The most successful leaders and high potentials in traditional office settings are chronically burned out and many are resisting return-to-office mandates. That’s not new.
What is new is the surprising paradox I stumbled upon as a leader, on my personal journey and through my executive coaching clients: strong intuition, high emotional intelligence and all of the woo-woo feels that the corporate world loves to stigmatize are actually the most predictable drivers to success in life, leadership, business, and navigating AI—and paradoxically, those same skills are contributing to the greatest worldwide burnout epidemic in the history of capitalism.
That’s because we process intel coming from our emotional intelligence, intuition and what I call Seeing in Surround Sound through our body, our senses and our nervous system. Yes, our mind and brain are involved, but the processing is more of a physical experience than a mental one. This is not a new fact, but it is also not well known.
Before the internet and the expectation of an “always on call,” 24-7 work week, we could experience these hits in our body and pace ourselves—essentially integrate the best parts of the intel and shake off the rest. But over the last few decades, as a global society we have willingly overserviced our contracts with companies to the point of exhaustion. We think that taking a break is “slacking.” On top of our exhaustion, we often ignore, underuse or overuse the cues from our emotional intelligence, intuition and Seeing in Surround Sound and this has only been exacerbated by post-Covid return-to-office policies. This overload weakens our ability to think strategically, lead teams, communicate and influence effectively, and get to the next level.
Working with clients, I share my proven, step-by-step methodology to help leaders identify exactly how their mind-body-intuition, Surround Sound superhighway operates at work so they can use that intel for both business and interpersonal results, while at the same time moving from exhausted to energized.