#7 Why Your Best Performance Practices Are Quietly Burning You Out
As this year ends, it's worth examining which practices served you well—and which quietly drained you.
Many of the practices that made you successful in 2025 may be undermining your leadership in ways you can't yet see.
You've done everything right.
You set ambitious goals.
You took on more responsibility when others hesitated.
You stayed available when the situation demanded it.
You made progress despite constant interruptions.
You held yourself to exacting standards.
You pushed yourself harder than anyone expected you to.
For a while, it worked.
Targets were met. Output was strong. You were seen as capable, disciplined, reliable.
And yet, something feels off.
You’re performing—but exhausted.
Results are solid—but your energy is not.
From the outside, things look successful—promotions, recognition, momentum.
Internally, you feel increasingly hollow, reactive, and worn down.
This is the sustainability paradox—and it’s one of the most hazardous traps high-performing leaders fall into.
Here's what I've observed after working with hundreds of leaders:
The very practices that fuel short-term performance often erode long-term capacity and well-being.
Over time, they begin to undermine judgment, creativity, and resilience—the very capabilities performance depends on.
The issue is not effort, ambition, or discipline.
The issue is design.
Many leaders are treating leadership like a sprint when it’s actually a marathon—often run at a sprinter’s pace.
The False Equation We've Been Sold
Somewhere along the way, we absorbed a cultural narrative:
Excellence requires sacrificing well-being.
Burnout is the price of ambition.
If you have time for sleep, recovery, or relationships, you're not serious enough.
This equation gets reinforced everywhere—in business books that glorify hustle, cultures that reward visible exhaustion, and leadership models that quietly equate overextension with importance.
I bought this narrative completely.
I treated rest as a luxury I'd earn later—after the next milestone, the next role, the next win. Or, better yet, when I retired.
I measured my worth by how many fires I could put out, how many critical initiatives I could juggle, how little sleep I could function on —and how constantly available I could be.
Then I hit a wall.
And what surprised me most wasn’t the exhaustion. It was the realization that I wasn't actually performing at my best.
I was performing at my desperate.
There's a difference.
What Burnout Quietly Takes from Leaders
When leaders operate in chronic depletion, the losses are subtle but consequential.
Decision-making narrows.
Creativity flattens.
Emotional intelligence—one of the most critical leadership capacities—gets hijacked by stress and threat response.
Leaders become reactive rather than strategic. Busy rather than discerning. Efficient rather than wise.
But there's something else that happens, something I rarely see named directly—the burden of managing the inner experience of burnout.
When you're chronically stressed, your nervous system stays in threat mode. Everything feels urgent. Everything feels like it could go wrong. Beneath the surface of "functioning well," there's a constant low-level vigilance.
Leaders in this state expend enormous mental energy managing themselves:
Managing the voice that says, "you're falling behind" (even when you're not)
Fighting the urge to respond defensively to feedback
Resisting the impulse to catastrophize manageable problems
Suppressing irritability toward people you care about
Carrying shame about not being able to keep up
Battling the anxiety that wakes you up at 3 AM
This inner toil is exhausting. And it's largely invisible, even to you.
You're burning energy on an internal firefight while simultaneously trying to perform at your best. You're not just tired from work. You're tired from constantly managing your own mind under sustained pressure.
And here's what makes it insidious: the harder you push, the worse this becomes.
Depletion increases reactivity.
Reactivity demands more effort to contain.
More effort deepens depletion.
A vicious cycle forms.
The energy you'd normally have for creativity, strategic thinking, relationship-building, and enjoyment gets redirected into internal containment. You're no longer operating at your best. You’re operating at your desperate—while spending enormous energy just holding yourself together.
Why Sustainable Practices Are Not Luxuries
This is why sustainable practices are not indulgences or self-care theater.
They're neurological necessities.
When extractive practices are redesigned, your nervous system receives a different signal: safety. That threat response stands down. Cognitive and emotional bandwidth returns.
You regain access to discernment, perspective, and presence.
You stop fighting your own mind and reconnect with your full leadership capacity.
Three Performance Practices That Quietly Undermine Sustainability
Let’s be specific. Here are three common practices that often become sustainability killers—not because they’re wrong, but because they’re left unexamined:
Practice #1: Relentless goal-setting without recovery cycles
Goals drive focus and motivation—until they don't. When goals are constant, with no seasonal variation or built-in recovery, your nervous system stays perpetually activated. You're always "on." There's always something to chase. Your brain never gets the signal that you've arrived, that you can rest, that you're safe. Over time, this produces chronic stress, not high performance.
Practice #2: Always-on availability
Responding at night. Taking calls during dinner. Checking email before bed. The logic is seductive: responsiveness equals reliability. But over time, your recovery time gets colonized by work. Boundaries disappear. Creativity and synthesis suffer because your mind never fully disengages.
Practice #3: Treating rest as a last resort
Many high achievers learn to interpret rest as weakness. If you're resting, you're not working. If you're not working, you're falling behind. So, rest becomes something you do only when you're sick or broken—by which point it's too late. Stress debt accumulates faster than a weekend can repay.
If you took time off this year, answer this:
How many days into your week-long vacation before you began to relax and disconnect from work? Four days? Six days? Do I hear eight days?
And how quickly did the stress return when you came back? A day? Half a day? The Sunday before your vacation ended?
The Audit: Where Are You Trading Sustainability for Speed?
Before the year ends, look back at your leadership practices over the past few months. Ask yourself:
Which practices feel sustainable—and which feel extractive?
Which ones energize you—and which deplete you?
Which ones expand judgment—and which narrow it?
Which ones serve long-term impact versus just short-term demands?
Which ones would you still choose if no one were watching?
The gap between the two lists is where the sustainability paradox lives.
Maybe it's a meeting cadence that's become an energy drain.
Maybe it's a communication pattern that keeps you reactive instead of strategic.
Maybe it's a set of activities you’re pursuing or metrics you're tracking that consume your attention without moving the needle.
Maybe it's a decision-making process that's become so consensus-driven that it's paralyzed real progress.
The point isn't to eliminate rigor or ambition.
It’s to distinguish between practices that genuinely support your desired impact and those that merely create the appearance of productivity while quietly draining you.
The Real Choice
When I redesigned my own leadership system, I discovered something unexpected: the supposed tradeoff between performance and well-being isn’t real. The actual choice is between short-term results and long-term impact.
When genuine recovery, reasonable boundaries, and sustainable practices are built into your leadership, performance doesn’t decline. It stabilizes—and often improves.
You're no longer spending enormous energy just managing your internal state.
Your thinking becomes clearer.
Your decisions become wiser.
Your energy becomes more consistent.
Your resilience increases under pressure.
You stop operating at your desperate and start operating at your best.
This isn't about caring less. It's about redesigning your leadership system to endure—by eliminating hidden drain, protecting judgment, and building recovery into the system rather than treating it as an afterthought.
The leaders I work with who make this shift report the same result: they achieve more while feeling better. Not instead of. While. Both.
That's not idealistic. That's sustainable excellence.
Before the New Year
Pick one practice from your audit—something that feels extractive. Ask yourself: How could I redesign this to serve both performance and well-being? What would need to change? What would I gain?
Start there. One small shift. That's how real systems change.
Which raises the next, more uncomfortable question:
If many of us leaders know our current systems are unsustainable—why do we keep them anyway?
That question is not about discipline or awareness.
It’s about the stories we tell ourselves when change feels costly.
And that’s where the next reflection begins.