There is a specific morning I keep coming back to.

The alarm went off at 5 AM. My kids were still asleep. The house was quiet, and for a second, that quiet felt like a gift. Then the list hit me before my feet touched the floor. Three projects, each one demanding full attention. A partnership I was trying to make work. Meetings stacked on top of meetings. My son would wake up in an hour, and I already knew I would be somewhere else in my head when he did.

From the outside, it looked like I was handling it. Delivering. Showing up. Saying yes to everything. I was the person in the room who seemed to have it together.

I was close to falling apart.

Not in a dramatic way. Not the kind of breakdown that makes people stop and say something. The slow kind. The kind where you are still performing, still producing, still answering emails at 10 PM, but something behind your eyes has gone dark. Your jaw is clenched and you have not noticed. Your shoulders sit somewhere near your ears. You snap at your partner over nothing and feel guilty about it for the rest of the night. You read a bedtime story to your kid but you are not really there.

I was juggling everything and going nowhere. And the worst part was that I called it discipline.

If you have been there, you are not alone.

The Numbers Nobody Wants to Talk About

A 2025 study found that 66% of American workers report burnout, the highest number on record. Among 18 to 34 year olds, it is between 81 and 83 percent.

Sit with that. More than four out of five young professionals are running on fumes.

And it is not just the front lines. Gallup’s data from 2025 tells us that 45% of middle managers report burnout, higher than any other employee group. The average number of direct reports per manager has risen to 12.1, up 50% since 2013. More people to take care of, fewer resources to do it with.

For founders, the picture is darker. Founder Reports published in 2026 that 87.7% of entrepreneurs struggle with at least one mental health issue. 72% report mental health effects. 55% have insomnia. 61% have thought about walking away from their own companies.

And here is the part that should keep us up at night, if insomnia has not already done that: Fast Company published a piece on March 9, 2026, calling it the “silent burnout crisis.” The people burning out the fastest are the ones who look the most competent. They keep delivering. They keep volunteering for more. They absorb pressure so others do not have to. They look like your strongest people.

They are your most depleted.

The earliest signal is not a drop in output. It is withdrawal from the things that do not show up on a performance review. They stop mentoring the junior hire. They eat lunch alone. They stop volunteering for the company event. They are still hitting targets, but they have pulled the plug on everything that made them connected.

When was the last time you checked for that in your own behavior?

This Is Not a Time Problem

The conversation around burnout keeps circling back to time. Manage your calendar better. Say no more often. Block your mornings. Batch your meetings.

I tried all of that. It helped, a little, for a while. Then I found myself right back in the same place, just with a more organized schedule attached to the same exhausted body.

Because the problem was never time. The problem was energy.

I think of it as four batteries. Every leader, every person, is running on four of them at once.

Physical. Your body. Sleep, movement, nutrition, how your nervous system is doing on any given Tuesday. This is the one I neglect first. Every time. It is the first battery I sacrifice when things get busy, and it is the one that drains all the others when it dies. If your body is shot, your thinking goes. Your patience goes. Your sense of meaning gets buried under fatigue.

Mental. Your capacity to think clearly, make decisions, stay focused. When this battery is low, everything feels harder than it is. A ten minute task feels like climbing a mountain. You stare at a document and nothing registers.

Emotional. Your ability to stay present with other people and with yourself. To feel what is happening in a room. To respond instead of react. When this one drains, you become either brittle or numb. Neither is useful when your team needs you.

Purpose. Your connection to why you are doing any of this. The thing that used to get you out of bed before the alarm. When this battery is dead, you can still work, but the work feels hollow. You are going through the motions of a life that used to feel like yours.

Here is what I have learned, painfully, through my own collapse and through coaching founders and executives who were collapsing in the same way: most leaders are running on one battery while the other three are dead. Usually purpose. Sometimes mental. They are powering through on sheer willpower and a sense of obligation, and they are calling it strength.

It is not strength. It is a slow leak.

Your Energy Is Not Private

Here is where it gets uncomfortable.

I used to believe my energy state was my problem. My internal business. I could be exhausted, I could be running on fumes, but as long as I delivered results, nobody needed to know.

That is a lie.

A depleted leader does not just feel depleted. A depleted leader creates depletion. It radiates. Your team feels it before you say a word. The tension in your voice during a standup. The impatience when someone asks a question you have already answered. The way you respond to a Slack message with one word when you used to write three sentences. The meeting where you are physically present and emotionally checked out.

Your team reads all of that. They adjust. They stop bringing you problems because they can see you are already overloaded. They start absorbing your stress. They mirror your urgency. And slowly, without anyone naming it, the culture shifts from alive to surviving.

A leader producing results while running on empty is still building a culture of depletion. The outputs might look good on a dashboard. But the people creating those outputs are drowning.

When did you first realize that your own energy was not just a personal matter but a leadership responsibility? For me, it was when my business partner said, quietly, during a hard stretch: “I can feel that you are not here.” Not angry. Not blaming. Just honest. And it hit me harder than any feedback I have ever received, because he was right. I was not there. I was performing presence while being somewhere else entirely.

The Romance of the Grinder

I think there is something we need to name about our culture. We have a romantic relationship with the grinder. The person who pushes through. The one who stays late, wakes early, takes the impossible timeline and makes it work anyway. We tell those stories with admiration. We build movies around them. We promote those people.

And I get it. There is something genuinely admirable about perseverance. About not giving up when things get hard.

But we have confused perseverance with self-destruction. We celebrate the founder who sleeps four hours a night without asking what their marriage looks like. We promote the manager who absorbs everyone’s problems without asking what they have lost in the process.

DDI’s 2025 Global Leadership Forecast found that 40% of stressed leaders have considered leaving leadership roles entirely. 71% feel overwhelmed by the pace of change. And only 29% of employees trust their immediate managers.

Those numbers are connected. A leader who is running on empty cannot hold the trust of a team, because trust requires presence. Real presence. The kind where you are actually in the room, not just occupying a chair.

Right now, most leaders are over-focusing on narrow outputs. Hit the revenue target. Ship the product. Close the deal. And they are spending enormous energy trying to make everything else in their life fit around that one goal, without stopping to ask whether their goals across different parts of their life are even pointing in the same direction. Your goals as a leader, as a parent, as a partner, as a member of your community. When those are pulling in different directions, the energy cost is massive, and most people do not even see it. They just feel tired all the time and assume that is normal.

It is not normal. It is misalignment, and it eats you from the inside.

Bigger Than You

This piece is about your batteries. But I want to leave you with something wider.

The energy crisis is not just happening inside your body. It is happening inside your organization. When 45% of your middle managers are burned out, that is not a wellness problem. That is a leadership failure running through the entire system. And when 74% of employees say their anxiety from the political and social environment is causing burnout at work, that is not inside your organization anymore. It is something moving through communities, through institutions, through the way we relate to each other as a society.

Energy does not stop at the border of your skin. It does not stop at the walls of your company. It ripples. From you to your team, from your team to your organization, from your organization to the world it touches.

We will go deeper into each of those layers in future pieces. For now, I want you to stay with yourself.

Back to That Morning

Remember the 5 AM alarm? The quiet house? The list that hit before my feet touched the floor?

I still wake up early. I still have a lot on my plate. I am still a dad with small kids and a full life.

But something is different. I stopped treating my body like it was optional. I stopped pretending that physical energy was the first acceptable sacrifice. I started asking a harder question: which of my four batteries is dead right now, and what is the smallest thing I can do about it today? Not as a performance hack. Not as another item on the to-do list. As basic self-care that I owe to the people who depend on me.

Some mornings, the answer is a twenty minute walk before anyone wakes up. Some mornings, it is admitting to my partner that I am not okay. Some mornings, it is looking at my calendar and canceling something that should not be there.

The shift is small. The difference is massive.

So here is what I want to leave you with. Not a framework to memorize, not a system to implement. A question.

Which of your four batteries is dead right now? Physical, Mental, Emotional, Purpose. Pick the one that flickers the most. And ask yourself: what is one thing I could do about it this week? Not next month. This week.

Because the people around you can feel it. Your team can feel it. Your family can feel it. And you deserve better than grinding yourself into dust and calling it leadership.

You deserve to lead from a place where you actually have something to give.

Two weeks ago I described a founder staring at a green dashboard while their stomach told a different story. Last week I asked why we’ve been trained to ignore that stomach. This week I want to give you something to do about it.

Not a framework. Not a model you pin to your wall and forget. Three practices you can use this week, in real situations, with real people, starting with yourself.

Before the meeting: 90 seconds with your own body

Before your next leadership meeting, close the door. You don’t need a meditation app. You don’t need ten minutes. You need 90 seconds and an honest question: what am I carrying into this room?

Scan from your head down. Is your jaw tight? Are your shoulders pinched up near your ears? Is there a knot sitting in your chest from the email you read twenty minutes ago? Is your breathing shallow?

You’re not trying to fix anything. You’re taking inventory. Because whatever you carry into that room, your team will feel it. If you walk in wound up and rushing, the room will tighten to match you. If you walk in with your chest open and your breathing settled, the room has space to be honest.

This isn’t about being calm for the sake of being calm. It’s about knowing your own starting point so you can actually read what’s happening around you instead of projecting what’s happening inside you.

During the meeting: track what no metric captures

Last week I asked you to write down a sensation when you noticed one. This week, take it further. During one meeting this week, split your attention. One part on the content. The other on the room.

Notice who speaks and who doesn’t. Notice the moment someone starts to say something and then pulls back. Notice the energy shift when a certain topic comes up. Does the room get quieter? Do people break eye contact? Does someone’s posture change?

You don’t need to act on any of it in the moment. Just notice. Treat yourself as an instrument picking up frequencies that the agenda doesn’t account for.

After the meeting, take two minutes and write down three things you observed that weren’t in the slides or the spreadsheet. Things like: “The team went quiet when I brought up the Q3 targets.” Or: “Sara looked like she wanted to disagree but didn’t.” Or: “I felt the energy drop after we talked about the reorg.”

Do this for two weeks. You’ll start seeing patterns that your tools never surface. That’s your experiential intelligence coming back online.

After the decision: check both channels

The next time you make a significant call, a hire, a strategic bet, a difficult conversation you’ve been postponing, run it through both filters before you commit.

Filter one, the logical: What does the data say? What are the numbers? What’s the evidence for and against?

Filter two, the experiential: How does this decision sit in your body? When you imagine saying yes, what happens in your chest? When you picture the person you’re about to hire sitting in your team meeting, what do you feel? When you think about the path you’re choosing, is there a pull toward it or a heaviness you’re pushing through?

If both channels point the same direction, move. If they conflict, slow down. Not to overthink it. To get curious about the gap. That gap between what the data recommends and what your body signals is where the most important information lives. It’s where the decision gets sharpened from good enough to right.

You don’t need to always follow the felt sense over the numbers. And you definitely shouldn’t throw out the numbers in favor of a vibe. The whole point of this series has been that we need both arms strong. What I’m asking you to do is stop ignoring the one you’ve been neglecting.

