I felt like I had lost my mojo

From the outside it looked like the best years of my career.

I was delivering leadership training virtually, day after day, to groups of twenty-five to a hundred people. Booked out. Good feedback. Global clients. If you had asked me then whether anything was wrong I would have said no, quite honestly, and then gone to make another coffee before the next session.

But I was burnt out. Not the dramatic kind — I wasn't falling apart, I didn't miss a session. It was quieter and more corrosive than that. I'd finish a day of delivery and feel nothing much at all. I could hear myself saying the right things in the right order to a grid of faces, some of them cameras-off, and I had no idea whether any of it had landed on a single human being.

I felt like I had lost my mojo.

It wasn't the hours

This is the part I'd want anyone reading to sit with, because I got the diagnosis wrong for a long time.

I assumed I was tired. So I did what tired people do. I looked at the calendar. I thought about taking fewer bookings, about a proper holiday, about getting the evenings back. And I did some of that, and it helped for roughly as long as it lasted, and then I'd be back in the grid on Monday feeling exactly the same.

The problem wasn't the volume of the work. It was the shape of it.

I'd built a working life in which the energy only travelled in one direction. Out. I was broadcasting — competently, to a lot of people, on subjects I knew well — and almost nothing was coming back. One hundred people is not an audience you can read. You can't tell who's struggling. You can't follow the flicker on someone's face and say, hang on, say more about that. You perform, you close the laptop, and you do it again.

What I was missing wasn't rest. It was contact.

A call about undergraduates

The thing that changed it was small enough that I nearly said no.

I got a call asking whether I'd career-coach undergraduates at Manchester Metropolitan University. On paper it was a step down from what I was doing — no global client, no senior audience, no scale. Twenty-year-olds who didn't know what they wanted to do with their lives.

I said yes, and it rearranged everything.

Sitting with one person at a time, I couldn't perform. There was nothing to perform at. A single nervous student across a table doesn't need a well-structured forty-minute module, they need you to actually hear what they just said — including the part they didn't quite say. And I found that the muscle I needed for that had gone slack while I was busy getting very good at presenting.

So I developed it. Deliberately, at an age when you're meant to have it already. I got better at listening than I had ever been in my life, and it was hard, and it was the most interesting work I'd done in years.

Somewhere in there I stopped being a virtual answer vending machine and became a trusted thinking partner. That's the shift. I don't think I could have made it in front of a hundred people.

Carrying it back

What I didn't expect was that it would travel upward.

I took the same way of working into coaching leaders at Siemens, and global sales leaders at Reuters on personal impact — and it turned out senior people want precisely the same thing the undergraduates did. Someone in the room who isn't grading them, isn't competing with them, and isn't going to answer the question before they've finished forming it.

The seniority changes the stakes. It doesn't change the need.

My soul felt full. I know how that sounds written down. It's still the truest description I have.

What I do with this now

I'm not telling this story for the redemption arc. I'm telling it because of what it taught me to look for in the people I coach.

When someone comes to me saying they're burnt out, the reflex — theirs and everybody else's — is to reach for the calendar. Fewer meetings. Better boundaries. A week off. Sometimes that's right and it's genuinely all that's needed.

But often the calendar isn't the problem, and I've learned to ask a different set of questions:

Where does your energy go, and does any of it come back? Broadcast roles drain in a way that exchange roles don't, even at identical hours.

What are you good at that you've stopped enjoying? Being excellent at something is a very effective way of getting trapped in it. Competence is sticky.

When did you last do work where you couldn't predict what would happen? Burnout and boredom live much closer together than we admit.

What part of this is actually inside your control? Not the reorganisation, not your boss's temperament, not the market. What you say, what you prepare, where your attention goes. Know yourself and work your circle of control — the rest is weather.

And what would you need to stop being good at, for a while, to get somewhere better? This is the hardest one. I had to be a beginner again, in front of students, at a skill I was supposed to have mastered.

If this is where you are

The list of things people bring to career coaching includes some sentences I recognise from the inside: I'm totally burnt out. Is this all there is? On paper it looks great but something's missing. I should be happy by now and I'm not.

None of those mean you've failed at your career. Mine was going perfectly well while I was hollow. They usually mean the shape needs to change, and that's a smaller, more workable problem than it feels like at two in the morning.

It took me a call about undergraduates. Yours will be something else. But it's very difficult to see the shape of your own working life from inside it — which is, more or less, the entire argument for having a thinking partner.

Leaders are developed, not discovered. So, it turns out, are the rest of us.