I remember too well when I realized I was burnt out. I don’t even like to talk about it, let alone sit here to write about it. It was a fatigue that sleep could not fix. I was full of effort and achievement with no reward. There was a chasm between what I was doing and why I was doing it. I just kept pushing forward because that had always been my answer to everything. Discipline. Endurance. Output. Somewhere along the way, the drive that once energized me had inverted. What was once a passion and life-affirming entrepreneurship journey had started becoming life-draining instead.
At the time, it did not look like burnout. On paper, things were working. Deals closed. Teams moved. Projects delivered. KPIs good. Burnout rarely announces itself in the KPIs. It hides behind competence. You keep producing because you don’t know anything else, even as the internal pressure rises. You tell yourself relief will come after the next milestone, the next quarter, the next round or that elusive exit. But relief and clarity never arrives on its own. It has to be deliberately designed into the system. Left unattended, burnout simply becomes a founder’s operating environment.
The first thing burnout distorted was my decision making. I became narrower. Less curious. More reactive. Far more curt. Decisions optimized for my short-term relief rather than long-term vision. I deflected complex conversations because they felt heavy. I delayed strategic choices because I did not trust my own energy to see them through. Risk tolerance became like gambling at a casino. Some days I played it too safe, protecting myself from more load. Other days I took unnecessary risks out of quiet desperation, hoping momentum would shake something loose.
None of this looked too dramatic from the outside.
From the inside though, it felt like operating with a dimmer switch permanently turned down.
Company culture followed. When a leader is burnt out, the organization feels it and absorbs it, whether they intend to or not. I became less present – hiding behind monitors at my home-office. Less available. Meetings shortened not out of efficiency but out of depletion. Patience thinned. Feedback became more transactional. I still cared, but care without energy does not translate well. Teams sense when decisions are made from survival instead of vision. Over time, that shows up as hesitation, second-guessing, and quiet disengagement. Our once-thriving company culture slowly disintegrated into something I don’t even have great words for..
I tried taking weeks off. Many times. Trips to Japan did not help. Neither did saunas, meditation, nor self-help books. I didn’t realize it then, but the problem was not tiredness. It was disconnection from purpose. Time away, followed by a return to the same incentives, the same internal pressure, the same unresolved questions, only reinforced the loop. Rest without redesign just reinforces burnout. What I needed was not another getaway. It was honesty about what was fueling me, and what was quietly consuming me.
Burnout thrives on avoidance. Avoidance of discomfort. Avoidance of parts of ourselves neglected. Avoidance of the question underneath all the motion. Why am I doing this in this way? The shift for me began slowly when I began to reveal how I’m feeling to my mentor – a former C-level at Mattel & IBM, turned coach. He shared that I should consider stop ignoring the signals of my burnout, turn towards it and start listening to it. With his council, I stopped asking how can I push through and started asking what is this trying to tell me. That question opened something within me and opened a pathway. Over time and with work with my coach, exhaustion stopped being an enemy to fight and became a signal to tune-in to. Awareness replaced brute force. And awareness, applied consistently, opened the door to purposeful actions. All of this possible because I opened up to my mentor and had regular dialogue with him.
Getting help was not passive or vague. It was uncomfortable at first. He asked me key questions to ponder I would never have considered on my own, recommended I sit down and write out my responses in detail. Working with my mentor meant slowing down enough to examine the stories I had been running for years. Stories about responsibility. About self-worth being tied to output. About rest being earned rather than deserved and required. Being coached, for me, looked like rigorous reflection paired with accountability. It meant tracing patterns across decades of my life, often back to my childhood. It meant naming tradeoffs I had been avoiding and designing decisions that aligned with values instead of habits.
Practically, it changed how I worked. Clearer boundaries. Fewer priorities. Decisions made earlier instead of postponed. Delegation that was real, not deflection. Whereas I used to make nearly all the decisions, I worked with our team to empower them all to make their own decisions in their capacity.
I let go of a lot of control I never should have had in the first place.
Space built into the calendar not as recovery, but as part of the work itself. Internally, it meant tolerating unease instead of numbing it with KPI analysis on dashboards. Letting go of identities that were no longer serving me – tough one but very rewarding. Redefining success as something sustainable, repeatable, and meaningful.
This did not happen quickly. It was built steadily over years. But the result was a life and career that felt stable, peaceful, and successful in a way that did not require constant self-extraction. Burnout stopped running the system because I was no longer ignoring its signals and had learned to attune and tend to my purpose.
If you are experiencing similar signals, invite yourself to take a pause. Step away from the next task. Do not ask what you need to finish. Ask what you need to feel whole again right now. That is where it began for me and what I work to pay-forward to the lives of other founders and CEOs. Working with an executive coach became the most meaningful journey of my career.
If you could use more support, it is not weakness, and maybe it’s a sign to explore coaching with someone you feel comfortable with.