Coming back to the dashboard

Remember that founder from two weeks ago? Green metrics. Churning stomach. Team that agreed too fast and pushed back too little.

Imagine that same founder after a month of these three practices. They walk into the meeting knowing what they’re carrying. They read the silence when it shows up instead of rushing past it. They notice the gap between what the data says and what the room feels like, and they name it out loud: “The numbers look good, but something in this room tells me we’re not talking about the real problem. What are we avoiding?”

One sentence. That’s all it takes to change the temperature of an entire team.

That founder’s dashboard still shows green. But now they have a second dashboard. One built from attention, from presence, from the accumulated wisdom of actually being in the room instead of just managing it.

That second dashboard has always been available to you. You just forgot to check it.

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This is Part 3 of 3 in the “Smarter and Dumber” series. If you missed the earlier posts.

If you’ve tried any of these practices and noticed something shift, I want to hear about it. Reply to this email. That’s what this space is for.

Last week I wrote about the gap forming inside organizations. Logical intelligence going up. Experiential intelligence going down. Two arms, one getting all the training.

If you read that and thought “yes, I feel this,” good. That feeling is the exact thing we’re talking about today.

Because here’s the part that bothers me: you probably already knew something was off. You’ve sensed it for months. The flat energy in meetings. The decisions that looked right on paper but sat wrong in your body. The growing distance between what the numbers tell you and what you actually experience when you walk through your office or get on a call with your team.

You knew. And you probably dismissed it.

Not because you’re careless. Because you were trained to.

Every leadership book, every MBA program, every board meeting, every investor conversation has reinforced the same message: what matters is what you can measure. Revenue. Retention. Growth rate. NPS scores. If you can’t put a number on it, it’s not serious. It’s “soft.” It’s feelings. And feelings don’t belong in the room where decisions get made.

So you learned to override your own signals. You felt the room tense up and you pushed through the agenda anyway. You sensed something was off with a hire and you looked at the resume instead. You noticed your own exhaustion creeping in and you checked the calendar to see if you could afford to rest. The calendar said no. So you kept going.

This is what it looks like to be intelligent on one channel and deaf on the other.

And it’s expensive. Not in an abstract, philosophical way. In a way you can trace back to real decisions.

Think about the last hire that didn’t work out. Not the one where the skills were wrong. The one where the skills were fine but something about the person didn’t fit. You probably felt it in the interview. A slight discomfort. A moment where their answer was technically correct but landed hollow. Your experiential intelligence flagged it. Your logical intelligence overruled it: “They check every box. The data supports them.” Three months later you’re managing a mess that costs you time, money, trust, and the energy of the team around them.

Or think about the product decision you made because the market research pointed one way, even though your lived experience with your customers was pointing another. You went with the research. It made sense. It was defensible. And it was wrong in a way that research couldn’t have predicted, because research measures what people say, not the gap between what they say and how they actually behave. Your senses would have caught that gap. Your spreadsheet couldn’t.

These aren’t edge cases. This is Tuesday for most founders.

The pattern is always the same: a felt signal arrives before the data confirms it. The signal gets dismissed because it doesn’t come with evidence. Weeks or months later, the data catches up and proves what the body already knew. By then, the cost is already paid.

I’m not saying ignore the numbers. That would be just as blind, just in the other direction. The whole point is that these two kinds of intelligence need each other. Logical intelligence tells you what is happening. Experiential intelligence tells you what it means. One gives you the map. The other tells you the map is outdated before you’ve walked into a dead end.

The problem is that we’ve built entire organizations around only one of them.

We have dashboards for revenue. We have surveys for engagement. We have AI tools that analyze sentiment in Slack messages. And we have almost nothing that asks a leader: “What did you feel in that room today? What did your body tell you that your metrics didn’t?”

That question sounds strange. Maybe even uncomfortable. Good. That discomfort is a sign of how far we’ve drifted from treating our own lived experience as a source of information.

The leaders I’ve seen make the best decisions aren’t the ones with the most data. They’re the ones who can hold both channels open at the same time. They read the report and they read the room. They look at the forecast and they check in with their own chest. They don’t choose one over the other. They let the tension between them sharpen the answer.

That tension is where the real intelligence lives. Not in the data. Not in the feeling. In the friction between them.

If you’ve spent the last year building your organization’s logical side and wondering why things still feel off, you now have a name for what’s missing. The question is whether you’re willing to take it seriously or keep filing it under “soft skills” while it quietly runs up a tab.

Next week, I’ll give you something to do about it. Not theory. Practices you can use in your next meeting, your next decision, your next conversation where the numbers say one thing and your body says another.

For now, try this: the next time you’re in a meeting and you notice something, a shift in tone, a silence that lasts a beat too long, a tightness in your own shoulders, don’t dismiss it. Write it down. Just the sensation. No analysis. See what it tells you a week from now.

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This is Part 2 of a three-part series. Next week: how to feel what your dashboard can’t show you, with practices you can start using tomorrow.

I write about the side of leadership that doesn’t fit on a dashboard. If this changed how you’re thinking about a recent decision, I’d like to hear about it.

You’re staring at the dashboard. Everything is green. Revenue is tracking. The AI-generated team performance summary says morale is “positive.” Your project management tool shows tasks are on schedule. The numbers say you’re winning.

So why does your stomach feel like it’s eating itself?

You noticed it three weeks ago. That meeting where everyone agreed too quickly. Your CTO nodded before you even finished the sentence. Your head of product smiled and said “makes sense” to a proposal that, six months ago, she would have torn apart with questions. Nobody pushed back. Nobody frowned. Nobody said “wait, I’m not sure about this.”

Your shoulders tightened. You felt it in your jaw. Something shifted in the room, and not one metric picked it up.

Here’s what happened: you got more data and less signal.

Over the past year, you’ve added tools. AI assistants that summarize meetings, predict churn, score leads, draft reports. Your company can process more information in a day than you used to handle in a quarter. On paper, your organization has never been this capable.

And your people have never been this quiet.

Not quiet in the way that means focused. Quiet in the way that means they’ve stopped trusting what they feel. They look at the AI output and think, “well, the data says this, so I guess that’s what we’re doing.” They stopped arguing. They stopped sensing. They stopped walking into your office to say “something about this deal feels wrong and I can’t explain why.”

That feeling, that itch in the chest, that knot before a bad hire, that tingling sense that a client is about to leave before any number proves it, that’s intelligence. It’s just not the kind we measure.

I call it experiential intelligence, and it’s far more than a gut feeling.

It’s every sense you have working together at once. Sight, sound, touch, the tone of someone’s voice, the shift in posture across the table, the weight of a room when something has gone unsaid. It’s your emotions giving you data that no spreadsheet can hold. It’s your spatial awareness telling you where you stand, literally and figuratively, in a conversation, in a conflict, in a company that’s growing faster than you planned for.

It’s your ability to move through an experience and actually be in it. Not analyzing it from a distance. Living it. Tasting it. Feeling the texture of what’s happening while it’s happening. That awareness, when you learn to use it, becomes the way you self-navigate. It’s how you regulate yourself in the middle of a tense negotiation instead of after it. It’s how you organize yourself in the moment, not through a system or a framework you read about, but through the living feedback your body and your senses are giving you right now.

This is also what gives you access to the states that produce your best work. Flow. Play. Presence. Mindfulness. These aren’t things you schedule or hack your way into. They come alive when your experiential intelligence is sharp, when you’re connected to what’s in front of you instead of running a simulation of the past or rehearsing the future. It’s what ties the present moment to the linear, artificial concepts of yesterday and tomorrow and makes them useful instead of paralyzing.

Experiential intelligence is anything that comes into being from acting in the world and the way you perceive it and interpret it. Every conversation you’ve had, every room you’ve read wrong and then learned from, every time your hands went cold before a decision and you later understood why. It’s built through lived experience. You can’t download it. You can’t automate it. And you definitely can’t replace it with a dashboard.

We’ve spent the last two years stacking logical intelligence. More processing power, better analysis, faster pattern recognition from machines. That’s not the problem. The problem is that while we built up one side, we let the other one starve.

Think of it as a body that only trains its right arm. Sure, that arm is strong. Impressively strong. But the whole system is off balance, and the first time you need to catch yourself from falling, that one arm won’t save you.

Your organization has one very strong arm right now.

The founders and leaders I talk to are starting to feel this. Not all of them can name it. They just know that decisions feel faster but not better. That their teams are more informed but less wise. That the speed went up and the judgment went down.

If you’ve been there, you’re not alone.

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This isn’t an argument against AI. I use it. You should use it. It’s a genuinely useful tool when it sits in the right place. But a tool is only as good as the person holding it, and if that person has spent the last year outsourcing their own sensing to a screen, the tool becomes a crutch for a muscle that’s already weakening.

When do you think this has cost you enough?

Because here’s what it looks like when nothing changes. Your team gets better at agreeing with data and worse at disagreeing with each other. The hard conversations disappear. The creative tension that used to produce your best ideas dries up. And one day you’re sitting in front of a dashboard that’s all green, and you can’t figure out why everything feels so hollow.

That tightness in your chest right now? That’s not anxiety. That’s your experiential intelligence trying to get your attention.

It might be time to listen.

This is Part 1 of a three-part series. Next week: what experiential intelligence actually is beyond the boardroom, and why the leaders who treat it as “soft” are making their most expensive mistakes without knowing it.

I write about the side of leadership that doesn’t fit on a dashboard. If this resonated, I’d love to hear what you’re noticing in your own team.

There’s a luggage tag on my mother’s bag that has been there for years.

It’s from a hotel. Aman Puri. We stayed there once, and something about that experience buried itself so deep she refuses to remove this small piece of fabric and leather. It’s worn now, frayed at the edges. It remains.

I think about that tag often. Not because of what it says about the hotel, but because of what it tells me about how we work. How memory works. How the experiences that stay with us play by rules most businesses never bother to learn.

I can barely remember the details of that trip. The meals blur together. The daily activities have faded. But something about the whole of it stays vivid. A feeling. A quality of attention we received. The sense that someone had thought carefully about what it would mean to be us, in that place, at that time.

And then there’s the other vacation. The one that taught me the opposite lesson.

The Hotels That Made Everything Worse

My wife Amalie and I desperately needed rest. Our son was young. We were exhausted in that bone-deep way that only parents of small children know, where your eyelids burn and your patience has been scraped to nothing. We booked a family hotel, one of those places that promises to handle everything so you can finally breathe.

What we got was a concentrated lesson in how to destroy an experience.

The schedules were clearly designed by people without children. Staff promised to handle forgotten items and then didn’t, leaving me feeling like I had adopted additional incompetent children rather than escaped my responsibilities for a few days. The rooms were dirty. Room service was unreliable. We hung “do not disturb” signs and were disturbed anyway.

At one point, the manager was actively rude to me while his team continued to fail at basic tasks.

We had paid premium prices for an experience worse than a budget hotel would have provided. The promise of rest became another source of stress. The escape became a trap.

Both hotels sold similar services at similar prices. One created a memory my mother carries with her years later. The other created frustration I still feel in my chest when I think about it.

