Ep 256: When leadership starts asking more of you, the instinct is often to go looking for something new, a new framework, a different leadership model, another way of communicating or delegating or influencing. You might recognise how it goes, right? The course that you felt so clear on the day, the notes that you meant to go through properly, and then a few weeks later, a moment where you knew exactly what to do, and you did what you've always done anyway. Followed by that so familiar thought. I need to get better at this. But what if the next evolution of your leadership isn't something else that you need to learn? So today we're looking at why what you know doesn't always show up when you need it most. What's happening underneath that, and why the answer might be closer than that next course. So let's get started, shall we? Welcome to Project Joyful, the podcast for health-centered leaders. Project Joyful is a space for conversations at the intersection of leadership, health, and lived experience. Here we explore what it means to lead in ways that honour your body, protect long-term capacity, and support a life that feels as good on the inside as it looks on the outside. This episode is part of the Biology of Leadership series, and this series We explore leadership through your body, not as a performance to optimize or a mindset to fix, but as a biological experience shaped over time. Leadership doesn't just live in decisions, strategies, or roles. It lives in your nervous system, in how responsibility is held, and how reliability and care quietly organize your body long before you're consciously aware of These conversations are for leaders who are capable, trusted, and effective, and who are curious about how leadership is experienced internally, not just how it performs externally. There's nothing you need to do as you listen, no insight you need to apply. This is simply an invitation to understand what's been shaping your experience of leadership beneath this service, and what's become possible when biology becomes possible. Part of the conversation. Let's begin, shall we? You're on a leadership course. Fun day, in person, a conference room in a hotel with a long table, jug of water at each end, and a notebook waiting at every seat. You've cleared your calendar for it, which took some doing, by the way, and you've told your team that you'll only be on email at the breaks. Mid morning, the facilitator draws a model on the flip chart and starts talking about the moment someone brings you a problem and the instinct to hand them the answer. You write it down and then you draw a big circle around it with your highlighter because this bit's important. And you can see how you're gonna use it when you're back at work. By afternoon tea, you've filled eleven pages and you've already got people in mind. Your Thursday one on one, the person who always appears at your door just after ten. This is good, you say to yourself, I'm gonna use this. You drive home with the notebook on the passenger seat, running back through the flip chart in your head. Those four boxes, the questions that you're meant to ask first. yeah, this is good. I'm definitely going to use this. Next morning you're at your desk by ten to eight with a day's worth of emails that you weren't there to answer yesterday, and you put the notebook on the corner of your desk, next to the keyboard where you'll see it. I'll go through it properly on Friday afternoon, you say to yourself. Friday afternoon and there's an email that needs a reply before the weekend and there's a paper that's due first thing on Monday. The notebook is still there on the corner of the desk. You look at it and you think, well, I'll get to that next week. You finish that email. On Tuesday, the notebook moves to make room for the board papers. It goes on top of the pile on the left hand side of your desk. And by Thursday, something else has landed on top of it. Three weeks later and you're looking for something else entirely and you lift that pile and there it is. You pick it up. yeah that course. You hold on to that notebook for a second, you don't open it. I'll go through this properly. You put it back on the pile and you go back to the email that you were halfway through. It's a Thursday, a few weeks after the course, and you've been in back to back meetings since eight. You got until half past before the next one. You open the paper that you're meant to be reviewing for Monday, you scroll to where you left off, and you're one line into the next paragraph when she appears beside your desk. Hey, have you got a minute? You glance at the corner of your screen. ten seven. Yeah, sure. She pulls a chair over from the empty desk that's next to yours and she sits down. Laptop on her knees. She starts telling you what's going on with the client and Somewhere in her second sentence, you already know what she needs to do. You can see the whole thing laid out. So you start telling her who to call first, what to say, what to leave until next week. She turns her laptop so that you can see the email that she's been trying to write. You read the first paragraph and you say, Okay, so what I do here is open with where things are at, and she nods and she starts typing, and then she stops. You lean in and you say Yeah, start with thanks for your patience while we've worked through this. She types it. You read it back over her shoulder. Then the next slide. And then the one after that. And then at some point you take the laptop off her knees and you put it on your desk because it's quicker. Half an hour later you glance at the corner of your screen and you realise that your next meeting's already started. The email's drafted and most of it's yours. You hand her a laptop back, she says, that's so much better, thank you. That's really helpful. And you're already on your feet, grabbing your own laptop, walking a pace to that meeting room with the paper still open on your screen. That evening, sitting at the lights on the way home, that flip chart comes back to you. Those four boxes, the question that you were meant to ask first. That was it. That was the exact moment the whole morning of the course was about, and you had Half an hour of it and you didn't even see it. I knew that. The light goes green and you pull away and the thought comes with you. I knew that. I wrote it down. I drew a circle around it. By the time you're in your driveway it's turned into something else. I really do need to get better at this. The following Tuesday an email comes in, about a half day masterclass on coaching conversations for senior leaders. You read the whole thing and then you open up your calendar and you check the date. Yeah, I need this course. This is the bit that I've been missing. Maybe this one will stick. The notebook from that other course is still on the pile on the left hand side of your desk, two papers down now. Learning's always been how you close a gap, right? When something was hard, you studied it. You prepared for the question before anyone asked it. You sat the exams, you got the qualifications, and it worked every single time. And in episode two hundred and fifty five, we looked at what happens when you outgrow a success strategy. Reaching for more knowledge can be one of those strategies, and it's a very convincing one because it looks so responsible. Nobody's ever raised an eyebrow at you for signing up to another course. At your desk that Thursday, nothing felt missing. You answered her question the way you always do, and it was a good answer. It was only later at the lights that that moment came back to you. And