Why Recharging Is a Leadership Practice
When you’re not speaking or coaching, what helps you recharge?
I was recently asked this question, and my immediate answer was physical activity, especially outdoors with someone I’m close to. There is something about the combination of the earth’s natural beauty, the smells, the fresh air, moving my body, feeling my muscles work and my energy move, and sharing it with someone whose company I enjoy that feels like plugging my mind, body, and spirit into a gigantic electrical outlet. I come back different. I’m more awake, more present, more connected to myself, and more available for the people and work that matter to me.
That got me thinking about what it really means to recharge, especially for leaders. Because I work with a lot of leaders who are taxed out and maxed out. Their calendars are full, their minds are full, and there is always someone who needs something from them. They are carrying the goals, problems, emotions, expectations, and sometimes even the anxiety of the people around them. They finish one meeting already thinking about the next three, and even when they stop working, their minds often don’t.
For many high-performing leaders, exhaustion has become so normal they don’t recognize it as exhaustion anymore. It’s simply how leadership feels.
That’s a problem.
Through my work in executive leadership coaching, I meet incredibly capable people who know how to produce. They know how to push through, solve problems, take care of people, manage competing priorities, meet commitments, and keep moving when things get hard. What many leaders haven’t learned is how to recognize what actually restores them.
We know how to expend energy. We aren’t always nearly as intentional about renewing it.
For years, I associated recharging with stopping. Doing nothing. Taking a vacation. Getting away from work. And while all of those things can be restorative, I’ve learned that recharging for me isn’t necessarily about doing less, but about doing the things that bring me back to life.
Movement is one of the fastest ways for me to get there. It might be a long hike, a bike ride, or walking my dog wearing my weighted vest. I love feeling my body work and getting stronger. When I’m outside, there’s another dimension to it. I notice the sky, the trees, the temperature, the smells and sounds around me. My attention moves out of whatever has been consuming my mind and into the present moment.
Sometimes I want more intensity. I love moving through a steam room, cold plunge, and hot tub sequence. There is something about the contrast that creates an almost electric charge in my body. It wakes me up, calms me down, and wakes me up all over again.
Other times, what restores me is stillness. Meditation is part of my daily practice. Sometimes it’s 20 minutes of silence and deep release. Other times it’s an active, hour-long guided visualization that engages my mind and imagination. One quiets me. The other activates me. Both bring me back into connection with myself.
That connection to self is something I think many leaders lose without realizing it. We become very good at asking, “What does everyone need from me?” What does my team need? What does the board need? What does my boss need? What does the organization need? What does my family need? Those questions matter, but when they are the only questions we ask, we can spend years giving from an increasingly depleted place.
There is another question worth asking: What do I need to be fully present and available for the life and leadership I’m creating?
One of the things I’ve learned through years of executive leadership coaching is that you cannot separate the leader from the leadership. You bring yourself with you. You bring your energy, your stress, your patience, your frustration, your presence, your distraction, your curiosity, your fear, and your patterns into every room you enter.
People feel that. You don’t have to announce that you’re stressed for the people around you to experience your stress. When you are chronically overloaded, everything can begin to feel urgent. Listening gets shorter. Curiosity disappears. Patience gets thinner. You become more reactive and less intentional. You may think you’re simply driving results while the people around you are learning to manage your energy.
This is where recharging becomes a leadership conversation. The point isn’t that you need to recharge the way I do. You may hate cold plunges. A weighted vest may sound miserable. Meditation may not be your thing, and a long hike might drain you rather than restore you. There is no universal formula. The responsibility is to know your own.
What gives you energy? What quiets the noise in your head? Where do you feel most like yourself? Who are the people whose company leaves you fuller rather than depleted? What strengthens you physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually? What brings you back to life?
Those questions belong in conversations about executive leadership coaching just as much as strategy, communication, influence, performance, and results do, because the state of the person leading impacts the people being led.
We also need to challenge the belief that exhaustion is evidence of commitment. There is a strange badge of honor around being overloaded. Back-to-back meetings, 12-hour days, missed workouts, unused vacation time, eating at your desk, answering emails at midnight — we talk about these things as though they demonstrate how important or committed we are.
I know that pattern because I’ve lived versions of it myself. But working yourself to the bone is not the same thing as being effective. Being depleted is not a leadership competency, and sacrificing yourself to your work does not automatically make the work better.
Eventually, the opposite happens. When you are depleted, you lose access to some of the best parts of yourself. Your perspective narrows. Your patterns take over. Things you could normally handle become irritating. Conversations you need to have get avoided or handled poorly. You react when you could have responded. You control when you could have been curious.
Leadership gives us these moments every day. Someone disappoints you. A result isn’t what you expected. An employee needs something when you feel like you have nothing left to give. Change isn’t happening fast enough. You get challenged in a meeting. Something you care deeply about goes sideways.
Who shows up in those moments?
For me, recharging creates space between everything coming at me and how I respond to it. Movement, nature, meditation, connection, physical challenge, and silence each give me a different way to release what I’ve been carrying and reconnect with the energy I want to bring into my life.
That’s why I’ve stopped thinking about these practices as things I do when I have time. They are part of how I take responsibility for myself. And taking responsibility for yourself is at the heart of executive leadership coaching.
We spend enormous amounts of energy trying to change our circumstances, our people, our organizations, and the results we are getting. Yet some of the most powerful change available to us starts much closer to home. It starts with noticing our own state. What am I carrying? What patterns am I operating from? What energy am I bringing into this conversation, this relationship, this team, this organization? Is this the version of me I actually want leading?
You don’t have to wait until you are completely depleted to do something about it. In fact, I think we need to stop treating recharging like emergency maintenance. Know what restores you before you desperately need restoration. Build those things into your life and protect them, not because you need another item on your self-care checklist, but because you know who you become when you don’t.
Recharging brings me back to myself. And when I come back to myself, I have more of myself available for the people I love, the work I care about, and the leaders and organizations I serve.
That may be the biggest shift in how I think about recharging today. It isn’t to escape my life. It’s about having the energy to fully inhabit it. It isn’t stepping away from leadership. It’s taking responsibility for the energy I bring to leadership.
So if you’re taxed out, maxed out, carrying too much, and telling yourself you’ll recharge when things settle down, consider this: What if things don’t settle down?
What brings you back to life now?
You don’t need to adopt someone else’s routine. You do need to know what restores you and be willing to make space for it. Because the energy you bring to your life is the energy you bring to your leadership.
If you’re ready to look at the patterns driving how you lead, reconnect with yourself, and become more intentional about the energy and impact you bring to the people around you, check out Evolve the Leader Within, as seminar series designed for leaders like you to do just that!
