’t sure she was living her own life anymore. I was effective. I was competent. I was, by most external measures, successful.

But I wasn’t what I would call real.

What I discovered

What I came to understand — through my own journey and through the privilege of accompanying hundreds of leaders through theirs — is that the most transformative shift available to any leader isn’t a new strategy or a better system.

It’s a return to themselves.

Not a romanticized, everything-is-easy version of themselves. But the grounded, wise, genuinely engaged version that exists beneath the accumulated weight of expectation, performance, and fear.

I call that version the Genius. And I wrote The Pinocchio Principle as a roadmap for finding it.

The book came out in 2011. In the years since, I have had leaders tell me that reading it gave them permission to want something different. That it named something they had been experiencing but couldn’t articulate. That it started a conversation with themselves they hadn’t known how to begin.

Those conversations are why I do this work. They are, in a very real sense, the whole point.

Why I’m still here

I share all of this not to tell you about a book, but to tell you about a conviction.

I believe the indomitable strength of the human spirit is essential to the future of business — and that it is, right now, largely underutilized. I believe there is a version of leadership that is both more effective and more sustainable than the one most of us were taught. And I believe it begins with the same question Pinocchio was trying to answer:

What does it take to become real?

That question is as alive for me now as it was when I wrote the book. It’s what animates every coaching conversation, every program I design, every piece I write here.

If it’s alive for you too — welcome. You’re in exactly the right place.

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You can find The Pinocchio Principle: Becoming a Real Leader on Amazon here.

And if you’re ready to go deeper, The Real Leader Academy is where that journey continues.

 

 

 

Start Before You’re Ready: 3 Insights for Stepping Into What Excites and Terrifies You

 

Can you think of the last time you did something that terrified and excited you at the same time?

If you’re like me, you can probably also think of a few times an opportunity like that revealed itself — and you let it pass by. We tell ourselves we’re not ready. We succumb to the doubt or the fear. And later, we feel the particular ache of recognizing we were ready for more and didn’t allow ourselves to step into it.

This week’s video is about what helps us step forward instead of shrinking back. I share three insights that have made the difference for me, and I imagine at least one of them will land for you too.

The first is about the discomfort of growth — and why feeling unready isn’t the warning sign we tend to think it is. The second is about a trap I’ve fallen into more than once: the belief that we need one more course, one more credential, one more bit of preparation before we’re allowed to begin. (Spoiler: there’s something a workshop can never give you that taking action will.) And the third is about what we can lean on in those moments when confidence simply hasn’t arrived yet.

We don’t grow by waiting until we feel ready. We grow by stepping into the thing that’s calling us — before we’re as prepared as we’d like to be — and discovering that we had what it took all along.

 

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If this resonates and you’d like more tools for leading from the inside out, you’ll find them inside The Real Leader Academy, including the Just In Time Coaching Library — a growing collection of tips and approaches for the real challenges leaders face.

 

 

When “Good Enough” Becomes the Enemy of Your Greatest Work

 

There’s a particular trap that almost exclusively catches high achievers. It doesn’t catch the mediocre or the disengaged — they’re nowhere near it. It catches the capable, the accomplished, the ones who have built real expertise and a track record of results.

It goes like this: you get good at something. Genuinely good. People notice. Requests come in. You deliver. More requests come. You keep delivering. Over time, you become the person everyone turns to for that thing — which feels like success, because in many ways it is.

Until the day you realize that the thing everyone turns to you for is no longer the thing that lights you up.

You’re good at it. Maybe even great at it. But “good enough” and “great enough” have quietly become the ceiling of what you bring to work every day. And somewhere below that ceiling, your most interesting and generative work is still waiting.

The difference between competence and genius

I use the word Genius deliberately — not to mean exceptional intelligence, but to describe the particular quality of contribution that only you can make. The thinking, the perspective, the creative combination of experience and instinct and care that is specific to you and shows up when you’re doing work that genuinely engages you.

Competence is reproducible. Someone else can learn what you know and do what you do. Genius is not. It’s the fingerprint. And it tends to disappear when you’re spending your best energy on things that, while valuable, are keeping you from what you’re actually here to do.

The leaders I’ve worked with who have made this shift — from operating primarily from competence to operating more from Genius — describe it as going from performing their job to inhabiting it. The work feels different. They feel different. And the people around them notice.

What gets in the way

The most common obstacle isn’t lack of clarity about what your Genius is. Most people, when they slow down enough to look, have a pretty good sense of when they’re in it and when they’re not.

