Passion to Grind – How to reverse the curse
- Kim Levings
- Aug 5
- 4 min read
There's a particular kind of tired that has nothing to do with hours worked. It's the tired of a leader who's been "in it" so long they can't remember what "it" was for.
You know the state. Diary full. Fires everywhere. Every decision feels urgent because in the moment, it is. You're not lazy, you're not disengaged — you're handling things. Constantly. And therein lies the problem.
Your brain isn't built to think creatively or even objectively, in the middle of the unrelenting noise. It's built to react and protect.
Here's what's actually happening under the hood. Your brain is a pattern-recognition machine. Every time you respond to a situation and get an outcome, that pathway gets a little more grooved. Think of creating tire tracks in a muddy field. If you do the same tracks over and over, it soon turns into a worn path and a known route. When responding or reacting to a stress situation (think trigger) – if you do it enough times, the response becomes automatic — you don't consciously decide anymore; you just execute. See red button, push red switch.
Under normal circumstances, auto-responding is a gift. It's why you don't have to relearn how to drive every morning. (Imagine going through all the pre-drive checks with conscious thought, every day!) Most of us have multiple “muscle memory” routines going on every day.
But under stress, that same muscle memory, pattern wiring becomes something else entirely: an alarm system. When the outcome tied to a pattern was painful — a blown deadline, a public correction, a season where the business nearly didn't make it — your brain doesn't file that away as information. It files it as a threat. And the next time something even loosely resembles that scenario, your subconscious doesn't wait for your judgment. It fires the old response, whether or not it's the right one for what's actually in front of you.
This is why so many leaders find themselves reacting to today's problem with yesterday's fear. I’ve also coached leaders who don’t understand their reactivity or inappropriate responses until they realize it’s a trigger from their youth. The colleague who just “pushed a button” in you is mistakenly categorized as a threat because that’s what your brother did…so – boom! Out comes a snarky response, or worse, a fit of anger – entirely inappropriate for the situation in a management meeting.
And here's the trap: you cannot see this from inside the machine.
While you're in the business — hands on the gears, eyes on the next fire — you are the least equipped person in the room to notice which of your patterns are working for you, and which are not. Distance isn't a luxury for leaders. It's the only vantage point from which the machine becomes visible at all.
Paul understood this tension better than most leadership books give him credit for. In Romans 7 he writes with startling honesty: "For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do — this I keep on doing." That's not weakness talk. That's a man naming exactly what we're describing — a mind on autopilot, running patterns that outlast the will to change them.
His answer wasn't more effort. It was renewal: "Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind" (Romans 12:2). Renewing isn't something that happens in the thick of it. It happens when you step out long enough to see what needs to be unlearned — and deliberately practice something better in its place. Taking on new patterns is something well within your control.
Jesus modeled the same rhythm, and He had far more legitimate claim on His time than any of us. He withdrew. Regularly. Not when the work was done, but often in the middle of the work, because He knew that proximity to the noise erodes clarity faster than almost anything else.
So what does this look like for you, practically?
It looks like time away from the business — not vacation, not another meeting with a different location, but genuine distance from the operational noise. Long enough to ask: Why did I start this? Is what I'm building still pointed at that, or am I just managing what it's become?
It looks like noticing which of your leadership reactions are actually decisions, and which are just old alarms going off. A pattern doesn't get unwired by willpower alone — it takes the same thing that built it: repetition, in a different direction, until the new response is the automatic one. Think of those tracks in the muddy field – if you intentionally create a new route, it’s only a matter of time and repetition that establishes that new route as a routine response, and the old one fades away.
A colleague once spoke a wise truth – “People don’t change, but they will trade up.”
It looks like humility enough to admit that some of what feels like "just who I am as a leader" is actually just the last pattern that got reinforced hardest, not the truest thing about you.
Leadership without distance isn't leadership. It's management of momentum you no longer control.
When you get stuck in the engine room, your brain is running on autopilot most of the time. That’s when what started as a passion – the whole reason you got into your business – tends to fade into the background. The tyranny of the urgent and the “here and now” has stolen your joy.
I want to share a great quote from the book, "The New Playbook of Teamwork" by Lynda McNutt Foster:
When planning begins with to-dos, people lose sight of why they're doing the work. It becomes about compliance, not contribution. Start here instead:
"What does DONE look like?"
"How will we know if this worked?"
"What's the minimum viable version worth building?"
This keeps teams focused on value, not just volume.
Step back and double down on the main reason you got into this business.
Reset yourself on a regular basis and open your mind to new creative pathways.
You may just surprise yourself with a different response, or a whole new pattern, when you get back to work.
One way you can be intentional about stepping away regularly is to be part of the LeaderPrint Executive Community. Launching in Spring of 2026, we have one last EXPLORE session happening in September. Come and see for yourself!
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