Recently, I sat down with my journal and looked at how I was actually spending my time.
I noticed something interesting. Some work energized me just thinking about it. Other work felt heavy, even when it made perfect sense. I saw how some actions pulled me forward, and others I had to push myself to do.
Most leaders operate from push without realizing it. Push feels like obligation, effort, force. It’s driven by should, have to, need to. Pull feels like curiosity and expansion. It’s guided by want to, drawn to, called toward.
That distinction sounds soft, but it isn’t. We’ve been taught to treat energy as fuel. Protect your reserves. Build in recovery time. But energy is also telling you something. Information about the fit between you and your work. The drain can be managed, or it can be read. And most leaders have never slowed down to read theirs.
We inherit our definitions of success without realizing it. The revenue milestones. The recognition. External markers showing you’ve made it. None of them are wrong to want. The exhaustion comes when they’re driving decisions no one consciously made.
I see it often in the leaders I work with. Successful yet exhausted, recognized yet unfulfilled. Not because of the success, but because the version of success they’re serving was defined by someone else. The energy drain is the evidence.
So I explored this myself by making two lists.
In the first, I listed everything that felt like pull: the work that energized me just thinking about it. And in the second, everything that felt like push: the things I felt I should be doing, but drained me even before I began.
The pull list was short and specific. Working with leaders at genuine inflection points. Deep partnerships over long horizons. Building for alignment, not just scale.
The push list was longer. And every item had a common thread: opportunities I’d said yes to because they looked good on paper. Goals I was pursuing because they seemed like the natural next step.
The pull list described a version of success I’d never articulated to others but had always recognized within. The push list described the version I’d absorbed from others. My journal had been telling me this the whole time. I had simply been managing the drain instead of reading it.
And the stakes go beyond fulfillment. Every leader has a natural way of working: conditions where energy builds through the work instead of being spent by it. But most of us drift away from ours without ever deciding to. The calendar fills with what our role attracts rather than what we’re designed for. The week hardens around obligations that deplete.
And it doesn’t stay private. Everyone in an organization calibrates to its leader. Your energy becomes the climate the whole organization operates in, whether you design it or not. Which means a team’s energy carries information too. The meeting that drains everyone in the room. The brilliant hire who somehow never thrives. Most organizations treat these as morale problems. They’re usually fit problems, and they can be read the same way.
So, give it a try. List where your time and energy actually go. Sort your activities and obligations honestly into pull and push. For each item on the push list, ask what would need to change for it to feel different. Sometimes it’s the approach, not the activity itself. For each pull item, ask what they have in common. That common thread is a description of how you work at your natural best.
Then start redesigning around what you find, one week at a time.
The goal isn’t eliminating push. Some obligations are simply the work. But not all exhaustion is the same. The kind that comes from hard work in the right place recovers overnight. The kind that comes from years in the wrong place doesn’t. Rest restores fuel. It doesn’t repair fit. And no amount of discipline resolves it.
Discipline was never the missing piece. The design was.