The obstacle is permission.

Permission to prioritize the work that only you can do over the work that simply needs to get done. Permission to say “this isn’t the best use of what I bring” — even when you’re good at it. Permission to disappoint the expectations that have accumulated around your competence.

That permission is harder to give yourself than it sounds. But it’s the threshold between a career that is impressive and a career that is alive.

A question worth sitting with

If you set aside everything you’re capable of doing — everything you’ve proven you can deliver — and asked instead: what kind of work makes me feel most like myself? What am I doing when time disappears and the effort doesn’t feel like effort?

That answer is a compass. It won’t tell you to blow up your career or abandon your responsibilities. But it will point you toward the territory where your greatest contribution lives.

And finding ways to spend even a little more time there — and a little less time on what merely keeps you busy — is one of the most important things a leader can do.

 

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If this resonates, The Real Leader Academy is designed exactly for this exploration — helping high-achieving leaders reconnect with what makes their leadership most powerful. → RealLeaderAcademy.com

 

 

 

 

What Disneyland Reminded Me About Presence (And Why It Matters for Leaders)

My family spent two days at Disneyland. I spent most of it somewhere else entirely.

Not physically — I was there. I stood in the lines, rode the rides, ate the overpriced food. But mentally, I was somewhere between a client situation I hadn’t fully resolved and a project that was nagging at me. I was going through the motions of being present while my actual attention was somewhere back in Phoenix.

At some point — I think we were waiting for the parade — my youngest grabbed my hand and asked me to look at something. And I realized I had no idea what she had been talking about for the last ten minutes.

I had been nodding. But I hadn’t been there.

Presence isn’t a soft skill

I want to make a case for presence that goes beyond the personal — beyond being a better parent or spouse or friend, as important as those things are. I want to make the case that the ability to be fully present is one of the most powerful and underrated leadership capabilities there is.

When you’re genuinely present with someone — not planning your response, not half-monitoring your phone, not running the background process of everything else you need to do — people feel it. They feel that they matter. They think more clearly. They take more risks. They bring more of themselves to the work.

Conversely, when a leader is visibly absent — technically in the room but not really there — the effect on the people around them is immediate and measurable. Conversations stay shallow. Trust erodes slowly. People learn not to bring the important things.

Your presence, or lack of it, shapes the quality of every interaction you have. And interactions are where leadership actually happens.

What snapped me back

Standing there watching the parade, I made a deliberate decision. I put my phone in my pocket. I let the client situation be unresolved for a few hours. I looked at what my daughter was pointing at.

It was a float. A fairly ordinary float by Disneyland standards. But the way she described it — the specific details she had noticed, the joy she took in explaining it to me — was anything but ordinary.

I had been missing it. Not just the float. Her. The whole trip.

And the thing that I keep coming back to is this: I didn’t get those hours back. They happened with or without my attention. The only question was whether I was going to be in them.

The practice of returning

Full presence all the time isn’t realistic. Our minds are meaning-making machines. They wander. That’s not a flaw to fix — it’s just how minds work.

What is possible is noticing when you’ve gone elsewhere — and choosing to return. Not with self-judgment. Just with intention.

In the middle of your next important conversation, try this: notice where your attention actually is. Not where you think it should be. Where it is. And if it’s somewhere other than the person in front of you — gently, deliberately, bring it back.

That act of returning is presence. It’s available to you in every meeting, every one-on-one, every conversation that matters.

And it matters more than most of what we spend our leadership energy on.

 

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I explore presence and what it means to lead from your fullest self in my book The Pinocchio Principle: Becoming a Real Leader.

 

 

 

What a Really Bad Day Taught Me About Leadership

I once arrived at a client meeting with coffee in my lap.

I was running late, reached for my coffee while pulling out of the driveway, misjudged the lid, and poured a generous amount of very hot coffee directly onto myself. I didn’t have time to go back inside and change. I arrived flustered, damp, and not exactly radiating executive presence.

In the parking lot, sitting in my car collecting myself before going in, I noticed something interesting: how much worse I was making it.

The coffee was a fact. The spill happened. Nothing about my narrative in that parking lot was going to change it. But what I was telling myself about it — what it meant, what it said about the kind of day I was going to have, what the client would think, whether I could possibly recover — was a story. And it was a story I was choosing to tell, even if it didn’t feel like a choice.

The story underneath the event

This is something I work on with leaders constantly, because it applies to everything. Not just spilled coffee but failed launches, difficult conversations, critical feedback, restructures, disappointments, and the hundred small indignities of a demanding professional life.