This wasn’t luck. It wasn’t an isolated incident. I was seeing something fundamental about how humans process reality. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

Two Selves Living in One Body

The Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman spent decades studying a strange split in human consciousness. He found that we are not one self but two.

There is the experiencing self. This is the you that lives in the present moment, processing the continuous flow of sensation and emotion as it happens. This self exists only in the now. It has no concern for how things will be remembered later. It simply experiences.

And there is the remembering self. This is the storyteller. The one who builds the narrative of your life after events have passed. This self doesn’t record experiences like a camera. It selects. It edits. It creates meaning from fragments.

These two selves often disagree, profoundly, about what happened.

Picture yourself listening to a beautiful symphony. For forty minutes, you’re transported. Present. Moved. The experiencing self is having one of those rare moments of genuine absorption. Then, in the final moments, someone’s phone rings. The spell breaks.

How will you remember this concert?

Kahneman’s research shows your memory will be shaped disproportionately by that phone disruption. Not the forty minutes of beauty. The ending.

He called this the peak-end rule. Our memories are not averages of our experiences. They are built primarily from the most intense moments and from how things ended. Everything else fades.

The Colonoscopy Study

Kahneman tested this in one of the most uncomfortable research settings imaginable: colonoscopies.

He tracked patients’ pain ratings throughout the procedure, moment by moment. Then he compared their real-time reports to their memories of the experience afterward.

The results were counterintuitive. Patients who endured longer procedures with lower pain at the end remembered the entire experience as less painful than patients who had shorter procedures that ended at peak discomfort. More total minutes of discomfort, but better memories.

When doctors began extending procedures slightly with reduced discomfort at the end, patient satisfaction improved dramatically. The experiencing self had technically suffered more. The remembering self felt better about the whole thing.

This is not a quirk. This is how memory works.

And it explains everything about why my mother still carries that luggage tag while I still feel tension in my shoulders when I think about the family hotel.

Aman Puri understood something about endings. About peaks. About the moments that become anchors of memory. The family hotel understood nothing about any of it. They ran things for operational convenience and let the experience collapse at exactly the moments that mattered most.

How We Build Reality

Stand in an art gallery sometime and watch two people look at the same painting.

One is moved to tears. The other shrugs and walks away. Same painting. Radically different experiences. What explains this gap?

Our minds don’t passively absorb what’s in front of us. We are constantly building reality through interpretation. And this construction follows patterns you can learn and design for.

Think about expectation. What we expect going into something changes what we actually perceive. In blind taste tests, people rate identical wine higher when told it’s expensive. The expectation doesn’t just color the perception. It literally changes it. This is why Airbnb hosts who slightly undersell their properties but overdeliver see higher satisfaction than hosts who create accurate but elevated expectations. The gap between expectation and reality becomes part of the experience itself.

Then there’s attention. Whatever you focus on becomes magnified. Whatever escapes your attention effectively doesn’t exist. Disney understands this at a level most companies never reach. In their parks, visual cues direct your eyes toward the magical elements while pulling them away from operational necessities. The castle draws your gaze upward. Utilitarian buildings are painted in “go away green,” a carefully formulated shade designed to escape notice entirely. They’re not just building environments. They’re designing where your attention goes.

And interpretation. You don’t experience emotions directly from events. You experience them from what you tell yourself about events. The same delayed flight can trigger rage in one passenger and grateful relaxation in another. The difference isn’t the delay. It’s the story each person writes about what the delay means. When a restaurant describes a thirty-minute wait as “a chance to build anticipation while enjoying our cocktails,” it doesn’t change the wait. It changes the story. And the story is where emotion lives.

Finally, narrative. We are storytelling creatures. We constantly assemble our experiences into stories that make sense, that connect to who we are and who we want to become. Experiences that fit easily into personal or cultural narratives feel more significant. They stick longer. They spread further. REI’s decision to close on Black Friday and encourage customers to spend time outdoors worked because it turned not-shopping into a story about identity and values. A simple absence of action became a meaningful experience because it connected to something people wanted to say about themselves.

The Spectrum of Experience

Not all experiences are equal. I think of them as existing on a spectrum with four levels.

At the bottom sit disappointing experiences. These don’t just fail to meet expectations. They diminish you. They make you feel incompetent, unimportant, like you’re wasting your time. The family hotel didn’t just provide bad service. It made me feel like I was failing at the simple task of taking a vacation. That’s the marker of true disappointment: you leave feeling worse about yourself than when you arrived.

Above disappointment sit transactional experiences. These meet expectations. They fulfill their function. Nothing goes wrong. And nothing is remembered. The hotel stay that was perfectly fine but utterly forgettable. The meal that satisfied hunger but left no impression. Most businesses operate here. Adequate. Interchangeable. Safe.

Higher on the spectrum are memorable experiences. These go beyond expectation in ways that stick. They touch something real about what people want: to feel recognized, to find meaning, to grow. The hotel staff who remember your preferences from last year. The server who surprises you with champagne because they overheard you mentioning a promotion. These moments make people feel genuinely seen. They become stories worth telling.

At the top sit experiences that change people. These are rare. They shift how someone sees themselves. What they believe they’re capable of. How they understand the world. The wilderness program that helps an executive discover capacities for leadership she didn’t know she had. The product that turns a beginner into a confident creator. The conversation that redirects someone’s entire trajectory.

The difference between these levels isn’t just satisfaction. It’s depth and duration. Disappointment creates immediate damage. The kind of experience that changes a person generates value that compounds over years through shifted behavior, deepened loyalty, and genuine word-of-mouth.

The State Where Everything Clicks

“I completely lost track of time.”

“It felt like the work was doing itself.”

“Everything else disappeared.”

You’ve said something like this before. You know the feeling. The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi spent his career studying it and named it: flow.

Flow is what happens when challenge and skill are perfectly balanced. When goals are clear and feedback is immediate. When action and awareness merge into a single stream of absorbed engagement.

What’s fascinating is that flow often involves hard work. Difficulty. Even struggle. And yet people consistently describe these moments as among the best of their lives.

Csikszentmihalyi asked thousands of people about their peak experiences. They kept describing situations with all the markers of flow, even when those moments were demanding or exhausting. The surgeon in a complex operation. The rock climber on a difficult face. The programmer deep in a thorny problem.

The conditions that allow flow are specific: clear goals, immediate feedback, a balance between challenge and skill, deep concentration, a sense of control, the merging of action and awareness, loss of self-consciousness, and altered perception of time.

When these conditions come together, something clicks. The experiencing self disappears into the activity. The remembering self later recalls it as deeply meaningful.

Too much challenge creates anxiety. Too little creates boredom. Flow exists in that narrow channel between, where you’re stretched to your capacity but not beyond it.

Video game designers understand this better than almost anyone. Games like The Legend of Zelda provide clear objectives, immediate feedback through visual and audio cues, and challenges that scale precisely with player development. Players spend hours in absorbed engagement because the designers have built the conditions for flow into the architecture of the game.

This isn’t manipulation. It’s understanding how humans work and building environments where they can function at their best.

Flow in Groups

Flow doesn’t only happen alone.

Group flow emerges when strangers experience collective absorption together. Concerts, festivals, conferences. The boundaries between individuals soften. Something larger takes over. People who don’t know each other become part of the same experience.

Team flow involves people who know each other working toward shared outcomes. The existing relationships, trust, and shared understanding create conditions for everyone to lock in. Sports teams in the zone. Bands locked into the same groove. Project teams where everything clicks.

Both forms of collective flow carry the characteristics of individual flow but add another dimension: the experience of merging with something larger than yourself. This is one of the deepest human needs, and experiences that activate it create bonds that last.

Why Your Brain Remembers Some Things and Forgets Others

The difference between forgettable and extraordinary experiences is biological.

Your brain processes exceptional experiences through entirely different pathways than ordinary ones. This creates lasting memories that stay accessible for years while routine interactions fade almost immediately.

Emotional arousal tags memories for storage. The amygdala flags experiences as “worth remembering” when they generate strong emotional responses. Norepinephrine and other neurochemicals flood your system, strengthening memory consolidation. This is why emotionally flat experiences fade quickly while emotionally charged ones persist. Without emotional resonance, even technically perfect experiences will be forgotten. The family hotel provided adequate rooms and adequate food. There was no emotional charge. Nothing to signal my brain that this was worth keeping. Aman Puri created emotional peaks. Moments of genuine surprise and delight. Those got tagged for storage.

Unexpected rewards create stronger memories than expected ones. Your dopamine systems respond most strongly not to rewards themselves, but to rewards you didn’t see coming. When something good happens that you didn’t predict, the neurochemical signature is stronger. This explains why the hundredth good meal at your favorite restaurant doesn’t register the way the first one did. Expectation kills the surprise response. Companies that weave pleasant surprises into their experiences create stronger memory formation than those delivering consistent but predictable quality.

Novelty captures attention automatically. Your brain is wired to notice what’s different. When something new or unexpected appears in your environment, attention locks onto it. You notice when someone rearranges furniture in a familiar room. You stop noticing the furniture once you’re used to the new arrangement. The brain conserves energy by filtering out what doesn’t change. Only the new breaks through.

Multiple senses create stronger memories. When experiences engage several senses at once, memory formation strengthens significantly. Each sense adds another strand to the memory, like braiding a rope instead of relying on a single thread. Singapore Airlines creates a signature scent used in hot towels, cabin air, and even flight attendant perfume. When passengers encounter that scent anywhere in the world, it triggers immediate recognition. The multisensory encoding made the memory durable enough to fire years later.

Six Dimensions of Experience

After studying thousands of experiences across industries, researchers have identified six dimensions that the most memorable interactions engage. I want to walk you through each of them, because once you see them, you start noticing which ones your own experiences are missing.

There’s the physical dimension, which is everything you can see, hear, smell, taste, and touch. The tangible, sensory reality of what you’re in. Capital One’s café banking concept changed financial services by changing the physical environment: comfortable seating, pleasant scents, acoustics that made financial discussions feel natural. The conversation about money didn’t change. The physical container did.

There’s the cognitive dimension: how an experience engages your thinking. Learning, problem-solving, making meaning from what’s happening. Video game designers are masters at this, calibrating challenge and skill progression to keep players learning without overwhelming them. The brain stays active without tipping into anxiety.

There’s the emotional dimension, which is the feelings evoked during and after an experience. Pixar’s carefully crafted story arcs, moving from setup to complication to resolution, show how intentional emotional design creates lasting impressions. They don’t leave emotional response to chance. They architect it.

There’s the social dimension: how an experience shapes your relationships and your sense of who you are. SoulCycle didn’t just offer exercise classes. It created tribal belonging, shared ritual, and collective achievement that went far beyond the physical activity. People became part of something. That social dimension turned fitness from a chore into an identity.

There’s the temporal dimension: how an experience unfolds over time. Its pacing, rhythms, anticipation, and how it sits in memory. Disney’s expertise shows up in how they manage queues, build anticipation, and choreograph entire days. They treat experiences as journeys through time, not isolated moments.

