12MinuteLeadership

Episode 23: Remembering WHY We Lead: A Pep Talk for Leader Burnout | 12MinuteLeadership

• Elise Boggs Morales • Season 1 • Episode 23

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When deadlines pile up and your calendar leaves no breathing room, purpose is usually the first thing to slip. Episode 23 of 12MinuteLeadership is a short, practical reset to bring you—and your team—back to center.

We walk through four anchors that restore focus and energy:

  • Lead with a mission: Separate job from calling and use your “why” as a decision filter and retention magnet.
  • Create meaningful change: Let frustration become “divine discontent”—fuel for improving what’s stale or broken.
  • Achieve more together: Align roles, delegate outcomes, and build trust so momentum multiplies.
  • Grow people into their potential: Reframe leadership as a privilege that shapes careers and confidence.

You’ll hear a personal story from my nonprofit work in India that brings these lessons to life—and a few prompts to help you reconnect with your own purpose.

If leadership has started to feel heavy, this 12-minute episode will help you trade pressure for perspective and exhaustion for impact.


If this message lands with you, share it with another leader who needs a reminder of why they started. And take one small action today that honors the moment you first wanted to lead.

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Speaker:

Welcome to the 12-Minute Leadership Podcast, where in 12 minutes or less, I'll share small things that you can put into immediate practice that will make a big difference in your leadership effectiveness. I'm your host, Elise Boggs Morales, leadership professor, consultant, and coach. For the last 17 years, I have helped thousands of leaders level up their influence and achieve remarkable results. If you want to trade compliance for true commitment and create your dream team, you are in the right place. Get ready for a quick hit of practical wisdom to increase your team's engagement, inspire top performance, and retain your best talent. Ready to level up your influence and get better results? 12 minutes starts now. Hi everyone, Elise here. Welcome to episode 23. Today's episode is one I think every leader needs to hear from time to time, a reminder of why we lead. With all the responsibilities, decisions, and weight that comes with leadership, it's easy to forget the privilege and purpose behind it. The meetings, the deadlines, the constant demands, they can slowly crowd out the deeper why that brought us here in the first place. So today, I want to bring us back to center, to reconnect us with four powerful reasons we choose to lead. Reason number one, you have a mission and a cause you want to see realized. There's a difference between a job and a calling. Leaders are driven by something bigger than themselves, a mission, a cause, a why. As Simon Sinek famously said, people don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it. And what you do simply proves what you believe. Great leaders know what they believe. For Martin Luther King Jr., it was a quality. For Malala, it was education. For Nelson Mandela, it was justice. For Steve Jobs, it was innovation and technology. Each had a mission worth leading for, and it's that clarity of purpose that fueled them. As a leader, your mission doesn't have to be world-changing to be meaningful. Maybe your mission is to lead an organization that is number one in its industry, to be the industry leader for innovation in your field, or to build beautiful landmark buildings in your city. In my 20s, I lived abroad in India for six months. The nonprofit I served was helping the poorest of the poor. I remember two projects I was working on that were drastically different in their effectiveness. One project was serving meals to street kids, offering education programs, and serving the community with a lot of joy. They were well funded and the staff seemed to genuinely enjoy what they were doing. In contrast, another project I worked on struggled with funding. The staff came in late and left early. Serving the community members felt more like a checkbox to be marked than a mission to be fulfilled. Needless to say, they often closed early when they ran out of food and had to turn people away. What was the difference? The leadership. One was on mission and the other was just collecting a paycheck. People will almost always join your organization and stick around when their work and your leadership is connected to a clear and compelling mission, something bigger than themselves. And when you're clear on your mission, your leadership gains energy. Decisions become easier because they're filtered through purpose, not pressure. If you feel that your love of leadership has grown cold, consider revisiting your mission. Reason number two, you want to create change. Peter Drecker once said, managers maintain the status quo, leaders challenge it. That quote has always stuck with me because it describes my why perfectly. After being under unskilled leadership in several different jobs out of college, I wanted to do something about it. I saw the impact poor leadership had on morale, productivity, and retention. I left several jobs I love because of poor leadership. And talking with others, my experience wasn't uncommon. I wanted to create change around how leaders lead, starting with myself and then helping other