I remember all too well when I realized I was burnt out. I don’t even like to talk about it. The fatigue that sleep could not fix. Effort and achievement with no reward. A growing gap between what I was doing and why I was doing it. I kept pushing forward because that had always been my answer. Discipline. Endurance. Output. Somewhere along the way, the drive that once energized me had inverted. What was once a passion and life-affirming started becoming life-draining from me instead.
At the time, it did not look like failure. On paper, things were working. Deals closed. Teams moved. Projects delivered. That is the trap. Burnout rarely announces itself as collapse. It hides behind competence. You keep producing because you don’t know anything else, even as the internal cost rises. You tell yourself relief will come after the next milestone, the next quarter, the next exit. But ease 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 streaks, or 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 delays the crash. 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 truth. 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 CMO at Mattel, IBM executive turned coach. He shared that I should consider pausing trying to ignore my burnout and started 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. 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 meaningful action. 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 questions to ponder, recommended a few books I’d never heard of. Working with my mentor meant slowing down enough to examine the stories I had been running for years. Stories about responsibility. About worth being tied to output. About rest being earned rather than 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 cosmetic. 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 its signals were no longer being ignored.
If you are experiencing similar signals, 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, maybe it’s a sign to explore coaching.