Do you know the feeling when you’re all aces? A few years ago, I had one of those days.
I’d built a session I was truly proud of: a full-day senior leadership team retreat with a client I loved. It felt like my version of Abbey Road, great content, seamless transitions, the fullest expression of my leadership creativity.
The morning of, I wore the perfect outfit. I’d been training for a marathon, so my clothes felt looser than usual. My confidence soared so much so that I even opted for the higher heels. I strutted into the hotel lobby, and the concierge handed me my workshop materials, delivered the night before. I was ready! When I bent over to pick up the boxes, wouldn’t you know what happened? My heels slid out from under me. Before I knew it, I was starfished on the floor … right in front of a crowd of people.
I recovered from the embarrassment. But it was a great reminder: there’s no such thing as perfect.
I’ve never met a leader with a perfect life. Maybe the perfect pictures of a life. The perfect social media posts. But a perfect life? Easy mornings with ultra-cooperative kids and a spouse who’s made everyone’s favorite breakfast. A commute with no coffee spilled on the shirt. Productive meetings where every voice contributes at its best. Frictionless peer relationships. A market that always favors the business.
Perfect isn’t in the job description of a leader. Besides, if everything were perfect, why would we even need leaders? We need leaders for the tough stuff: the challenges, the struggles, the last-minute problem-solving. Whether that’s a Tide stick on a coffee-stained tie or jockeying for the resources to get one more proposal out the door.
With so much we can’t control, we can control one powerful leadership decision: the energy we can channel when we need it the most, despite the swirl going on in our worlds.
So where do you reclaim your energy? Here’s what I do.
Reframe the moment. Before I do anything else, I ask myself a few questions. In the grand scheme of things, how big a deal is this, really? Will it matter in a week, a month, a year? Is there another way to look at this situation besides the one I landed on first? What’s the fastest, most useful way to move through it instead of getting stuck in it? A reframe doesn’t mean pretending the hard thing didn’t happen. It means refusing to let one moment write the story for the rest of the day.
Choose your next move on purpose. Once I’ve reframed, I think about what’s ahead of me and what energy that moment actually requires. Walking into a tense negotiation calls for a different energy than walking into a team celebration, and I don’t leave that to chance. Sometimes I need a mantra, a short phrase I repeat to reset my mindset. Sometimes it’s music, a specific song that shifts my mood in under three minutes. Sometimes it’s a few minutes of quiet, stepping into a stairwell or a parked car just to breathe and recalibrate before I walk back into the room. The tool matters less than the intention: choosing the energy you bring instead of carrying in whatever you happen to be feeling.
Build energy strategies for the long haul. The reframe and the next-move reset get you through a single moment. But leadership is an endurance sport, not a sprint, and that requires fueling your mind, body, and spirit on a daily basis, not just when things go sideways. For me, that means protecting sleep even when the calendar fights me on it, moving my body most days (that marathon training has taught me more about leadership stamina than most leadership books have), eating in a way that keeps my energy steady instead of spiking and crashing, and building in small moments of stillness, whether that’s prayer, journaling, or simply a walk without my phone. None of this is about perfection either. It’s about consistency, the small, repeatable habits that keep your reserves full so you have something to draw on when life throws you a hotel lobby moment.
The smallest energy habits let us recover fast from the mishaps, mistakes, and missteps that come with a life in motion. Good luck to you this week as you continue to make conscious choices to be the leader the moments you enter require!
