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You check your phone at 11:47 PM. Again.

Three new messages from coaching staff. Two "urgent" emails from the board. A text from your performance director about tomorrow's session changes.

You tell yourself you'll just quickly respond to the critical ones. Twenty minutes later, you're still scrolling, your mind racing with decisions that can't wait until morning.

Sound familiar?

Yeah, and I’ve been there too.

Here's what no one tells you about reaching the apex of sports leadership: The higher you climb, the more the role demands pieces of you that can't be replaced.

Your time. Your energy. Your mental bandwidth. Your personal relationships.

And slowly, imperceptibly, you become excellent at everything except taking care of the person carrying all this responsibility.

But in parallel there’s a process of ‘downward creep’ at play. You can only give what you’ve got and your reservoir is getting lower. Slowly, week by week.

Welcome to the invisible burnout crisis that's silently decimating sports leadership careers.

And it’s not through dramatic flame-outs, but through the gradual erosion of the very qualities that made you exceptional in the first place.

This week's edition is the first in a series I'm calling "Unspoken Burdens".

We're exposing the hidden psychological burdens that sports leaders carry but rarely acknowledge.

It's a little uncomfortable but you'll find it's useful……

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The Burnout That Doesn't Look Like Burnout

Traditional burnout is obvious. People stop performing. They become cynical. They check out.

But sports leaders experience something far more insidious....high-functioning burnout.

You're still delivering results. Still making critical decisions. Still showing up with the energy everyone expects from someone in your position.

But underneath, something fundamental has shifted.

Your creativity feels mechanical. Your passion feels manufactured. Your natural instincts, the ones that got you here, feel buried under layers of accumulated fatigue you can't quite put a name or label on.

You're running on fumes, but the engine still works. So you keep driving.

A Bundesliga sporting director once described it to me this way:

This is the burnout that high-achievers don't recognise because it doesn't fit the narrative of what burnout is supposed to look like.

The Always-On Addiction

Sport operates in a culture of perpetual urgency. Everything is critical. Every decision matters. Every moment counts.

This creates what psychologists call "continuous partial attention".

That’s a state where your mind never fully disengages from work, even during supposed downtime.

You're not just working long hours. You're psychologically tethered to your role 24/7.

Your brain learns to scan constantly for problems to solve, decisions to make, crises to prevent. It becomes hypervigilant, always ready to spring into action.

It’s seductive but there’s a cruel irony? This hypervigilance (which feels like dedication) actually diminishes your leadership effectiveness over time.

Famous copywriter Gary Halbert understood this pattern:

When you're always partially engaged, you're never fully engaged with anything.

Your strategic thinking becomes reactive rather than creative. Your decisions become templates rather than innovations.

In essence, your leadership becomes a performance rather than an authentic expression of your capabilities.

Not good and not sustainable.

The Hidden Cost of Never Switching Off

Here's what addictive ‘always on’ continuous engagement does to your leadership capacity:

Decision Fatigue Masquerading as Diligence: Every micro-decision throughout the day depletes your mental resources. By evening, you're making choices about family dinner with the same cognitive apparatus you used for million-pound transfer or team performance decisions.

Creative Atrophy: Innovation requires mental space. When your mind is constantly occupied with immediate concerns, you lose access to the lateral thinking that created your best strategic insights.

Emotional Numbing: Constant stimulation creates emotional calluses. You become less responsive to the subtle human dynamics that are crucial for elite leadership.

Physical Debt: Your body keeps score even when your mind doesn't. Chronic stress creates inflammatory responses that affect everything from decision-making clarity to injury recovery in your athletes.

A motorsport team principal I worked with realised this during a particularly demanding season:

The Legacy Leader's Energy Framework

The leaders who sustain excellence while maintaining personal sustainability operate from a fundamentally different energy philosophy.

They don't try to manage time better. They manage energy states.

The Three Energy Types Elite Leaders Protect

1. Generative Energy This is your creative, strategic, visionary capacity. It's what allows you to see possibilities others miss and devise solutions that don't yet exist.

Your Protection Strategy: Ring-fence specific times when you're completely unavailable for reactive tasks. One Olympic performance director I know schedules "generative blocks" every Tuesday and Thursday morning…she has no meetings, no emails, no interruptions.

