The Leadership Cost of Running on Empty
What Six Months of Grinding Without Looking Up Actually Costs
Principle: Energy Is a Leadership Resource, Not a Personal Indulgence
I’ve noticed a pattern in myself over the last few years. Christmas comes and goes, and then I start a six or seven month grind without really looking up or taking a breath. By the time June or July rolls around and I finally get some vacation, I realize my tank has been empty for weeks.
Performance researchers Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz built an entire framework around this exact pattern, working first with elite athletes and later with executives. Their core finding was that high performance has less to do with managing time and more to do with managing energy, across the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual dimensions. Energy has to move in cycles of expenditure and renewal. Athletes train this way on purpose. Sprint, then recover. Push, then rebuild. Nobody expects a body to sprint for seven months straight.
Leadership somehow gets treated as the exception. We ask ourselves to run in a straight line from January to July with no built-in recovery, as if the same principle that governs a hamstring doesn’t apply to attention, patience, and presence.
The decline that follows isn’t a cliff. It’s gradual enough that you can miss it in yourself for months, right up until vacation forces you to stop and notice how far you’ve drifted.
Perspective: The Cost Shows Up in Other People First
Here’s the part that makes this hard to catch in real time. When your energy runs out, it doesn’t usually show up first in your own numbers or your own output. It shows up in how you treat the people around you. You get short with someone who didn’t deserve it. You have less capacity for a hard conversation you’d normally handle well. You stop having energy for the social situations that used to come easily.
Coaching culture tends to reward the opposite instinct. Grinding through without a break gets read as dedication. Taking recovery seriously can feel like admitting you’re not tough enough for the job. That framing has it backwards. An empty tank doesn’t make you more committed. It makes you a worse version of the leader your people actually need.
If you’re running your team on the same empty tank you’ve been running yourself on, ask honestly whose performance you’re protecting by refusing to rest.
Story: What Six Months of Grinding Actually Cost Me
The pattern is consistent enough now that I can see it coming before it happens. Christmas gives me a real break. Then the calendar fills in and I stop tracking it. Six months pass. Seven. I keep telling myself I’ll build in a breather once things settle, and things never settle.
By the time I get to a real vacation in June or July, I can feel how depleted I actually am. And if I’m honest with myself, I haven’t just been tired. I’ve been a worse leader because of it. Less patient with people who needed more patience than I had to give. Less energy for the social situations, the check-ins, the moments that build the relationships I actually care about.
What makes this worth naming is that all of this happens even with a strong family, a supportive community, and routines that are relatively healthy. I’m not running on empty because the supports aren’t there. I’m running on empty because I let the grind override the supports I already have. I genuinely don’t want to think about what this pattern would do to someone without those things in place.
The skill I’m still building isn’t willpower. It’s catching the pattern in month three instead of month six, and being honest enough with myself to act on it before vacation has to do the work a decision earlier in the year should have done.
Question:
Think about your own year. Is there a point, maybe not Christmas to summer like mine, but some stretch, where you consistently run yourself down without noticing until you’re already empty? What has that cost the people closest to you, and would they say the same thing about you that you’d say about yourself?
Closing Thought:
Energy management is not a personal indulgence. It’s a leadership responsibility. The cost of ignoring it doesn’t show up in your own scorecard first. It shows up in the people who depend on you. Catch the pattern before vacation has to catch it for you.
Until next week,
Caleb Cousens
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Ouch! Thanks for this, Caleb. Very helpful!