Where Your Energy Goes, Your Identity Follows

Over the years I have had many conversations with founders and senior leaders who describe a feeling that is not always easy to put into words.

It is that moment where you have had a busy week and it has been productive, but somehow there is still this sense that your best thinking or focus has not gone where it should have gone.

"I do not feel like I am just surviving the week but I cannot point to what actually made a difference in it either," was a phrase one client used.

I am not talking about burnout but something else more specific. I call it the brain drain.

This might show up as that decision that keeps getting postponed because there is never the right moment. Or the conversation you keep going over in your head instead of having it in real life. It might be that commitment you made months ago but no longer fits where things are now, yet it has still not been addressed. Or the meeting that did not need to happen but was in the diary and stayed there. Or the task that only you can do not because it is required of you but because you had not set it up differently. Or a responsibility that landed in your lap because you are the most senior person available and nobody else picked it up.

None of these are significant on their own but they do accumulate. They add weight to the week in a way that is not always easy to spot. It is not the weight of too much work, though that is real too. It is the accumulation of unfinished things where tasks remain open and incomplete. This requires thinking space that could be directed somewhere considerably more useful.

The research is starting to catch up with what I have observed for quite a while. A 2024 study of 373 executives found that decision-making quality declines measurably over sustained periods of high responsibility, with a direct and negative effect on workplace performance and wellbeing. The Center for Creative Leadership has found that senior leaders spend an average of 72 hours per week engaged in work-related activity. The question worth asking is not how much of that is too much, but how much of it is drawing on the thinking that actually needs protecting most.

When unresolved things accumulate, the thinking available for the larger focus decisions gets less of what it needs. You become slightly more reactive, slightly more likely to reach for the nearest available answer rather than the considered one. Slightly more likely to agree with the room rather than bring your own viewpoint into it. That depletion makes the harder decisions feel harder still, and the things that should be addressed stay unaddressed a little longer, which continues the drain.

The instinct is usually to look at the volume of work or the circumstances for the answer. In my experience the answer lies somewhere else.

This is where it connects to identity and why I wanted to write this now as a companion to the last article.

You bring a perspective to the room that nobody else brings in quite the same way. That specific combination of experience and judgement that is uniquely yours and has taken years to develop. These do not disappear when the brain drain is running. They just become temporarily subdued. The thinking that makes you distinctively useful in a room needs something in reserve when you get there.

Over time your clearest thinking consistently shapes who you become. When you apply the full version of yourself, your work gets that version. When it gets the depleted version, it gets less of what you are actually capable of bringing. Over time that adds up and that is what requires change.

When AI is accelerating the pace of almost everything and sameness is increasingly easy to produce, that distinctiveness matters even more.

When someone addresses even one of the things that has been sitting there unresolved, something changes quite quickly. Thinking sharpens. Decisions feel easier. One founder I worked with described it as feeling like themselves again — which sounds simple but was, in practice, the thing that changed everything else.

Sometimes progress is not about doing more. It is about addressing the thing that has been tolerated.

The question worth sitting with is not how do I get more energy. It is this: where is your best thinking actually going right now and is that where it should be?

If this strikes a chord, I would love to hear about it. Reply and tell me where you are with this.

Or if you want some proper thinking space around it, I offer two routes in. A free thirty-minute discovery call which, if it feels right, leads into The Unblur Intensive — a single focused session to get clarity on one area. Or a free longer consultation if you are drawn to deeper one-to-one work over time. Email penny@katherineashmore.com with whichever feels right and I will get back to you within 48 hours.

If this resonated, the article that preceded it is here — What Makes You You.

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Sources: Rashid, M. et al. (2024). The Impact of Decision Fatigue on Workplace Well-Being. International Journal of Educational Administration, Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities. Center for Creative Leadership. Senior Leader Time Research. www.ccl.org.