by the time you were in the driveway, the conclusion was always there. I need to get better at this. And by the following Tuesday you're checking your calendar for a masterclass on that thing that you think you're missing. And all the while the notebook with your notes from the course, the ones that felt so valuable that day. Well they're still sitting two papers down. So what happened at ten seven? The model on that flip chart, the four boxes that you circled in the highlighter on the course? Well that depends on a part of your brain called the prefrontal cortex. It sits just behind your forehead and it's what lets you pause when someone pulls a chair up to your desk with a problem. You pause and then you ask the question that the course told you to ask first. What have you thought about so far? And that happens before you hand over the answer that you can already see. Your prefrontal cortex is also one of the most sensitive parts of your brain when dealing with how much pressure you're under. Professor Amy Arnstead at Yale has spent decades researching this and what her work shows is that even fairly mild stress, especially the kind that you don't feel in control of, well, it can dial down the prefrontal cortex really quickly. And then that stress chemistry floods in and the brain hands floor to faster older circuits, including the ones that run your most practiced habits. So you've been in back to back since eight that morning. You've been trying to get back into that paper all morning. And then she was beside your desk with a client problem and your brain reached for the response that you've given thousands of times. You knew the answer, so you gave her the answer. And everything from that course day was still there in your memory, you know, the four boxes, the question you were meant to ask first, the bit you circled in the highlighter. But the part of you that would have reached for it had been turned down. Then you're at the lights on the way home. The day's done. Nobody needs anything from you and that pressure has started to ease. And there it is, the flip chart right where you left it. I knew that. Yeah, you did. You learned it in a quiet room with a cleared calendar, nobody needing anything from you. You needed it at ten seven on a Thursday, two hours into a morning that's already asked a lot of you. That Thursday was probably one of many. Looking back over the last few months, there have been more of them than you'd like. The decision that you leave until tomorrow because by four o'clock you just can't face one more decision. The evening that ends and the morning that starts with nothing much in between to fill you back up. Things that used to take a bit of effort now take a lot of it. Same knowledge, same experience, same you, but with a little less in the tank each week. So somewhere along the way, part of your identity was built on a version of you who could handle all of this with room to spare. And for some women that's being the one who's always prepared. For others, it's being the one who gets it right or the one who keeps getting better. And that identity carries a quiet assumption inside of it that your capacity stays the same. And the woman in the conference room taking notes is who you are all of the time. So when there's less there, when you've got less energy or you're less able to cope, or you just don't have the reserves to make one more decision, it reads as something being wrong. And with the way you're leading, maybe with you. And when there's something wrong, you fix it. That's what you've always done, and you're really good at it. You find the course, the book, the masterclass. I need to get better at this. I need this. And once the date's in your calendar Something in you settles a little bit. This is a really intelligent adaptation. Like learning has solved nearly every problem you've ever faced. So of course it's where your system goes first. Your reflex is to add, though, whether it's another course, another set of notes, another model to remember and apply under pressure. And this is in a season when your capacity's already drawn down. Every one of those additions is another withdrawal. The notebook, two papers down as far as Full of great ideas. And it's also one more thing on the list still waiting for that Friday afternoon. So the fix that you trust most is drawing on the very thing you're running low of. Capacity moves, it rises and it falls with the season you're in, with how much you've been carrying, with how well you've been able to recover. And that's just biology. You can be every bit as capable as you've always been and have less available to you in a long time. Demanding season. Knowing that is part of being capable too. So is trusting that what's in the notebook's already yours. And that what it's been waiting for is room for you to use it. So your next step might actually be less, fewer things added, and factoring in the conditions that you're leading in. Fifteen minutes between meetings instead of none. An evening that ends when it ends. So tomorrow starts with something back in the tank. Noticing when she's pulling that chair over at ten seven that you've been running back to back since eight and letting that count for something. The framework's already yours. The room to use it is the part that you get to build. Those course emails are gonna keep coming. Maybe next month there's one about difficult conversations or strategic influence. And you open it. And the familiar thought. arrives right on time. I need this. And maybe sitting just beside it there's a different question. What's been drawing on my capacity lately? And what's been giving any of it back? That second question brings you back to yourself, to the season you're in, the weeks you've been carrying, and how much recovery has been able to happen in between them. You already bring extraordinary precision to your work. You can read a paper and see the gap in the second paragraph before anyone else has even finished the first. You know where the numbers sit across the business and what's moving them. Leading with your biology in the picture means letting some of that attention fall on yourself as well. Your energy, how well you've recovered, how clear your thinking is by mid afternoon. How lightly these things become part of how you lead. Information about the conditions you're leading in. Your ambition stays exactly where it is. You can still be the one who keeps getting better. Getting better can include knowing what your capacity is doing and leading with that in the picture as well. The next evolution of your leadership may be your biology catching up with everything you already know. If this is you wondering what else might be influencing how leadership feels for you right now, I've created the biology of sustainable leadership. It's a short guide written for noticing. It explores why leadership can feel harder than your capability suggests, what's happening in your brain and your body underneath that, and three quiet mismatches between the way modern leadership runs and the way human biology works pace, availability, and carrying responsibility on your own. It finishes with a few reflections that you can hold lightly over the coming week. There's nothing in it to implement, just a clearer view on what your capacity's been carrying. You'll find it at tracy tutty.com forward slash leadership. Hey, thanks for listening to today's podcast. Can I ask you a favor? If our conversation spoke to you today, could you please take a moment to leave a five star review? 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