2. Responsive Energy This is your capacity to make quality decisions under pressure, handle unexpected situations, and provide clear direction when others need guidance.

Your Protection Strategy: Batch your reactive work into specific windows rather than allowing it to scatter throughout your day. For example, a rugby director I advised shifted all "firefighting" to two 60-minute blocks, dramatically improving his decision quality.

3. Restorative Energy This is your ability to mentally and emotionally reset, process experiences, and return to baseline functioning.

Your Protection Strategy: Create true disconnection rituals. Not just "unplugging" but actively engaging in activities that require your full attention in, strictly, non-work domains. Remember how Alex Ferguson famously developed ‘me time’ through wine collecting and horse-racing?

The Recovery Paradox

Here's the psychological trap that keeps high-achievers stuck: You believe that resting is the opposite of achieving.

But neuroscience reveals something counterintuitive.

Peak performance requires strategic recovery.

Your brain literally needs downtime to consolidate learning, process complex information, and generate creative insights. The most innovative solutions often emerge during mental rest periods, not during focused work sessions.

Advertising guru Rory Sutherland puts it perfectly in a recent podcast:

When you never allow your unconscious mind to work, you're operating with half your cognitive capacity.

I read about a basketball operations executive who discovered this accidentally during a family vacation where he was completely offline for five days because of remote location.

"I had more strategic breakthroughs in that week than I'd had in the previous three months. It was like my brain finally had space to think."

The Always-On Exit Strategy

Breaking the always-on pattern requires more than intention. It requires systematic intervention:

Your Energy Audit

Track your energy levels hourly for one week. Note:

• When do you feel most creative?
• When are you most reactive?
• What activities actually restore you versus what you think should restore you?

To make it easy, use an App or simply the alarm and notes function on your phone.

Your Response Delay Protocol

Implement increasing delays before responding to non-urgent communications:

• Wait 2 hours before responding to emails
• Wait 24 hours before making non-critical decisions
• Wait 48 hours before reacting to external pressures

This might seem completely unworkable…but then again, will most of this work and these decisions matter in 20 years time??

Your Disconnection Ritual

Create a physical and psychological boundary between your leadership role and your personal identity:

• Change clothes when transitioning from work
• Use a specific self-talk phrase to signal mental shift e.g. "The director is now offline"
• Engage in activities that require full presence e.g. cooking, reading fiction, playing a musical instirument, physical exercise.

The Sustainable Excellence Model

Legacy Leaders understand something that burnout leaders don't.

Sustainability is a performance strategy, not a weakness.

When you protect your energy, you're not being lazy. You're being strategic about your most valuable resource.

When you create boundaries, you're not being unavailable. You're ensuring that when you are available, you're operating at full capacity.

When you disconnect, you're not neglecting your responsibilities. You're maintaining the psychological resources that make you exceptional at fulfilling them.

The goal isn't work-life balance. It's work-life integration that enhances both rather than depleting either.

Over lunch at a recent seminar, a Premier League CEO told me:

It’s more rewarding to hunt with a rifle, not a shotgun.

So, a simple question….Are you ready to stop running on empty?

Your legacy depends not just on what you achieve, but on how sustainable your path to achievement actually is.

The leaders who last aren't those who burn brightest. They're those who've learned to burn at exactly the right temperature for exactly the right duration. The ones who don’t burn out.

What would change if you started treating your energy as strategically as you treat your team's performance?

P.S. If you've been wrestling with the always-on trap or feeling like your effectiveness is declining despite working harder than ever, we should have a conversation. The smartest leaders recognise when they need an independent perspective to break patterns they can't see from inside them. Sometimes the most productive thing you can do is talk to someone who understands the unique pressures of your position and can help you find sustainable approaches that preserve both your performance and your well-being.

Book in a free Clarity Call today at https://calendly.com/p_clarke/20min​

Very last thing...I wonder if you could help me? Would it be difficult for you take 10 seconds and send this edition to a colleague or friend who would be interested or could benefit? Thanks in advance.

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Thank you for being part of the Leaders Coach community. The work on how to lead better is something you have to do alone. But you don't have to do it on your own. Onward and Upward, Paul Clarke

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