And there’s the meaningful dimension: how an experience connects to your values, your aspirations, your sense of purpose. Patagonia creates experiences woven into environmental values because they recognize that customers are looking to participate in something larger than a purchase.

These six dimensions are not separate boxes. They’re intertwined aspects of every experience. The most extraordinary experiences engage all of them in concert. Weakness in one dimension undermines strength in the others.

What This Means for You

Think about a truly extraordinary experience you’ve had.

What made it stick? Which moments stand out most vividly? How did it engage you across those six dimensions?

Now the more important question: what would happen if you designed experiences for others with the same care?

Most organizations stumble into experience design by accident. They focus on operations, on metrics that are easy to count. They forget that the experiencing self and the remembering self play by different rules. They ignore the peak-end principle. They build transactional interactions and wonder why loyalty erodes.

The gap between what they deliver and what humans actually need is enormous. And in that gap sits extraordinary opportunity.

The Luggage Tag Question

My mother still carries that luggage tag.

It’s been years now. The fabric is worn. The leather is cracked. She has no practical reason to keep it there. It doesn’t hold her bag closed or identify her luggage in any useful way.

But she refuses to remove it.

That small piece of material represents something. A peak moment. An ending that felt complete. An experience that engaged her across multiple dimensions in ways that created a memory strong enough to anchor itself to a physical object for years.

The family hotel left nothing behind except tension in my shoulders and a story about what not to do. Same industry. Same price point. Radically different outcomes.

The difference was not luck. It was understanding.

Understanding that we have two selves, and they don’t agree about what happened. That peaks and endings carry more weight than middles. That emotional arousal tags memories for storage while flat experiences fade. That surprise creates stronger encoding than predictability. That experiences exist across multiple dimensions, and weakness in one undermines strength in the others.

This understanding is available to anyone willing to look.

The question is what you do with it.

When you design an experience, are you designing for the experiencing self or the remembering self? Are you creating peaks and endings worth remembering? Are you engaging multiple dimensions or leaving some empty?

Are you building transactions that people forget by evening, or are you building something that someone might carry with them for years?

The luggage tag is still there. Still frayed. Still attached.

What would it take for someone to carry something of yours that long?

Every business optimizes for something.

Revenue. Efficiency. Market share. Conversion rates. Customer satisfaction scores. These numbers fill dashboards, populate board presentations, and determine bonuses. They feel solid. Objective. Real.

But here’s the paradox: the companies winning right now don’t stand in the winning table because of these numbers they’re there because of something the numbers cannot capture.

Call it resonance. Call it meaning. Call it the difference between a transaction someone forgets by the end of the day and an experience they tell their friends about for years.

This isn’t soft. This isn’t secondary. This is the entire game.

The Invisible Divide

Two coffee shops sit on opposite corners of the same street. Same quality beans. Similar prices. Comparable locations.

One churns through customers. Adequate. Forgettable. Fine.

The other has a line out the door. People drive past three closer options to get there. They bring their laptops and stay for hours. They introduce friends to it like they’re sharing a secret.

The difference cannot be found in the product, the price, or the real estate. It lives somewhere else entirely. In the quality of attention the barista gives. In the feeling of arriving somewhere rather than merely stopping. In the story the customer gets to tell themselves about the kind of person who frequents a place like this.

This is not luck. This is design. But not the kind of design most businesses understand.

The Measurement Trap

We measure what is easy to measure and then mistake it for what matters.

Customer satisfaction surveys capture whether expectations were met. They say nothing about whether the experience was worth remembering. A perfectly adequate hotel room scores well on satisfaction. It creates zero loyalty, zero advocacy, zero reason to return.

Revenue tracks what happened. It reveals nothing about why, or whether it will happen again, or what story is forming in the customer’s mind about who you are and whether you belong in their life.

The Temkin Group found that billion-dollar companies investing in experience design gained $700 million in additional revenue within three years. McKinsey research shows that companies excelling at customer experience deliver 30% higher shareholder returns and nearly double the shareholder value of peers. Harvard Business School found that customers with exceptional experiences spent 140% more.

These numbers point at something they cannot directly name.

What Humans Actually Want

Cornell neuroscience research reveals that experiences create more lasting happiness than possessions. Brain imaging shows that even anticipating an experience activates different neural circuitry than anticipating a purchase. Deeper emotional engagement. Stronger memory formation.

We already know this. Not from research, but from living.

Think of the purchases that genuinely mattered to you. The object was secondary. What mattered was what it let you do, who it let you become, what story it let you tell.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi spent decades studying what he called “optimal experiences.” Moments when people feel fully alive, fully engaged, operating at the edge of their capacity in ways that create genuine fulfillment. His conclusion: these moments share common features. Clear goals. Immediate feedback. A balance between challenge and skill. A sense that what you’re doing connects to something larger than the immediate task.

Businesses that create these conditions don’t just satisfy customers. They become part of how customers understand themselves.

The Meaning Crisis and Its Opportunity

Philosophers describe our era as experiencing a collapse of meaning.

Traditional sources of purpose and belonging have fragmented. Religious participation has declined. Community structures have weakened. Work has become more transactional. People are adrift in a sea of options, hungry for experiences that matter, that contribute to lives worth living.

This creates both a crisis and an opportunity.

The crisis: people are overwhelmed, disconnected, skeptical of anything that feels like manipulation.

The opportunity: genuine connection has become rare enough to be valuable. Experiences that honor human psychology and contribute to genuine flourishing stand out like lighthouses.

People don’t really buy products They’re invested in buying better versions of themselves. The luxury hotel that makes you feel worldly. The fitness program that turns you from beginner to athlete. The leadership training that helps you become who you always wanted to be.

Identity. Transformation. Belonging. While overused as buzzword marketing concepts they are really the deepest drivers of human behavior.

The Design Most Businesses Get Wrong

Most organizations treat experience as decoration. Something for the marketing team. A layer of polish on top of the “real” work.

This is backwards.

Products can be copied overnight. Features can be matched within months. Prices can be undercut by anyone willing to sacrifice margin but experiences that resonate at a psychological level create barriers that competitors cannot easily cross.

The airline that turns delays into moments of genuine care. The software that makes complex tasks feel natural. The hotel that makes exhausted travelers feel seen rather than processed.

These are not accidents. They are the result of understanding, at a deep level, how human psychology actually works. What creates memory. What builds trust. What makes someone feel like they matter.

And then designing every interaction to align with that understanding.

The Territory Worth Claiming

The most valuable real estate is not in Manhattan or Monaco.

It exists in human minds and hearts. The place a brand occupies in someone’s sense of who they are and what their life is about.

This territory, once claimed through genuine connection, becomes extraordinarily difficult to lose. Competitors can match your features, undercut your prices, copy your marketing. They cannot easily dislodge the relationship you’ve built with someone’s identity.

Every industry is being reshaped by this reality. As artificial intelligence makes traditional advantages easier to replicate, the ability to create meaningful human experiences becomes the primary differentiator. The thing that cannot be automated. The sustainable advantage.

The Question That Changes Everything

What would happen if you stopped optimizing for what you can measure and started designing for what actually matters?

Not satisfaction scores. Memory formation.

Not transaction completion. Identity transformation.

Not feature lists. Felt experience.

The gap between what businesses currently deliver and what humans actually need represents the largest opportunity in the modern economy. It requires no new technology, no massive capital investment, no revolutionary product innovation.

It requires understanding what humans want at a level deeper than their stated preferences and then having the courage to design for that, even when the dashboards cannot capture it.

Two coffee shops. Same beans. Same prices. Completely different outcomes.

The difference is not the product. The difference is whether someone walks away feeling like a transaction was completed, or like something meaningful happened.

That difference is available to you. Right now. Today.

What are you designing for?

I was maybe seven or eight years old when I first saw Son Goku turn Super Saiyan on TV. His hair went golden, the ground cracked beneath his feet, and something inside of me shifted. I didn’t have words for it then. I just knew I wanted that. Not the power, not the muscles. I wanted the feeling of becoming something more than what I was a moment before.

That obsession never left me. It just grew up alongside me and put on different clothes.

I started learning Shaolin Kung Fu. I sought out martial arts teachers from traditions I could barely pronounce. I climbed Kilimanjaro without any real training, just to see what would happen when my body was pushed that far beyond what my mind thought was possible. I kept exposing myself to difficult things, trying to recreate that feeling of transformation I had witnessed as a child sitting too close to the television screen.

For years, it felt like stumbling. I accumulated knowledge that didn’t fit together. I jumped between disciplines and practices and theories, always chasing something I couldn’t quite name.

Today, it’s a little bit more clear. I know now that what I was looking for has a name. Researchers call it Flow. That state where you disappear into the work and come out different on the other side.

I’m still discovering. I think I always will be. But to start making sense of it, we need to begin with the smallest possible unit. The individual. You.

What This State Actually Feels Like

You’ve been there before. Maybe you didn’t have a word for it, but you’ve felt it.

Think of a conversation so good you forgot to check the time. You looked up and two hours had passed like minutes. Your thoughts came easily. You weren’t performing or worrying about how you sounded. You were just there.

Or maybe it showed up in your work. You sat down to solve a problem and suddenly you were three hours deep, the solution taking shape under your hands, and you didn’t once check your email or wonder what was for lunch.

This is why I have as many conversations as possible. Why I coach. Why I will spend time talking with complete strangers in coffee shops, people I will never see again. Because that’s where I find it most easily. That state of being fully engaged, time dissolving around me.

Maybe you have your own version. The question is whether you’ve learned to recognize it and whether you’ve learned how to get there on purpose.

When You Can’t Find It

Here’s where it gets uncomfortable. Leaders spend a lot of their time locked out of this state. The costs are steeper than we like to admit.

You feel it, don’t you? The calendar is back to back. Meetings you already know will surface problems you don’t have solutions for. Your heart rate is elevated before you even sit down. You’re making decisions, hundreds of them a day, and you can feel the quality degrading as the hours pass. By 3 PM, you’re not thinking clearly. You’re just reacting.

Then there’s the fog. Difficulty holding multiple scenarios in your head. More reliance on habit and gut feeling, but not the good kind. The kind that’s really just exhaustion dressed up as intuition.

The emotional side starts to show. Irritability. A sharp tone you didn’t mean to use. Overreacting to small problems. The inner critic gets louder. You’re managing your image instead of making sense of what’s actually happening.

Your teams feel it. Decisions pile up on your desk. You’re handling email and chat and meetings simultaneously, fragmenting your attention until nothing gets your full focus. You’re avoiding hard conversations because you don’t have the bandwidth.

71% of CEOs report burnout at least occasionally. Over half report anxiety or depression tied to sustained overload. Roughly half describe significant loneliness in the role.

Work becomes a grind. You feel reduced to chief firefighter instead of builder. And slowly, the version of yourself you hoped to become as a leader starts to feel very far away.

The Conditions That Get Stolen

Let me name what’s actually being taken from you.

Your goals have multiplied until none of them are real. Everything is a priority. Your brain has no target to aim toward. You sit in meetings where the objective shifts three times before anyone notices.

