You Don't Love Your Dog (And That Explains Burnout)

Patch is the family dog. Anxious, loyal, very cheeky. The family loves him.

In workshops, I ask who the dog lovers are. Hands go up. I ask how they know they love their dog. I ask where they feel that love.

It's the same answer every time: in their body.

Then I ask, 'What if that sensation disappeared? Would you still love the dog?'

The room goes quiet. The answer is always 'No'. They wouldn't hate their dog. But they wouldn't love them either.

It's not the dog you love. It's the sensations.
This is also how burnout works, and why most leaders miss it until it's too late.

The problem isn't a lack of resilience. Most senior leaders are genuinely tough. The problem is a lack of awareness that burnout is already showing up - as sensation until it is far too late.

The fatigue. The exhaustion. The shorter fuse. Leaders treat these as separate things. Background noise. Part of the job.

They're not separate. They're the sensations signalling that burnout is already underway. It's not a character flaw. It's the way our system operates.

Let me be direct. Burnout prevention isn't a meditation initiative. It's not bean bags, breathing apps, or turning your break room into a soft-play centre for adults.

Burnout is a performance and risk issue. Full stop.

When someone is burnt out, they lose cognitive control under pressure. They snap. They miss things. They make decisions from a short fuse instead of clear thinking. Those decisions feel right in the moment - but that's because the system is operating from fight or flight, where everything looks like a threat.

In any leadership role, that creates a culture problem that cascades through teams and ends up costing lots of money.

You can't put a band-aid over a bullet wound.

Here's what happens at the body level.

You don't react to the environment. You react to the sensations in your body that the environment triggers. In the same way you don't love your dog - you love the sensations your dog triggers in you. You're not distracted by the email, the meeting, or the interruption. You're distracted by the sensations these things trigger inside you. Unless you address this you can't solve the problem.

Something happens. A sensation arises. Your attention gets pulled. You fight to bring it back. Another sensation arises. Your attention gets pulled again. You fight again.

This is where the real cost hides.

When you feel the desire to check something, and then fight against that desire, you're doubling the energy expenditure. If the distraction pulls at you with ten units of energy, you need eleven units to stay focused. That's 21 units spent just to take one step forward.

All day long, you're fighting yourself. You get to the end of the day having won none of those battles. You've got nothing done.

This is why you're exhausted despite feeling like you achieved nothing. The energy went somewhere - it went into fighting sensations.

That creates the stress. Stress pushes you into fight or flight. Your body floods with cortisol and adrenaline. Now everything looks like a threat. And because everything looks like a threat, you stay in fight or flight.

It becomes a loop. And the loop is expensive.

Not as a platitude. As physics.

Sensations rise, exist for a period, and pass. When you understand this, you stop being hostage to whatever you're feeling right now. You know it will shift. The question becomes whether you let it run its course or whether you fight it and make it worse.

The intervention point is the sensation itself. Place your attention fully on what you're feeling in the body, and work with it instead of against it. Don't label it. Don't judge it. Don't justify or explain it. Don't resist it.

Just observe.

When you do this, you break the loop before it pushes you somewhere you don't want to go.

I don't want to be the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. I don't even want to be the fence at the top. I want to stop executives and business leaders walking up the cliff in the first place.

That's the work I do. Not fixing what's already broken. Intervening before the break.

What should you look for? A shorter fuse than you used to have. Mistakes you normally wouldn't make. Fatigue that sleep doesn't fix. A creeping sense of not caring about things that used to matter.

These aren't character flaws. They're signals. Your body is telling you something, and the worst thing you can do is dismiss it as 'just part of the job'