What's on Your Mind?

It’s the first week of January, and you’re already drowning in Slack messages. You told yourself this year would be different, that you’d set boundaries and stop overcommitting. But here you are, saying yes to another meeting you don’t have time for, staying late to fix something that could wait, feeling that familiar knot in your stomach every Sunday night. Across corporate America, 90% of employees are experiencing some level of burnout. For decades, we’ve been focusing on optimizing our physical health, tracking our sleep cycles, heart rate variability, while the part of us that actually drives our decisions at work, and quality of life, namely our beliefs and emot…

The most dangerous people in a company are stressed leaders. I say that with full self-awareness. I’ve worked for a few and came uncomfortably close to becoming one myself. I’ve always had an impulsive temperament. On good days, it made me decisive. On bad days, reactive. Add long hours and the pressure of scaling a startup, and my emotional state began to spill onto the team. Focusing on mental health, rest, and mindfulness fundamentally changed how I build my company and how I see my role today. I’m still a CEO, but I’ve also become something else—the “chief energy officer.” What follows is everything I wish I’d known earlier about leading with emoti…