Leader Exhaustion

You can wake up tired for a lot of reasons, but there’s a kind of leadership exhaustion that doesn’t disappear with sleep. It sits in your chest, shows up in your decisions, and quietly reshapes what you think “success” is supposed to feel like. I’m talking about the moment most leaders ignore until they can’t anymore, when pushing through stops being admirable and starts being a warning sign. 

We dig into a hard truth for driven founders and executives: if your business model required 16-hour days in year one, it should not still require that in year ten. When it does, you may not have built a business at all, you built a job that owns you. We also wrestle with the idea that working harder is not always the answer, and sometimes working harder is the actual problem. That reframing matters for sustainable leadership, burnout prevention, and building a company that can grow without consuming the person leading it. 

To make it practical, I leave you with three questions you can sit with today: are you tired because you’re building something sustainable or because your business is designed to drain you? If you had to cut your work hours in half, what would you eliminate first, and why haven’t you already? And is hard work still serving your vision, or has it become the only model you know? If this hits home, subscribe, share it with a leader who needs it, and leave a review with the one change you’re ready to make.

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Transcript

Introduction And The Leadership Moment

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You're listening to the Growth Instigators Hotline. I'm Aaron Havens and this is message 520. Let's talk about life and let's talk about leadership. Today we're talking about the moment most leaders ignore until they can't anymore. You wake up tired, not the kind of tired that a good night's sleep fixes. The kind that sits in your chest, wears you out, the kind that makes you wonder if this is just what leadership feels like now. And because you're tough, and because you're committed, because your hard work is part of your identity, you push through. But here's the question no one's asking you. What if your exhaustion isn't a challenge to overcome? What if it's a signal you're supposed to listen to? That's right. Because the business model that required you to grind 16 hours a day in one year still shouldn't require that in year 10. If it does, you didn't build a business, you built a job that owns you. And the hardest thing for a driven leader to accept is this working harder is not always the answer. Sometimes working harder is the actual problem. Tim Ferris says it this way: Being busy is a form of laziness, lazy thinking, and indiscriminate action. That is so true. Your exhaustion is trying to tell you something. The question is whether you're listening. So here's three questions to sit with in our life and our leadership today. Are you tired because you're building something sustainable or because your business is designed to drain you? Question number two. If you had to cut your work hours in half, what would you eliminate first? And why haven't you eliminated it already? The third question is this Is hard work still serving your vision, or has it just become the only model you know? Huh. My friends, until next time, may each of us live good lives and lead good companies.