Finding Your Rhythm Again: Leadership, Burnout, and the Power of Joy
Part of the Change Series on leadership, rhythm, and personal growth.
For most of our careers, we are taught a very simple formula for success:
Work harder.
Push longer.
Outperform everyone around you.
Grit becomes the defining trait of high performers. The ability to keep pushing when others slow down. The willingness to sacrifice comfort, time, and sometimes even health in the pursuit of achievement.
And for a while, that formula works.
But eventually something else starts to happen.
The work becomes mechanical.
The calendar becomes full, but the work becomes empty.
The purpose that once drove the effort starts to fade into the background.
This is where burnout quietly begins.
Not because someone lacks the ability to work hard, but because the rhythm of the work has been lost.
I recently read a story about Olympic figure skater Alysa Liu that captured this idea perfectly. At the peak of her career, when the world expected her to keep climbing, she walked away from competitive skating entirely.
Not because she failed. Because she was exhausted.
The routines that once felt creative and joyful had turned into rigid systems of expectation. The sport that had once been an expression of freedom began to feel like a performance machine she was trapped inside.
She described feeling like a puppet. So she stepped away. No competitions. No training cycles.
No pressure to perform. Instead, she simply lived.
She traveled. She explored other parts of life. She disconnected from the relentless performance loop that had defined her identity.
And something interesting happened. She rediscovered joy.
When she eventually returned to skating, the work looked different. It wasn’t driven by pressure or obligation. It was driven by curiosity and love for the craft.
And she didn’t just return. She won Olympic gold.
The Myth of Endless Grit
The story challenges one of the most common myths about leadership and success. We often assume that the highest performers are the people who never slow down.
But that isn’t actually what sustains long-term excellence. Endless pressure eventually breaks the rhythm. And rhythm is what makes performance sustainable.
Great musicians understand this. Music isn’t just sound.
It’s timing. It’s pauses. It’s silence between notes. Without rhythm, the music becomes noise.
The same thing happens in careers.
When the calendar fills every available moment with meetings, deadlines, travel, and pressure, the work can begin to feel like noise.
Productivity might still exist. But joy disappears.
Burnout Is Often a System Signal
One of the most misunderstood aspects of burnout is what it actually represents. Burnout is rarely about weakness. More often, it’s a signal.
A signal that something about the environment, expectations, or rhythm of work has drifted too far from the conditions that allow people to thrive.
Many high performers blame themselves when they feel this way.
They think:
“I should be stronger.”
“I should push through this.”
“Everyone else seems to handle it.”
But sometimes the problem isn’t the individual.
Sometimes the system around them is misaligned.
When the pace becomes constant acceleration without recovery, even the strongest performers eventually lose the joy that made them great in the first place.
Rediscovering Flow
What Alysa Liu’s story shows is that stepping away isn’t always failure. Sometimes it is recalibration. Sometimes it is rediscovering identity beyond the expectations of performance.
And when that happens, something powerful returns.
Flow.
Flow is what happens when skill, curiosity, and purpose align again.
It’s the difference between forcing work and enjoying it.
Between surviving a career and actually experiencing it.
Many leaders discover that their best ideas, best decisions, and best energy come not when they are grinding harder, but when they have regained that sense of rhythm.
Finding Your Own Rhythm
In a world driven by constant connectivity, this may be one of the hardest lessons to embrace. Technology makes it possible to work all the time. Emails never stop. Messages never pause. The calendar never fully clears.
But sustainable leadership isn’t about constant motion. It’s about intentional rhythm.
Time to think. Time to step back. Time to reconnect with why the work mattered in the first place. Because the truth is simple. You can force performance for a while.
But you can’t force joy.
And joy — more than grit — is often what fuels the most meaningful and sustained success.