Every experience has two layers. The first is what actually happened — the fact, the event, the words that were said. The second is the meaning we assign to it. And while we often can’t control the first layer, we have extraordinary influence over the second.

The problem is that most of us don’t realize we’re operating in the second layer. We experience our interpretation of events as if it were the events themselves. The story feels like reality. And when the story is “this is a disaster” or “I can’t recover from this” or “this always happens to me,” the story shapes everything that comes after it.

What I did instead

In the parking lot, once I noticed what was happening, I tried something different. I asked: what’s actually true here?

What was true: I was late. I had spilled coffee. I was late. The client was waiting.

What was a story: that this meant the meeting was ruined before it started. That I was incompetent. That today was destined to be a disaster.

When I separated the fact from the story, something shifted. Not magically — I was still a little rattled. But I walked into that meeting present enough to actually be useful. And as it turned out, the client barely noticed I was late. What they noticed was that I was fully there when it mattered.

The leadership application

You don’t have to spill coffee to use this. You can use it the moment you notice that your reaction to something feels bigger than the thing itself. That’s usually a sign the story is running.

Ask: What is actually, factually true here? What am I adding to it? And what would be available to me if I set the story down for a moment?

The leaders I’ve worked with who navigate difficulty with the most grace aren’t the ones who don’t get rattled. They’re the ones who notice when they’re rattled — and choose, intentionally, what they do next.

That’s not a talent. It’s a practice. And it starts in the parking lot.

 

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I wrote more on navigating the stories that run our leadership in my book The Pinocchio Principle: Becoming a Real Leader.

 

 

 

How to Navigate Change Without Losing Yourself in the Process

 

Something I’ve noticed about the way most leaders navigate change: they try to power through it.

They treat uncertainty like an obstacle to overcome — something to be solved, managed, or outwaited. And the harder they push, the more exhausted and disoriented they become. Not because the change is too hard. But because they’re approaching it from the wrong place inside themselves.

There’s a version of you that can meet change, challenge, and uncertainty with something that looks a lot like courage and grace. I’ve seen it emerge in leaders who were convinced they didn’t have it. And I’ve watched the same leaders miss it entirely when they tried to force their way through.

The difference isn’t talent. It’s where they’re operating from.

Two ways of showing up

In my work with leaders, I talk about two distinct modes of operating. I call them the Puppet and the Genius.

The Puppet isn’t weak or lazy. In fact, it tends to show up most forcefully in the highest achievers — the ones with the most at stake, the most responsibility, the most pressure. The Puppet operates from fear, from the need to control outcomes, from the accumulated weight of every expectation and assumption about how things should go. When change hits, the Puppet tightens its grip. It defaults to what has always worked. It resists what it cannot predict.

The Genius is something different. It’s the part of you that can stay curious when everything is uncertain. That can ask “what is this situation asking of me?” instead of “how do I make this stop?” It’s the part that trusts your own capacity to navigate whatever comes — not because you have all the answers, but because you’ve stopped pretending you need them before you can move.

Here’s what I’ve noticed: the Genius doesn’t arrive when the change gets easier. It arrives when you stop fighting the change and start getting interested in it.

What this looks like in practice

A client of mine — a VP navigating a significant organizational restructure — came to me exhausted and furious. Everything she had built was being dismantled. Her team was scattered. Her role was unclear. She had a dozen reasons to be angry, and she was right about all of them.

But the anger wasn’t helping her lead. It was keeping her locked in Puppet mode — reactive, contracted, focused on what she was losing rather than what was possible.

What shifted things wasn’t a new strategy. It was a question: “What if this disruption is happening for you, not to you?”

Not as a platitude. As a genuine inquiry. What might this change be making room for? What has the old structure been preventing? What could you do now that you couldn’t before?

She sat with that for a long moment. And then something in her face changed. Not relief exactly. More like recognition.

“I’ve been so focused on what I’m losing,” she said, “I haven’t once asked what I might gain.”

The practice

When you’re in the middle of change that feels threatening, try this: notice which part of you is in the driver’s seat.

Is it the part that is contracted, defensive, focused on risk and loss and what might go wrong? That’s the Puppet. It means well. It’s trying to protect you. But it cannot lead you through what it cannot see.

Or is there a quieter part available — one that is curious, grounded, willing to not know yet? That’s the Genius. It doesn’t need the change to be resolved before it can show up. It shows up precisely because the change is unresolved.

