The Activated Leader™ | Issue #57
In this issue:
The room was so heavy I bought flowers to fix it.
It didn't work.
I remember standing in front of the conference room arranging them before a calibration meeting, thinking if I could just make the space feel lighter, this meeting will be bearable. The role would start fitting again. The Sunday dread would lift. My family would stop absorbing the version of me that was only half-there.
The meeting happened and was just as awful as I thought it would be. Nothing changed.
That was somewhere around month nine.
I stayed almost a full year after I already knew.
Not because I didn't see it. I saw it.
I saw it in the meetings I rehearsed three times.
I saw it in the way I stopped mentioning work at dinner.
I saw it in the version of me my kids were getting, polite, present-ish, quietly gone.
I stayed because leaving would mean admitting something my whole identity was built on resisting: that trying harder wasn't going to work this time.
That's the part nobody warns high performers about.
We know how to leave bad roles.
What we don't know how to leave is the fog before we decide.
The months of shrinking.
The months of "maybe it's me."
The months of interrogating ourselves for a problem that isn't ours to solve alone.
That fog has a name.
And it's expensive.
The Activation Tax
The Activation Tax is what a high performer pays when they keep delivering inside a definition of success that's stopped fitting.
It doesn't announce itself.
It shows up in the small things.
The Sunday dread.
The meeting you rehearse three times.
The version of you that goes quiet at the dinner table.
The instincts you stop trusting.
The relationships you lean out of.
The version of yourself you shelve to keep performing.
The leaders I work with almost never name the tax while they're inside it.
They name it later, usually in our second or third session, when they finally see what it cost them.
And here's the piece I want you to hear:
The tax isn't paid by leaving.
It's paid by staying past the moment of knowing.
That's the expensive part.
Not the exit.
The eleven months before it.
Re-activate or release?
There are only two right moves once you know. Both require you to stop drifting.
You're in re-activate mode if:
the role could still fit if you brought your full self back to it.
Your energy quietly went somewhere else because you checked out, not because the work itself is wrong.
There's a version of you that could genuinely shape this role, and you haven't tried it yet.
You're in release mode if:
the role has morphed into something that doesn't match your skills or values.
You've tried multiple real repair moves and nothing has shifted.
Your body is telling you before your mind will.
Staying in the fog is the wrong one.
Every time.
The question is not should I stay or should I go.
The question is which season am I actually in, and am I willing to move on it this week?
One prompt to sit with
If fear wasn't shaping your decision, would you still be fighting for the role, or would you finally give yourself permission to leave?
Sit with the answer before you explain it away.
What's Activating Me This Week
Read:
Necessary Endings by Henry Cloud. I re-read it every time I catch myself buying metaphorical flowers.
Peter sits across from two consultants and calmly tells them he does about fifteen minutes of real work in a given week. He's not angry. He's not making a point. He's just past caring enough to perform.
And here's the thing. I'm not telling you to stop caring about your job...but what opens up when you look at it from a different perspective?
Try:
For the next seven days, notice the exact moment your body tells you the role isn't right.
Not what you think about it, where you feel it.
Jaw, shoulders, chest, gut.
The body knows months before the mind will admit it.
If this landed, I want to hear from you
Earlier this week I sent a note asking which of three things is actually keeping you stuck right now.
The next thing I build will come from your answer, not from what I assume it is.
If you didn't reply yet, this is your nudge.
Pick the one that made you flinch a little:
A) The gap between what you've achieved and how little it's let you feel it.
B) Why boundaries feel like a threat to your identity, not a skill.
C) The saboteur running your decisions when you're not looking.
Reply with the letter.
That's it.
I read every one.
Whichever wins is where I go next.
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