Picture yourself in that meeting. Someone raises an issue. Then someone else pivots to a different problem. Thirty minutes later, you’re not sure what you’re solving anymore. Your chest tightens. You write something down just to feel like you’re tracking, but you know you’ll forget what it meant by tomorrow.

Your feedback loops are broken. You make decisions and don’t know if they’re working for months. You’re operating blind, and by the time you discover you were off track, the damage is done.

Think about that product decision from last quarter. The one you’re still not sure was right. How long did it take before you had any real signal? How many other decisions stacked on top of it while you were waiting?

The challenge is wrong. Either the work is too easy and your mind wanders, you check your phone, you drift. Or it’s too hard and you freeze, make fear-based calls, avoid the thing entirely.

You know both feelings. The boredom that comes with tasks beneath you. The quiet panic when you’re supposed to have answers you don’t have. Neither state lets you do your best thinking.

Your concentration is shattered. Notifications. Knocks on the door. Someone needs you for “just a quick thing” that takes forty-five minutes. By the time you return to the complex problem you were solving, you’ve lost the thread entirely.

Feel that moment of returning to your desk after an interruption. The document is open. The cursor is blinking. But whatever you were about to write has evaporated. You stare at the screen. You check your email instead.

You’ve lost your sense of agency. You’re not steering. You’re just responding. Crisis after crisis. Your agenda is whatever lands in your inbox next.

You can’t stop watching yourself. Instead of being absorbed in the problem, you’re absorbed in how you look while solving it. Fear of judgment. Image management. The voice in your head narrating all the ways you might be wrong.

What You Can Protect

Let me name what these conditions look like when they’re present.

One or two priorities that are actually clear. Not ten priorities, not a strategic document full of competing commitments. A small number of things where you know what success looks like. When your team can articulate what matters without hesitating, they stop needing to escalate every decision to you.

Feedback that arrives while you can still act on it. Signals that tell you weekly, not quarterly, whether something is working. Conversations where people tell you the truth, not what they think you want to hear.

Work calibrated to stretch you without breaking you. Challenges that meet your capability at the edge. Not so easy you coast. Not so hard you freeze. This requires adjusting as you grow, and doing the same for your team.

Protected time for complex thinking. Hours where no one can reach you. No meetings. No notifications. A door that stays closed. This is how good decisions get made.

Knowing who owns what. Decision rights that are named out loud. When everyone knows who can make the call, your inbox stops being where choices go to die.

Room to be uncertain. A culture where you can say “I don’t know” and your people can say it back. Where mistakes surface quickly because no one is hiding them.

These aren’t complicated concepts. But protecting them requires attention. It requires saying no to things that seem urgent but aren’t.

The Question for You

This state isn’t reserved for superheroes or martial arts masters or people born with some special capacity. It shows up when the right conditions are present. Those conditions can be created.

The question isn’t whether you’ve experienced this before. You have. You know exactly what it feels like.

The question is what you’re willing to protect.

What would it look like to have two clear priorities instead of twelve? To know by the end of each week if your biggest bet is working? To have four hours this week where no one can reach you?

What would it cost you to try?

And what is it costing you not to?

You feel it before you name it.

The third notification in five minutes. The question from your team lead that pulls you from the strategy doc you finally started. The email marked urgent that turns out to be anything but. Your hand moves to your phone again, and you catch yourself wondering when you became someone who checks email 36 times an hour.

Your pulse is slightly elevated. Not enough to alarm you, just enough to keep you from settling. Your shoulders have crept toward your ears sometime in the last hour. You didn’t notice. You notice now.

This is what scattered attention feels like from the inside. Not dramatic. Not a crisis. Just a slow leak you’ve learned to live with.

That leak is flooding the basement.

The Numbers Behind the Fog

Let me show you what this costs when it compounds.

Distraction-related productivity losses run about fifteen times higher than sick days. Fifteen times. For the average office worker, that translates to over $10,000 lost per year, per person. For a large company, it crosses $1 million annually. For small businesses, it’s north of $100,000.

And that’s just the direct hit.

Every time you get pulled from focused work, you lose 23 minutes trying to get back. Not because you’re weak-willed. Because that’s how human cognition works. The brain doesn’t switch tasks cleanly. It drags context from the last thing into the new thing, and it takes almost half an hour to shake it off.

Now multiply that across your day. Across your team. Across a quarter.

Seventy-nine percent of workers can’t go a full hour without distraction. More than half get pulled away within thirty minutes. If you’re leading a team, you’re not just managing your own attention. You’re managing an environment where focus is fighting for survival.

When the Leader’s Attention Fractures

This is where it gets personal.

You make somewhere around 35,000 decisions a day. Most are small. Some are not. And your brain doesn’t distinguish between them the way you’d like it to. Each one draws from the same well. By afternoon, that well runs low.

Decision fatigue doesn’t announce itself. It shows up as hesitation where you used to be decisive. It shows up as defaulting to the safe choice because evaluating the risky one feels like too much. It shows up as mental fog right when clarity matters most.

And your team watches. They feel the hesitation. They sense when you’re not fully present, even if they can’t articulate why. That uncertainty ripples outward. Execution slows. Coordination breaks down.

CEOs work an average of 62.5 hours a week while sleeping less than seven hours a night. That’s not a badge of honor. That’s a recipe for degraded judgment at the exact moments when judgment matters most.

When you can’t hold your own attention steady, you can’t hold the organization’s direction steady either.

The Cascade You Don’t See

Think about what happens when priorities stay fuzzy.

When everything gets marked as important, nothing truly is. Your team faces ambiguity about where to put their energy. They duplicate efforts. They pursue goals that don’t connect. They start to quietly redirect their attention to whatever feels most urgent in the moment, because you haven’t given them a clear alternative.

Research shows organizations chasing more than five simultaneous priorities see a 30% drop in execution effectiveness. Some projects burn 40% of their budget on rework alone. Not because people are incompetent. Because the signal from the top was noise.

When strategy and execution pull in different directions, the root cause is usually scattered attention dressed up as a planning problem.

And the people cost? Employees who work under distracted, unclear leadership are more likely to disengage. More likely to experience stress and frustration. More likely to leave.

Fifty percent of employees who quit cite their manager as the reason. Bad managers increase turnover by 37%. Each departure costs somewhere between 75% and 213% of that person’s annual salary to replace.

You’re not just losing productivity. You’re losing people. And the ones who stay often check out while remaining on the payroll.

The Attention Tax on Your Body

Let me bring this closer to the skin.

When you operate in constant reactive mode, your nervous system pays the price. The low-grade vigilance. The never-quite-relaxed state. The way your jaw tightens when you see another notification pop up.

Nearly three-quarters of managers report high psychological distress. Sixty-nine percent of leaders experience burnout. Almost half feel disconnected from their work.

This is the predictable consequence of trying to lead while your attention is being shredded into confetti.

Depleted leaders struggle to plan. They struggle to achieve goals. They show reduced patience with their teams. They set poor boundaries. They become more impulsive, not less.

One more thing that might sting: when you’re depleted, you trust your team less. That reduced trust changes how your team behaves. They contribute less. They pull back. Your depletion becomes their disengagement. The cycle feeds itself.

What Gets Lost in the Noise

Beyond the metrics, something subtler disappears.

Creativity requires drift time. The loose, unfocused moments where connections form without forcing them. When chronic busyness fills every gap, the supply of new ideas dries up.

Your ability to see the whole picture requires enough cognitive space to hold multiple perspectives at once. When attention narrows under pressure, you lose that breadth. Research shows there’s an inverted U-shape between how broadly a CEO allocates attention and how well the company performs. Too narrow, and you miss signals. Too broad, and you lose depth. The sweet spot requires deliberate calibration.

You can’t calibrate what you can’t control. And you can’t control attention you’ve let the environment manage for you.

The Path Back

If this feels heavy, I want you to hold something else alongside it.

Scattered attention is a systems problem. Systems can be redesigned.

The data is clear: organizations investing in leadership development see a 23% increase in performance. A 32% jump in engagement. Better leadership can eliminate 5-10% of the productivity drag and prevent up to a third of voluntary turnover.

But it starts with something simpler than a training program.

It starts with you getting honest about where your attention actually goes. Not where you think it goes. Not where you wish it went. Where it actually lands, hour by hour, day by day.

Start here:

Track your interruptions for one week. Every time something pulls you away from focused work, note it. Don’t judge it yet. Just see the pattern.

Identify your three true priorities. Not five. Not ten. Three. If you can’t name them in under fifteen seconds, neither can your team.

Protect one hour of uninterrupted time daily. Block it. Defend it. Use it for the work that moves the needle, not the work that feels urgent.

Notice your body’s signals. The tight shoulders. The shallow breathing. The restless leg. These are data. They’re telling you something about your cognitive state. Learn to read them.

Back to the Baseline

Remember where we started? The notification. The interrupted thought. The hand reaching for the phone.

That moment is a symptom of a system that hasn’t been designed for focus.

You have more control over that system than you think. Not total control. The world will keep demanding your attention in ways that fragment it. But you can build structures that make focus easier. You can create environments where your team’s attention is protected too. You can lead in a way that clarifies instead of confuses.

The leak in your attention is a design flaw. Design flaws can be fixed.

What would it feel like to end a day knowing you spent your attention on what actually mattered?

That’s the door I want you to walk through.

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Are nations and the way that the world is put together doomed to fail?

Are they a symptom rather than a solution for what is holding us back as a society at large? If we didn’t exist anymore and we would all become citizens of the world, would that eradicate the threat of nuclear destruction? Would it help us truly become more open to other people, their cities, gender, etc.? Is it really something that we should look at at all? Let me see if I can address any of this.

Are Nations Dinosaurs ready to go extinct?

If we’re looking at history, it’s quite clear that we seem to forget that nation-states is a concept or something from not too long ago. I can’t seem to wonder and think if it’s about time for us to make a software update on that concept.

We did however always and for a very long time have a sense of belonging and a sense of identity tied to something else, but it wasn’t necessarily geographically connected to a nation with borders in that sense. What is defined as a nation or not really depends on how the war has been won and the line has been drawn in the sand.

Thinking back, the earliest proper nations probably started somewhere in the 1600s and have served us well to get to where we are. I think we should meet it with respect, but just like concepts back then, maybe it’s time to re-evaluate. Particularly with all of the negative downsides that are coming up now: taxes getting higher and higher and the governance becoming so large that they’re losing track of the way that they’re spending. A lot of funds just getting moved around and spent on ridiculous things and lost because it’s just too big to manage for humanity at large. And we might have a chance with artificial intelligence coming in making sense of the numbers and the data that we have, but that also poses a real threat and a big collection of issues that might come along with that.

Then we have the challenges that come with national conflicts with other nations. Now we have weapons of mass destruction, and as we’re moving into this new age of AI, robotics, and drones, it just becomes an order of magnitude more dangerous.