Navigating change well doesn’t mean being unaffected by it. It means choosing, again and again, which part of yourself gets to respond.

 

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If this resonates, I explore the Puppet and the Genius at length in my book The Pinocchio Principle: Becoming a Real Leader.

 

 

 

Why Losing Your Passion at Work Is a Leadership Problem (Not a Personal One)

 

A third of your time on this planet is spent at work.

Let that land for a moment.

Not a third of your workday. A third of your life. Which means if your work feels like a grind – if you’re pushing through it, white-knuckling your way from one obligation to the next, surviving instead of thriving – that’s not just a professional inconvenience. That is the texture of a significant portion of your life.

I’m not going to pretend that work is always meant to feel blissful. Every meaningful endeavor has its hard days, its tedious stretches, its moments of doubt. That’s different from the slow erosion of passion that I see happening in so many high-achieving leaders.

And I want to make a case for why that erosion isn’t just a personal problem – a matter of attitude or perspective or self-care that you can fix with a long weekend. It is a leadership problem. And it has consequences that ripple far beyond you.

The cost you aren’t calculating

Here’s what most leaders don’t realize when they make peace with feeling depleted: the energy you bring to your work is not self-contained.

When you’re running on fumes, everyone around you feels it. Your direct reports feel it in how you show up in one-on-ones: the half-presence, the clipped responses, the sense that you’d rather be somewhere else. Your peers feel it in how you engage in meetings – whether you’re genuinely curious and generative, or just getting through the agenda. Your organization feels it in the quality of your thinking, your decisions, the kind of problems you’re willing to sit with.

Leadership is a transmission, not a transaction. What you carry inside yourself is what you transmit to the people around you. And a depleted leader, however accomplished and competent, transmits depletion.

I’ve seen this play out in organizations again and again. A team whose leader has lost their spark begins to lose theirs. The culture quietly dims. People start doing the minimum required to stay out of trouble rather than bringing their best. Nobody named it as a problem. Nobody pointed to the leader. But the source was there.

Why it happens to the best ones

Losing your passion at work doesn’t happen to lazy or uncommitted people. It happens to exactly the opposite kind of person.

It happens to the leaders who care deeply and have been pouring themselves out for so long that the well has run dry. The ones who made success their identity and then discovered that achieving it didn’t feel the way they expected. The ones who kept saying yes to things that didn’t align with who they really are, because they were so good at executing that the requests kept coming and they felt responsible for saying yes.

This is part of something I call the Curse of Competence. The better you are at something, the more of it you’re asked to do – whether or not it’s what lights you up.

Over time, you can find yourself at the top of a ladder that’s leaning against the wrong wall. Impressive by every external measure. Quietly lost on the inside.

What reigniting actually looks like

I want to be clear about what I’m not suggesting here. I’m not suggesting you quit your job, blow up your career, or make any dramatic external changes. In my experience, the most profound shifts happen from the inside out – in how you relate to what you’re doing before you change what you’re doing.

What I’ve seen work, again and again, is this: when leaders reconnect with why their work matters – not the metrics, not the deliverables, but the genuine human impact – something shifts. When they start bringing more of who they actually are to what they do, rather than the polished, managed version they’ve learned to present, something opens up.

There’s a part of every leader I’ve worked with that is wiser, more creative, and more energized than the version that shows up exhausted and going through the motions. And when that part gets activated – when you stop performing leadership and start being it – the effect on the people around you is immediate and unmistakable.

That’s not idealism. I’ve watched it happen in boardrooms, in hospitals, in classrooms, and in startup teams. It is available to you.

The question I’d ask you

If you set aside what you’re supposed to feel about your work – what you’ve decided is reasonable or realistic or acceptable for someone at your level – what is the honest answer to this question:

Does your work feed you? Or does it deplete you?

If the honest answer is the latter, that’s worth paying attention to. Not to spiral into crisis, but to get curious. Because the version of you that is genuinely energized, engaged, and lit up by what you do doesn’t just feel better – it leads better. It makes better decisions. It draws out the best in the people around it.

And the world needs that version of you more than it needs the depleted one.

 

If this landed for you, I explore the journey from depletion to what I call your Authentic Genius in my book The Pinocchio Principle: Becoming a Real Leader.

 

And if you’re ready for a more structured journey, The Real Leader Academy offers programs specifically designed to help high-achieving leaders reconnect with what makes their leadership most powerful — and most sustainable. → RealLeaderAcademy.com

 

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