Reclaiming Agency, Energy, and Power
The Pursuit of Control Is Costing Us Everything
Burnt out leaders and employees alike are inundated with the same, tired advice: take deep breaths, drink more water, and “prioritize self-care.”
While these suggestions can certainly improve one’s day, they don’t address the root cause of the exhaustion and cynicism plaguing so many people.
High-performing leaders aren’t burned out because they don’t know they should stay hydrated or get eight hours of sleep at night. Leaders often believe their value depends on how much they can carry—every outcome, every team member, every fire that needs extinguishing.
Leaders who internalize such an immense amount of responsibility often believe that if we can control more, we can outrun the chaos and achieve the desired outcomes. Ultimately, this dynamic reflects an attachment to control, rather than a commitment to agency and sufficiency, and it’s wreaking havoc on our quality of life and our efficacy as leaders.
Releasing Control, Reclaiming Agency
Control is seductive.
As humans, we are hard-wired to do whatever we can to ensure a good outcome. We wear thick boots to ensure our comfort in the winter, set reminders in our phone to leave early and beat the traffic, and spend hours fretting over an upcoming conversation to try and ensure we’ve thought through every possible outcome. In moderation, this instinct can be helpful–but in excess, it can make us anxious, frustrated, and exhausted trying to grasp for power where we have none.
Agency, by contrast, is rooted in integrity and groundedness. It helps us acknowledge that while we can’t control every outcome, we can choose how we engage in every moment, and how we respond to our circumstances. Agency helps us to choose, consciously and on purpose, which burdens we will choose to carry, and how we will respond to the multiple demands on our time, energy, and power.
Where control is defensive and depleting, agency is proactive and creative.
Where control reacts, agency responds.
Leadership Without Self-Betrayal
Part of this focus on agency over control touches on another facet of the issue: self-abandonment and self-betrayal.
As leaders, we often sacrifice so much of ourselves, our time, our energy, our weekends and holidays, our peace of mind and more, because we feel that we must to ensure a good outcome. This is an attempt at control, albeit a self-sabotaging one. When we don’t have the bandwidth to support our teams, lead thoughtfully, and strategize for the future, we become part of the problem.
Self-care in this context is really self-leadership: practicing sovereignty—taking full ownership and authority over your internal world, and making conscious, values-aligned choices in big and small moments alike. It’s the ability to choose how we show up and self-govern from a place of integrity, not in reaction to external pressures or expectations.
Rather than spa days and sabbaticals, self-care as self-leadership looks like:
Knowing what is your responsibility and what isn’t;
Recognizing and respecting your limits and locus of control in the face of pressure;
Creating systems that restore your energy and help you lead with a clear mind; and
Choosing presence over performance, and connection over output.
When we truly take care of ourselves, beyond the face masks and vacations and yoga, we not only begin living well, but leading well, helping our teams function smoothly with a grounded guide.
Reflection as Resistance—The CLEAR AAR
We teach our teams to pause, assess, and adapt, but when was the last time we did that in a way that truly respected our humanity?
Most After Action Reviews (AARs) are exclusively focused on efficiency and effectiveness. They rarely take into account the levels of urgency that had to be sustained to achieve said outcomes, or who we burned out along the way.
The Center for Conscious Leadership’s CLEAR AAR is a tool that supports teams in taking a more holistic approach to post-project reflection. Used collectively, it helps teams both review the project as a whole and understand the human experiences, systemic patterns and power dynamics that surface under pressure, sustainability, and refinement opportunities.
Used individually, the CLEAR AAR helps us get in touch with the pressures we face, our motivations and the actions we took, while comparing against our capacity, values, and energy in order to regulate our nervous system and ensure we’re leading consciously and sustainably.
Ask yourself:
Conditions: What internal and external conditions shaped my response? How clear was I on my role, responsibilities and locus of control? How well-resourced (emotionally, physically, relationally) was I?
Leadership Moves: What did I do, say, or model? How effectively did I regulate my own stress and co-regulate with those around me? Was I self-aware and grounded, or reactive and rushed? What stress did I take on that wasn’t mine to carry? Did I respect my own capacity and others’?
Effects: What were the short- and long-term effects on others, and on me? What were the visible and invisible costs of the decisions made?
Alignment: Was my response aligned with my values and vision? What internal and systemic tensions were revealed? How safe did I feel—and how did that shape my behavior? Is this in line with who I am, and who I am becoming?
Renewal: What beliefs or actions might need recalibration? What boundaries, supports, or rest do I need before re-engaging? What leadership capacities or nervous system skills do I want to strengthen?
The aftermath of our choices matters. Our self-care and self-leadership matters. And how we metabolize our experiences shapes the leader we become next.
Wayshaping—From Wishful Thinking to Inevitability
Most leaders set goals. Conscious leaders shape conditions.
Wayshaping is the practice of shaping an environment to be more conducive to the outcomes we desire—not because we force them, but because we’ve aligned the culture, the rituals, and the expectations to support the results to emerge organically.
Instead of demanding your body and spirit be more resilient, Wayshaping builds a container that makes it easy to return to yourself again and again. Wayshaping is the difference between cultivating a lush garden through tender care and nurturing, and yelling at a plant to grow faster. It’s the difference between building a damn and learning to read the tides.
Wayshaping is about sensing the natural currents—of people, power, and energy—and designing rhythms, structures, and spaces that work with them instead of against them.
Operationalizing Insight: Leading by Design
Combined, the CLEAR AAR and Wayshaping are tools of self-leadership that invite leaders to pause, reflect, and act with intention—not just in hindsight, but in the design of what comes next.
The CLEAR AAR helps you learn how you showed up and what contributed to these outcomes. Wayshaping helps you to create the conditions to show up differently next time. Together, they ensure you’re not just leading others to intended outcomes, but leading yourself first, reclaiming your agency, energy, and power with clarity, courage, and care.
Leadership that Nourishes You, Too
You don’t need to burn yourself out to make big things happen.
You can be incredibly high-achieving and high-performing while engaging in self-care that is fundamentally rooted in self-leadership, not self-sacrifice.
Your leadership can reflect your values and produce results you’ll love. There is a different way to lead–one that centers self-trust, discernment, and sustainability. Conscious, regenerative leadership replenishes as it harvests, sustainably giving energy as it receives.
When you reclaim your agency, you reclaim your leadership and shape the way forward.
Want this kind of leadership culture across your team?
Book a strategy call to explore CLEAR AARs, Wayshaping, and the practices that help high-performing teams regenerate capacity while staying focused on impact.