So what would happen if we became true cosmopolitans? If we borrowed from an older concept and had guilds of belonging rather than becoming this weird thing that is called a nation-state which is tied to a geological thing that has been drawn at the sand. Are nations ready to go extinct? Have they served their purpose or do they need to move into the next phase of what it means to be a nation? With us potentially moving into being a space-faring race, it also seems to be much more difficult to identify what it means to be a nation. Are you still China if you have a colony on the moon or moving to Mars or any of the other planets that seem so far out there at the moment? What do we need from the place of belonging and what happens if they can’t meet it?

And even more: What does a possible solution even look like? As you might come to know, if you keep reading the things that I’ll be writing in the future, I have tendencies to have paradoxes and oppositions that seem to form complexity and might be confusing. But bear with me and see if you can hold the complexity a little bit longer, because even if it sparks a slight idea within you that would make my day. What if we became cosmopolitan and had a true sense of being a citizen of the cosmos? You’d still have your densities of belonging: belonging to your family, your in-group, your guild or other affiliations that you have, and still seeing yourself as part of this larger thing. But more to that later.

The Doom and Gloom of Nations

I’m becoming increasingly worried about what leaders are delivering today. Be it the over-successful and slightly becoming more and more arrogant entrepreneurs leading the tech space of AI and robotics and chips and you name it, or the leaders of nations that again are escalating situations with each other because of us still being humans that have still not learned to express and experience our emotions and our thoughts properly.

What will happen if they can keep to escalate and keep moving towards a destruction or an escalation for another war that nobody wants, or worse, creating things that are just not in our favor or creating a future society where we don’t want to live in it?

Nuclear destruction is still a threat, and things being as they are, it could lead to that. But what if we didn’t have geolocational ties anymore? If the citizens of the current nations just lived everywhere, where would you place the bomb? What would happen if we stay as we are? Would we all die? Do we want that? Then we have the AI race, whether they are able to achieve general artificial intelligence or not. What is that thing, and how should it be managed? And who are we to decide depending on where you’re from what should be done here, and are we even smart enough as a human species to do anything about it at all?

Would it be better if we could collaborate because we didn’t have ties to where we come from or where we’re born, and what skin color we have or what we are born with in between our legs. I personally feel that a sense of excellence, striving to the best version of who you are, is truly what should be the measure of what you’re worth or not. And this is an unpopular opinion because we are based on our actions and based on the way we behave, either valuable to society, your family, your friends, yourself. So from moment to moment, we have the power to do things or not. And right here, right now, I think it’s time for us to do something about the situation because we as individuals are part of a system, and this system is part of every individual.

And if we don’t realize that we have power and also not have power, we are just leaving it up to chance if we survive or not and that’s just not an option for me.

How can we become Cosmopolitan Leaders?

I’ve been trying to think about this for a while now. What does it mean to be a citizen of the cosmos? A true global individual, a leader of such. To me, it’s about constantly aligning yourself towards complexity.

We have to exercise a way where we deliberately think about what the best possible solution is and strive for a way where it aligns with your own thriving as an individual, connecting to friends and family and the close people that you have in your proximity. Then slowly build it and move on from the team that you are a part of. Both in organizations or another part of belonging such as a sports team or a hobby that you have that allows you to have affinity with something. And as a founder or as an executive, building the complexity even more. What does it mean for your organization and how can you align it with the other ones? And we need to really think about what it means for the world at large because it doesn’t help if we just have really, really good ways of living in one place but it causes other places to suffer or is not moving along as much. And this might sound elitist, but maybe it should. Maybe it should provoke you. But think about it. Can we afford not to bring every single resource of the world forward? EI have a deep hope that this is the seed, a thought, a seedling that grows into some sort of way of thinking, way of being, adapting it as a way of life. Because I can’t go anywhere. Without other people participating. And looking around me, it really does feel like everyone is lonely and disconnected and is reaching for a genuine connection in the moment. But because of behaviors and because of a missing mindset or a concept, it just doesn’t happen.

very individual, every capacity to become the best possible planet on paper but also in lived experience? I’m not one to say that I have the answer here. I have a feeling that this can only be done if you join in as a process and let it unfold, let it build within you. Building competence by wrestling with the problem starting to understand it from a logical but also intuitive way.

So what does it take? What do you think? If we align it to a larger whole, it’s impossible for one person or even a group of people to think about this. It needs every culture of the world. It needs different ways of thought. And it’s not happening right now. How can we elevate to get ready to become a species that is able to go into the cosmos if that is what we want and make it the best possible way of living here and now?

It starts with a seed of thought

I think about the ways that society is crumbling right now. It’s difficult for families to put children through institutional life and still come out okay the other way. And at the same time, make enough and live a good life. And even if you have the money, it’s really difficult.

Our society is simply not made for us to have a good experience. And we’ve come a long way. It’s not that we haven’t. It just feels like we can do better if we put our heads together. Because right now we’re deciding based on individual experts. And we do need people that have the big picture at heart and are able to dabble in differentiating different ways of thinking, particularly with AI coming up, it’s more than ever important to put our heads together and think about what it means to be human and be a good citizen of the world.
And even come to the conclusion that this is not for you and you think that I’m wrong.

Good.

That’s what I want.

I want to be wrong.

I want to be right. I want both, I want experience. I want to taste the nectar of life in every possible way. And I think you as a leader should think about doing the same.

May the Flow be with You
Yours Kev

We hear about AI and the potential benefits and dangers of it. We read about and hear about war - EVs or not EVs. Where does it all go? Can we sit back without trying to explore what a real leader would look like? What kind of mental models they would need for us to accept the way that they navigate? What about ourselves? Do we show up as individuals with the right leadership mindset?

Urging you if you don’t view yourself as a leader - even if it’s just a thought leader - it’s over. The time is over for you not to participate and not take responsibility.

Chances are, if you’re reading this, you really do want to make a difference. You do want to build or create a better future. Or you have a passion that you want to put out there.

We need to be more deliberate. Create a process that allows us to intuitively understand how different system dynamics work together - and how the individual and the group work together in tandem.

We need leaders that can make decisions and are able to look at all sorts of different angles. Whether it’s parents navigating, forming, and supporting their children, to managers and team leaders helping the team build whatever that they’re working on, entrepreneurs and founders participating in trying to shape the world into a better place, or even executives and politicians.

How do we do this? How can we explore it? How can we expand it? That’s what this Substack, this newsletter is about. Let’s go beyond. This is an open invitation if you have something to say, if you work with leaders, support leaders, are a leader, a parent, someone that needs to lead the way for somebody else, or direct and fine-tune how people and tools and things work together. Let’s have a conversation.

I’m starting to collect interviews and conversations and want to push them out there so we together have a voice and start a process where we can move this into the right direction. Again, I don’t have rose-colored glasses and see everything as good, but I just feel that we can’t afford not to do it. We need to start this process. We need to start the conversation. Demand from ourselves and from the leaders out there to be through cosmopolitans - a cosmopolitan that integrates and connects as an individual is able to lead themselves properly, to navigate and grow into proper leaders and work things out together all the way to a global scenery.

I’m planning to put out these unedited, these raw thoughts, these invitations for you to participate, dear reader. So I need your help. I think we need to come together. If you have a Substack that speaks to any of this, or if your work speaks to any of this, I need to talk to you. Let me say that again. I need to talk to you, and I want to make it public. So if you dare, come sit with me.

Yours, Kev

Have you ever paused to consider the true price of your relentless pursuit of success? The thrill of a promotion, the satisfaction of exceeding KPIs, or the recognition from top executives can feel exhilarating, but at what cost? In a world where constant busyness is celebrated and achievement is revered, we often overlook the toll it takes on our well-being. From an early age, we learn that our value is tied to our productivity, and that success means an unending ascent. Yet, this chase can lead us to a precarious edge, where the very things we strive for may come at the expense of our health and happiness.

Professionals with aspirations like yours rely on this drive. It is what motivates you to get a quick workout in before starting a full day of work. It is the driving force behind your efforts to connect with others, provide guidance, and continuously enhance your skill set. There is a dark side to this dogged pursuit, though. Even though there’s a promise of a breathtaking view from the peak, the ascent is usually so excruciating that we wonder if it was worth it.

Constant success comes at a cost, and we need to address that. This is not meant to dampen your enthusiasm for your goals; on the contrary, it is to make sure that you are fit, content, and able to fully appreciate the view when you reach your destination.

The Psychological Toll of Never Enough

You feel the pressure to perform not only at work, but also at home, in your dreams, and even in your bones. You are precariously balanced when your sense of value is linked solely to your most recent achievement. One slip-up, like an unsatisfactory review or a missed deadline, can send you into a tailspin.

The mental toll of believing you are “never enough” is this. There is substantial evidence linking perfectionism to mental health problems like anxiety and despair. Finding contentment becomes next to impossible when the bar is constantly being raised. “Once I achieve X, I will finally be happy.” This is the “arrival fallacy” that you may fall victim to. But the joy is short-lived, and the worry about reaching the next objective sets in almost immediately after.

Burnout results from being in a constant state of hyper-arousal. It’s more than just being exhausted; it’s a deep state of mental, emotional, and physical weariness brought on by chronic and extreme stress. It deprives you of the enthusiasm you once had for your work and makes you feel cold and unattached.

The Physical Price You Pay

The score is kept by your body. No amount of caffeine or sheer willpower can ever make you forget the physical toll that relentless striving takes. When levels of the stress hormone cortisol remain consistently high, they can cause serious health problems.

Rest is sacrificed. You think you’re making progress by sacrificing sleep for increased productivity, but in reality, you’re just building up a sleep debt that will become unpayable with interest. Lack of sleep impairs your ability to think clearly, control your emotions, and make sound decisions, all of which are necessary for effective leadership.

Keeping moving and eating properly frequently take a back seat. Instead of fuel, people eat fast food and sit at desks all day. Contrary to popular belief, a high-performance vessel is essential for maintaining peak performance. If you put short-term success ahead of your physical health, you will fail in the long run.

When Personal Connections Are Neglected

Imagine a moment when you and your loved ones were fully engaged in the here and now. Fully engaged in the moment, both physically and mentally; that is, focusing entirely on your loved ones rather than juggling thoughts of your next presentation and your email.

In the midst of one’s dogged pursuit of success, one’s loved ones are frequently relegated to the background. By the time you clock out, you may have exhausted the resources that are necessary to maintain a relationship: time, energy, and vulnerability. If you’re not careful, you could end up ignoring significant life events, withdrawing socially, or viewing your home life more as a chore list than a place of relaxation and enjoyment.

Maintaining a healthy work-life balance is an essential component of genuine leadership. Protecting the relationships that matter to you requires strength, not weakness, which is why setting boundaries is a smart move.

The Illusion of Fulfillment

We are sold a narrative that success equals happiness. But how many stories have we heard of CEOs and celebrities who seemingly “have it all” yet feel empty inside? Achievement provides a hit of dopamine, a temporary high. It does not, however, provide lasting fulfillment.

Success is derived from a more profound source. Meaningful relationships, making a positive impact on a bigger picture, engaging in interests unrelated to making money, and developing one’s skills independently of one’s position are all sources of this.