leaders as I do now. When I first stepped into leadership, one of the driving reasons was that I wanted the ability to make decisions that aligned with my values, especially around creating a trusting, healthy workplace culture. I wanted to influence how people were treated, how they communicated, how they collaborated. I'd seen cultures built on fear or politics, and I knew I wanted to lead differently. So much of leadership is about challenging what's comfortable, whether it's systems, assumptions, or even our own habits. Leaders don't just accept what is, they imagine what could be. Change isn't easy. It brings friction, resistance, and uncertainty. But leaders lean into that discomfort because they see possibility on the other side. So if you've been frustrated lately, maybe that's not a sign that you're in the wrong place. Maybe it's confirmation that your leadership instincts are alive and well. Tune into that. It may just be divine discontent nudging you to be part of the change. Reason number three, you want to achieve great things, and you know you can't do it alone. There's an African proverb that says, if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. I love this because it captures the tension leaders live in every day. You can move quickly by yourself, but you'll go farther with others. People can be your greatest asset or your greatest challenge. And the difference often comes down to the quality of your leadership. When you know how to mobilize people, how to inspire them, develop them, and align them, you create momentum that no one person could generate alone. That's the magical part of leadership. You achieve extraordinary things and seemingly impossible things together that you can never achieve on your own. There is no greater feeling than when you get the right people aligned and on mission and compelled by the same drive to change things. That's what leadership does. It multiplies impact through people. If you feel stuck in your leadership, consider whether you might be trying to do things on your own instead of fully engaging your team. If you need help rebuilding those skills, check out my book, Lead Anyone, on Amazon. I break down the relationship-building skills needed to create engagement, performance, and retention within your team. And reason number four, you want to grow and develop others into their potential. Simon Siddick says it again and says it best. Leadership is not about being in charge, it's about taking care of those in your charge. Leadership gives us influence, and with influence comes responsibility. We make decisions that shape careers, confidence, and culture. We have the power to hire and fire, to open doors or to close them, to build people up or break them down. That's a heavy truth, but it's also an incredible opportunity. What if we focus that power on developing every member of our team into their greatest potential? When we call people up rather than calling them out, we don't just correct, we cultivate. We help people see what they're capable of becoming. And when people feel developed, not managed, challenged, but supported, they don't just perform better, they thrive. Your greatest leadership legacy won't be what you achieve. It will be who you help others become. One of my favorite emails to receive is the news that a leader I have coached has achieved their dream, whether it's a promotion, securing a big client, or finally being able to influence and lead that difficult person on their team. Leadership is an opportunity to help accelerate others forward. So if you're feeling frustrated by performance or expectations are not being met, consider whether there's an imbalance of focus on achievement and neglect of talent development. Remember how you got where you are, the mentors and leaders you had along the way, and continue to pay that forward. In closing, here's an additional thought to reflect on the privilege of leadership. Sometimes in the midst of the stress, it helps to pause and remember leadership is a privilege. You get to shape the environment people spend most of their waking hours in. You get to help others grow, to create opportunity, to model integrity, to make things better than you found them. That's sacred work. So let's recap what we've remembered today about why we lead. One, you have a mission, a cause you want to see realized. Two, you want to create change and challenge the status quo. Three, you want to achieve great things together, not alone. Four, you want to develop and call others up into their potential. If leadership has started to feel heavy lately, come back to your why. Because when you remember your purpose, the pressure turns into perspective. Here's your reflection question for this week. What's one moment that first made you want to lead? And how can you reconnect with that passion today? So, I hope you enjoyed today's episode. If this episode resonated, share it with another leader who may need a reminder of their why. I'll see you next time. Like what you heard on today's episode and want to go deeper? Subscribe to this podcast so you never miss an episode. You can also pick up my book, Lead Anyone, on Amazon. Then go to my website to check out ways that we can support your leadership goals. From executive retreats to customized training and coaching, my team of experts will help you level up your leadership and accelerate your results. Go to www.eliseboggs.com for more info.