What the highest performers protect that the rest ignore.
Last time, I wrote about the cost of pushing through and why great performance requires to stop and to pause. Read it here.
This time I’d like to take that further. Because stopping the push is only the beginning. The harder question is: what do you replace it with?
I have been thinking about this since a conversation with a senior executive leading across multiple business lines in a complex, regulated industry. Her scope is wide: operations, technology, compliance, strategic initiatives - all moving simultaneously. Her results speak for themselves. She consistently delivers ( and overdelivers) beyond what is expected.
When I asked how she sustains it, she did not talk about boundaries or self-care. She spoke about curiosity. About deliberately changing the essence of her work - constantly shifting between topics, shifting between people. She talked about physical routine and regularity. About knowing what gives her energy and protecting it. I like to refer to this concepts as Energy Drainers and Energy Gainers.
Energy Drainers - everything that drains your energy during the day - including tasks and people.
Energy Gainers - everything that helps you to regain.
Learn more about yourself through a simple audit: track your energy levels throughout the day to see what drains you and what energises you. You may uncover valuable insights about yourself, the people you interact with, and your environment.
Self-aware leaders know very well what drains and what boosts them and when to reach for the right tool or practice when they feel depleted.
What she described, without using these exact words, was the deliberate maintenance of her capacity. Not capability. Capacity.
Capacity precedes Capability.
This distinction is at the centre of my work and my research.
Capability is what we can do: skills, knowledge, expertise.
Capacity is the inner container from which we do it: the ability to remain clear, regulated, and present under pressure. The word comes from the Latin ‘capax’. It means to be able to take in, hold, contain.
Most leadership development invests in capability. More tools. More frameworks. More competencies. The assumption is that leaders lack something, and that what they lack can be acquired. But the leaders I work with do not lack knowledge. What they lack is enough internal room to use what they already know, especially when the pressure is real.
Performance psychologist Jim Loehr, whose research on elite athletes at the Human Performance Institute shaped how we understand sustained performance, found that the highest performers do not operate at a constant level of output. They train in cycles - between intense demand and deliberate recovery. The recovery is not optional. It is the mechanism that makes the performance possible.
The same principle applies to the leaders I work with. The ones who sustain their performance are not the ones who push hardest. They are the ones who have learned, whether by instinct or by design, to work in a way that prevents them from reaching their capacity ceiling.
This is the subject of my new paper, The Capacity Ceiling: Why the most capable leaders still hit walls, and what shifts when you stop adding more and start expanding instead.
Reflection:
Where in your current rhythm are you maintaining your capacity — and where are you slowly depleting it without realising?
What gives you energy as a leader? When did you last deliberately protect it?