If you are climbing the ladder only to find it’s leaning against the wrong wall, all your effort is in vain. You must define success on your own terms. Is it just about the corner office? Or is it about having the freedom to travel, the time to mentor others, or the health to run marathons?

Practical Strategies for Finding Balance

So, how do you break free from the hamster wheel without sacrificing your career goals? How do you maintain your ambition while reclaiming your life? It requires a strategic shift in how you operate.

Set Realistic Goals and Priorities

You cannot do everything. Attempting to do so is a recipe for failure. Ruthlessly prioritize. Identify the 20% of activities that drive 80% of your results and focus your energy there. Learn to say “no” to opportunities that don’t align with your core values or long-term vision.

Practice Self-Compassion

Treat yourself with the same kindness you would offer a mentee. When you stumble, don’t berate yourself. Celebrate your small wins. Acknowledge progress, not just perfection. Self-compassion builds resilience, allowing you to bounce back from setbacks faster and stronger.

Cultivate Mindfulness

Stop living in the future. Anxiety lives in the “what ifs.” Peace lives in the “right now.” Practice mindfulness to anchor yourself in the present moment. Whether it’s five minutes of meditation or simply drinking your morning coffee without a screen, these moments of presence recharge your mental batteries.

Prioritize Self-Care

Assuming you’re interested, this has nothing to do with bubble baths. It all comes down to basic upkeep. Plan your exercises just like you would a meeting. Get your fuel ready by meal prepping. Take care of your sleep schedule like it’s your job, because that’s exactly what it is.

Seek Support

You can get help if you need it. If you need help, talk to someone you trust or see a therapist. Find leaders who can inspire you by their example of balanced leadership. Being able to admit when you’re wrong or need assistance shows that you’re a strong leader.

Redefining Your Climb

Your well-being and contentment need not be sacrificed in pursuit of unwavering success. Being both ambitious and balanced is possible. Being an attentive partner and high achiever is within your reach. You can take pleasure in the ride while driving results.

Just sit back and think for a second. Do you find yourself operating the vehicle, or does it operate you? Find a way to make your aspirations and principles line up. Invest in yourself first and foremost; doing so is essential to achieving long-term success, not a nice-to-have.

Only by laying a solid groundwork can you unleash your boundless potential. We are all in need of someone with your level of leadership, vision, and motivation. More importantly, though, when you are whole, healthy, and happy, the world needs you.

You can feel it, can’t you? That constant tension between where you want your team to be and where they are right now. You’re checking things off your list, meeting your KPIs, and going to endless meetings, but there just isn’t any spark. You’re working hard, but are you making a future that you really want to live in?

The old way of leading: command, control, and management based only on numbers is no longer useful. It makes teams tired and leaders feel like they don’t know what to do. We need to move our focus from just managing to Flow Leadership in order to really thrive.

Leadership Archives is your ally in this journey. More than just a newsletter, it embodies a commitment to redefine leadership. It’s about creating the best experiences that naturally encourage resilience, creativity, and high performance. You’re in the right place if you’re ready to stop treading water and start making waves.

Who Is Leadership Archives For?

Not everyone can use Leadership Archives. It was made just for the changemakers: the executives, founders, and ambitious entrepreneurs who know there is a better way to do things.

The Architect of Culture

You are the leader who cares about both the “how” and the “what.” You know that culture isn’t just a buzzword; it’s how your business runs. You want to create a space where people don’t just come, but come fully.

The Future-Builder

You don’t want things to stay the same. You want to make a future that is good, long-lasting, and satisfying. You want to get out of the daily grind and leave behind a legacy of work that matters.

What We Explore: Themes for the Modern Leader

Leadership Archives on Substack is designed to be your weekly compass, guiding you back to your “True North.” Here is a glimpse into the core themes we explore:

Resilient Teams

How do you put together a team that not only survives change but also thrives on it? We go deep into frameworks for psychological safety, flexibility, and group strength. It’s about going from weak hierarchies to strong, connected teams.

High-Performance Strategies

High performance shouldn’t mean a lot of stress. We break down the plans that lead to long-term success. This means changing how meetings are set up, making workflows more efficient, and getting rid of the “busy work” that slows down productivity.

True North Leadership

How do you stay grounded in a world full of noise? We look at the inner workings of leadership, such as finding your purpose, making your vision clear, and being true to yourself as a leader. When you lead from your True North, you draw in talent and success.

Bridging the Gap: From Blog to Action

You might already know about my blog on[kevnordentoft.com] and its posts about experience design and leadership change. Leadership Archives is the next step in that conversation.

The blog sets the stage for the theory, but the newsletter is where the action happens. It sends you those big ideas right to your inbox, along with stories, steps you can take, and useful frameworks.

The blog is like a map, and the newsletter is like a guide that tells you where to go. It’s a special channel for us to get to know each other better and make sure you have the tools you need to make these changes right away.

Join the Movement

Are you ready to stop being a manager and start being a leader?

Today, sign up for Leadership Archives on Substack.

When you join, you don’t just get another email; you also get a partner in your leadership journey. Every week, you’ll get new ideas that will make you think and give you specific steps to take to improve your career and your team.

Don’t be happy with things as they are. Find your leadership potential and start making the work life you’ve always wanted.

Designing a Desirable Future

Transforming your leadership approach goes beyond improving business outcomes; it’s about enhancing your life and the lives of those you lead. We can grow and be happy when we use Flow Leadership and good experience design instead of stress and stagnation.

People who can picture the future and then make it happen own it. Together, let’s make that future happen, one week at a time.

Bosses now fight a straight-up war for their team’s eyeballs. Emails, feeds, pings each buzz swipes another second of staff brain time. We live in an age of information abundance and energetic depletion, where leaders are drowning in data while starving for the focused presence required to make sense of it all. Think of org pyramids as aging flip phones. We need swappable batteries, not one long battery-life brag in a dusty brochure. Strategic slide-show “visions” with zits and coffee smell? Use what it wants. Use what it feels like while doing the work, or toss the binder out. What’s needed is a fundamental shift in how we understand leadership itself: not as a set of competencies to master, but as the art of managing energy through information.

This is my very article in Leadership Archives, a series of Interiews, articles, book reviews on leadership and more to explore leadership as a whole. My angle is experiential and subjective, rooted in the felt reality of what it means to lead. While staying aligned with objective outcomes, measurable results, and organizational impact. As a Flow Leadership Coach, I work at the intersection of optimal experience design and practical leadership application. It will bring together research from ancient philosophers, contemporary neuroscience, and interviews with founders and executives to create an “ARCHIVE” of  understanding of leadership for our time.

The Crisis of Attention in Modern Leadership

Leaders today operate in a fundamentally different landscape than their predecessors. The modern paradox is the following: we have access to more information, tools, and frameworks than ever before, yet leaders report feeling more scattered, reactive, and ineffective. Remote teams fracture presence across digital platforms. Decision fatigue compounds daily. Constant connectivity creates the illusion of productivity while eroding the deep focus required for strategic thinking.

The neuroscience reveals why this matters so profoundly. Research shows that when you’re in optimal states of attention, what neuroscientists call “flow states” different brain networks activate. The fronto-parietal control network engages while the default-mode network (responsible for mind-wandering and self-referential thinking) quiets down. This neural synchronization enables peak performance, creative insight, and effortless decision-making. But here’s the problem: modern work environments systematically prevent these states from arising.

When emotional triggers activate your nervous system, your attention fractures. Brain networks desynchronize. You lose access to the very information, the frameworks, patterns, and strategic models you need to navigate complexity. A leader in this state becomes reactive rather than responsive, tactical rather than strategic. The consequences ripple outward: teams lose coherence, organizational culture fragments, and vision becomes clouded by urgency.

The true misconsception is that the shift we need to make about Leadership has nothing to do with better management or better tools but about understanding that leadership is fundamentally an energetic practice and that your effectiveness depends on your ability to manage your own energy and design environments that allow energy to flow optimally.

What Is Leadership?  Etymology and Ancient Wisdom 

Before we can reimagine leadership, we must understand where the concept comes from.   The word “leader” emerged in the English language around the 1300s, coming from the Old English lædere ,translating to  “one who leads, one first or most prominent”.   This came from lædan , which meant “to guide, conduct, cause to go with one, march at the head of, accompany and show the way”.  Now here the root connects to Proto-Germanic laidjanan and even later back to the Indo-European leit(h) , meaning “to go forth, to cross a threshold”. 

What’s remarkable to me about this is its emphasis on movement and guidance . Leadership, in its original sense, was never about position or authority and much more about showing others the way forward.   The suffix “-ship” wasn’t added until 1821, when “leadership” emerged to mean “the state or condition of being a leader”.   This distinction matters:   “leading” is an action (doing), while “leadership” describes a state of being. 

Interestingly, the word “manage” has entirely different roots.   It derives from the Latin manus , meaning “hand” giving it the suggestion of control, handling, manipulation.   Leadership and management are thus fundamentally different:   one is about guiding movement forward, the other about controlling what exists. 

Out ancient philosophers of the past understood this intuitively. Three traditions, separated by geography but united in insight, all pointed toward consciousness and wisdom as the foundation of leadership.

Plato’s Philosopher King (circa 400 BCE) proposed that ideal leaders must possess both wisdom and virtue. Plato had argued that only those who had pursued philosophical knowledge and those who understood justice, truth, and the nature of the good were fit to lead People. The Philosopher King was not only bound to  education but also had they transformed their character through the pursuit of wisdom in action. Leadership, for Plato, required you to embody what you knew, not just intellectually grasp it.

Aristotle built on and refined Plato’s vision. He introduced the concept of phronesis “practical wisdom” which bridges knowledge and action. Unlike theoretical wisdom, phronesis is contextual. An ability to discern the right action in any specific situation, to find the “golden mean or path” between extremes, and to develop virtuous character through repeated practice and reflection. You became a leader by habitually practicing virtuous actions until they became second nature.

Sun Tzu  writing from the Chinese strategic tradition, stated that leadership requires both intelligence and moral grounding.  Sun Tzu’s insight was that winning is created before the battle begins through tedious preparation, understanding yourself and your context, and using that to move with strategic intelligence rather than brute force.

These ancient traditions converge on a profound truth: leadership is primarily about how you direct energy and attention . Plato’s wisdom allows you to see clearly. Aristotle’s phronesis enables you to act skillfully in the moment. Sun Tzu’s strategic intelligence ensures your energy moves efficiently toward your goals. What modern management theory forgot we’re now rediscovering is that leadership isn’t a position you hold but a state you cultivate.

The Energy & Information Mental Model

Everything in life, when you distill it down, is either energy  or information .

Energy is action in the moment, directed toward the future.   The raw capacity to do, to move, to create.  It’s the “do” dimension of leadership. As the Chinese saying goes “where attention goes energy flows”. You know this if you’re tried to drive your car along the road while watching a spontaneous happening on the side of the road.

Information is energy that has been converted into patterns, models, archetypes, and frameworks.   It’s crystallized experience from the past, ready to be deployed now.   Information is the “know” dimension, the accumulated wisdom, the strategic frameworks, the emotional intelligence models, the leadership principles you’ve learned and internalized. 

Dont mistake them as seperate from each other. Information is energy from the past , compressed into reusable patterns. Energy is information activated in the present , directed toward future outcomes. The relationship is cyclical: energy converts into information through experience and reflection; information guides and optimizes how we use energy in action.

Leadership, in this sense is the skill of managing energy through information .

Let me make this concrete. Imagine you’re facing a difficult conversation with a key team member. There’s tension, potential conflict, high stakes.

The energy dimension : You feel your body’s response. Your heart rate elevates. Attention narrows. There’s an impulse to defend, to avoid, or to attack. This is raw energy moving through your system. How you manage this energetic state will determine everything that follows.

The information dimension : You’ve learned frameworks for navigating difficult conversations.   Maybe you understand the neuroscience of emotional regulation.   Perhaps you’ve internalized principles of nonviolent communication.   You have archetypes, patterns of how these conversations typically unfold locked in and stored from past experience.   This information is available to you, but only if your energy is managed well enough to access it. 

When your energy is poorly managed, you lose access to your information . A triggered emotional state fragments your attention.   Your brain networks desynchronize.   The frameworks you know intellectually become unreachable in the moment.   You react instead of responding.   You fall back on habitual patterns, often the least effective ones just because they’re the only information available when your system is dysregulated. 

This is why emotional intelligence matters for leadership.   This is why environment design is needed for anything to work and  this is why flow states are so powerful.   They’re all about managing energy so that information can be accessed and applied skillfully. 

Why Leadership Is About Managing Energy 

Leadership development as we know it focuses on what (goals and vision), how (processes and strategies), and who (team dynamics and culture).   While these are important they miss the fundamental part:  the energetic dimension that determines whether anything actually happens. 

Leaders fail from poor energy management, both their own and their environment’s.   Three examples illustrate this: 

1. Emotional Triggers and Attention Fragmentation

You’re presenting a strategic initiative to your board. A skeptical question activates an old wound, imposter syndrome, perhaps, or a past failure. Your nervous system reacts. Suddenly you’re not present anymore. You’re defending, justifying, explaining. The clarity you had moments ago evaporates. Your attention fractures between the actual conversation, your internal story, and your attempts to appear competent.

While it might seem like a competence problem its not. The emotional trigger pulled your energy away from the present moment. You lost access to your strategic information, the well-prepared answers, the frameworks, the vision just because your system became dysregulated.

2. Environmental Design and Focus

Consider two work environments. In the first, noise is constant, visual clutter dominates, interruptions are normal. Your attention is frequently pulled to irrelevant things, a loud conversation nearby, notifications pinging, Files and tasks in your side of your eyes that remind you of unfinished tasks.

In the second, the environment is designed for focus. Natural elements support attention restoration. The space communicates psychological safety. Interruptions are minimized. Your nervous system can settle. Your attention remains unified.

We need to start understanding that your environment has an energetic value . Chaotic environments continuously drain attention, pulling energy toward the past (unfinished tasks or past failures of delivery) or future (anxieties about what’s coming). Intentionally designed environments allow energy to remain present, focused on what matters now.

Research on Attention Restoration Theory confirms this: even a 40-minute walk in nature measurably enhances executive control capacity. The environment is never neutral it either supports or undermines your ability to access and deploy your information skillfully.

3. Leadership Presence 

When you encounter a leader with strong executive presence, what you might be perceiving is energetic coherence. Their attention is unified. They’re not fragmented between their inner narrative and outer reality. They hold space for complexity without becoming reactive. This presence is the natural result of managed energy.

They’ve learned to regulate their own energetic states so they can think clearly, access their strategic information, and create an environment where others can do the same. So often this is why presence is felt as trustworthy and inspiring as it signals to others that this person has their stuff in order.

Information on Archetypes , Models, and Patterns

If energy is the fuel, information is the blueprint. Information tells energy where to go and how to move effectively.

Archetypes are universal patterns of leadership behavior and identity.   Carl Jung identified archetypes as fundamental templates. The Ruler, the Sage, the Warrior, the Caregiver are energetic concepts condensed to navigate the world at higher speeds.   When you recognize these patterns in yourself and others, you gain access to compressed wisdom about how energy typically flows through different leadership styles. Archetypes are often misunderstood as this woo woo concept coming from somewhere in the universe but they exist in our minds and it influences our behaviour strongly. 

Models and frameworks are structured information such as flow theory, emotional intelligence, systems thinking, strategic planning tools.   These are energy blueprints.   They show you how to direct your energy most effectively based on accumulated research and experience. 

Experience-based patterns are personal information you’ve accumulated. You’ve navigated difficult conversations before. You’ve launched projects. You’ve managed crises. Each experience converts energy (the lived moment) into information (the pattern you internalized). The more consciously you reflect on experience, the more useful information you extract.

Here’s a thought: information is how we “show the way” to others . Remember the etymology of leadership is about guiding movement.   You guide others by sharing the patterns you’ve learned, by modeling how energy flows through challenges, by providing frameworks that help them direct their own energy more skillfully. 

But information without action is useless.   And action without information is chaotic.  Leadership is your integration point it is quite frankly where energy and information meet, where presence and pattern unite, where the subjective experience of being fully in the present moment coincides with objective outcomes and measurable impact. 

Flow Leadership:  The Integration of Energy and Information 

This brings us to flow and to why I approach leadership through this lens.

Flow, was first described by psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, and is most frequently known as the state of optimal experience. It’s when you’re so fully engaged in an activity that nothing else seems to matter. Time perception shifts. Self-consciousness dissolves. Action and awareness merge. You’re completely present with what you’re doing, and everything flows naturally.

Csíkszentmihalyi identified eight conditions that enable flow: clear goals, immediate feedback, balanced challenge and skill, deep concentration, being present in the moment, a sense of control, altered time perception, and egolessness. When these conditions align or arise in your experience, you access peak performance, deep satisfaction, and effortless effectiveness.

But flow isn’t just for individual productivity or athletic performance. Flow is the result of when energy and information are perfectly aligned .

In flow, you have enough challenge to engage all your skill (your information and patterend behaviours), but not so much that you’re overwhelmed and lose access to it. Your energy is fully present, not scattered across past regrets or future anxieties. The environment supports your focus. Emotional triggers are minimized or managed. Your attention is unified, pointing in one direction, uninterrupted.

This is the leadership state we need to cultivate.

Flow in Leadership Context

When you’re in flow as a leader, decisions become obvious. Not because you’re oversimplifying, but because your energy is aligned and your information is accessible. You can see patterns clearly. You can sense what’s needed. You respond rather than react. Others feel your clarity and are naturally drawn into alignment with your vision.

Flow leadership is definitely not about achieving a permanent high-performance state, that’s neither possible nor desirable. More accurately its about understanding the conditions that allow flow to arise and intentionally creating those conditions for yourself and your team.

This is where energy and environment become crucial. An executive working in a noisy, chaotic office can’t access flow because their attention keeps fragmenting to irrelevant stimuli. A founder constantly triggered by team conflict can’t think strategically as their nervous system is in continuous threat response. A leader who hasn’t learned to manage their emotions is l just like a musician playing on a broken instrument, the information (the music) is there, but the energy (Vibration from string) can’t express it clearly.

Why Flow Leadership Is the Path Forward

Flow leadership represents a paradigm shift from time management to energy design. It moves from “How do I do more?” to “How do I create conditions where effectiveness flows naturally?”.

This approach is:

Experiential : It begins with your subjective, felt experience. How present are you? Where is your attention? What’s your energetic state? These soft questions are the foundation of everything else.

Evidence-based : Flow states are measurable. Neuroscience can track the brain networks involved. Performance outcomes in flow are documented across domains from athletics to business. And as much as we still lack proper data it has come a long way to prove that its not just an imaginary phenomena.

Practical : The conditions for flow; clear goals, immediate feedback, challenge-skill balance, minimized distractions, can be intentionally designed into your work and leadership practice.

Integrative : Flow leadership synthesizes ancient wisdom (presence, virtue, strategic intelligence) with modern research (neuroscience, positive psychology, systems thinking) into a coherent framework for action. 

Flow leadership is inherently aligned with both your subjective experience and objective outcomes.  When you’re in flow, you feel fulfilled, engaged, and alive and you’re also more effective, creative, and impactful.   This isn’t a trade-off between well-being and performance and is quite clearly the recognition that they emerge from the same source:   managed energy flowing through good information. 

What This Series Will Explore 

Leadership Archives is an ongoing exploration of these ideas in depth. In the articles ahead, we’ll investigate: 

Research Integration : I’ll write about ancient leadership wisdom, Stoic philosophy, Eastern traditions, indigenous leadership models and also  explore how they map onto modern neuroscience findings about attention, emotion, and optimal states.  We’ll examine contemporary leadership theories (transformational, authentic, servant leadership and more).   And we’ll unpack practical frameworks from flow psychology, systems thinking, and complexity theory. 

Real-World Application : Theory without application is just intellectual masturbation.  I’ll interview founders and executives who have buit companies and lead teams. We’ll explore case studies of organizations that have redesigned their cultures and environments for energy optimization and flow.   I’ll speak with researchers and coaches working at the intersection of neuroscience, psychology, and leadership and people who are translating ancient wisdom and modern science into practical tools. 

The Experiential Focus : Each article will invite you to notice your own energy and attention.   Where is your focus right now?   What’s your energetic state as you lead?   We’ll expand on the subjective experience of leadership and what it feels like to be present, to be fragmented, to be in flow all while staying grounded in measurable outcomes and practical impact.   Your effectiveness as a leader ultimately depends on how you show up, not just what you do. 

My aim is to guide you through a transformation arc: 

From “I need to do more” to “I need to manage my energy” 

From “How do I influence others?” to “How do I create conditions where influence flows naturally?” 

From “What’s my leadership style?” to “What’s my energetic signature, and how do I design my environment to support it?” 

If I can help with reorienting how you understand leadership itself as the art of presence, the management of energy, and the skillful deployment of accumulated wisdom that would make my world.

The Leaders We Need Now

We dont need more Leader with the biggest egos, the most aggressive strategies, or the longest work hours. We need ones who understand that presence is power , that environment shapes possibility , and that information is the bridge between what we know and what we do .

The would be leaders who have learned to manage their own energy so they can facilitate for complexity without becoming reactive. They’ve designed their environments both physical and relational to support focus rather than fragment it. They’ve internalized frameworks and archetypes deeply enough that wisdom flows naturally in the moment.

These leaders show the way not by commanding or controlling, but by embodying a state that others recognize and aspire to. They guide through presence. They influence through clarity. They create cultures where energy flows toward what matters most.

This is the leadership our time demands and it’s what this series will help you cultivate.

If this resonates with you, subscribe to Leadership Archives. This is for leaders who sense that something is missing from traditional leadership advice, who are ready to explore the experiential dimension of effectiveness, and who want to integrate ancient wisdom with modern practice.

The path forward begins with presence. Let’s walk it together.