When motion becomes a way of not feeling
By Dr. Leticia Lilleström
There is a particular kind of discomfort that rarely appears in leadership assessments.
It does not emerge during a crisis, a difficult negotiation, or a board meeting where the future of an organisation is being decided. In those environments, the high performer may be exceptionally capable. Pressure sharpens their concentration. Complexity gives them something to organise. Uncertainty becomes a problem to investigate, structure, and eventually resolve.
The discomfort appears when nothing urgently requires their attention.
An afternoon without meetings. A project completed ahead of schedule. A holiday where no one needs a decision. A Sunday morning with no immediate responsibility to fulfil.
For some high performers, these moments are not experienced as freedom. They produce an unexpected restlessness, sometimes accompanied by guilt, irritation, or an inexplicable sense that something is being neglected.
The person who can navigate organisational uncertainty with remarkable composure may struggle to tolerate a few hours without a clear purpose.
This contradiction deserves more attention than it receives.
The discomfort of being left alone with one’s thoughts is not unique to leaders. In experiments reported in Science, Wilson and colleagues (2014) found that participants often preferred mundane activity to sitting alone with their thoughts; in one study, some even administered a mild electric shock to themselves. The findings do not explain executive overwork, but they challenge the assumption that stillness is always experienced as welcome relief.
Leadership culture tends to interpret constant movement as ambition, discipline, and exceptional commitment. And frequently, it is exactly that. Meaningful work can be deeply satisfying, and some individuals genuinely enjoy the intensity of their professional lives.
But movement can also serve another purpose.
It can prevent a person from encountering the thoughts, emotions, and questions that become audible when activity stops.
The distinction matters because an executive moving towards something and an executive moving away from something may deliver identical results while acting from very different inner conditions.
When competence becomes a place to hide
High performers often develop their relationship with achievement long before they occupy positions of authority.
They become the person who solves problems, anticipates difficulties, accepts responsibility, and delivers when others cannot. Over time, their competence begins to attract expectations. Reliability becomes part of their reputation, and their reputation gradually becomes part of their identity.
There is nothing inherently unhealthy about this progression.
The difficulty begins when competence stops being something a person possesses and becomes the principal way they understand their own worth.
Achievement then carries two functions.
The first is practical: it produces results, creates opportunities, and allows the individual to contribute meaningfully.
The second is psychological: it reinforces an identity built around being capable, valuable, necessary, and in control.
When these functions become deeply intertwined, inactivity can feel disproportionately threatening.
Without an immediate problem to solve, the person loses access to one of their most familiar sources of reassurance. They may not consciously think, I am only valuable when I am productive. Their behaviour may nevertheless be organised around precisely that assumption.
A new assignment restores direction. A difficult challenge provides focus. An overflowing schedule offers evidence that they are still needed.
The relief may be so immediate that the underlying discomfort remains unexamined.
In this way, competence can become both a strength and a hiding place.
The individual is not pretending to be capable. Their capability is real. What remains uncertain is whether they can experience themselves as equally valuable when that capability is not being exercised.
The difference between ambition and avoidance
It would be a mistake to interpret relentless activity as automatic evidence of emotional avoidance.
Some people simply enjoy working. Others are building businesses, supporting families, recovering from financial difficulty, or pursuing ambitions that legitimately require sustained effort. Certain leadership periods demand extraordinary concentration, and temporary intensity should not be confused with psychological dysfunction.
The more revealing question is not how much a person works.
It is what happens internally when they cannot work.
Consider two executives who regularly work sixty-hour weeks.
Both are commercially successful, highly regarded, and deeply involved in their organisations. Both enjoy solving difficult problems and derive satisfaction from achievement.
The first can step away when circumstances permit. They may prefer being active, but inactivity does not substantially threaten their sense of self. Their ambition remains available to them as a choice.
The second experiences withdrawal from work differently. An unstructured day feels unsettling. They repeatedly check messages despite knowing nothing urgent is expected. They create tasks when existing responsibilities have been completed. Even during moments of apparent relaxation, part of their attention remains occupied with what should be done next.
Their behaviour may look like commitment. Internally, however, activity may also be regulating emotions that silence would otherwise expose.
Ambition and avoidance can coexist.
A person may sincerely love their work while simultaneously using it to avoid loneliness, uncertainty, grief, dissatisfaction, or questions about their personal identity.
Human motivation is rarely as orderly as the explanations we give for it.
The important distinction is whether movement remains a freely chosen expression of purpose or gradually becomes necessary to escape an unwanted inner experience.
The emotional function of being busy
Busyness offers several forms of reassurance that are rarely acknowledged in executive environments.
It provides structure. There is always a next decision, an unresolved issue, an impending deadline, or a measurable outcome against which effort can be evaluated.
It also provides a socially acceptable explanation for emotional distance.
A leader who is constantly occupied may not have to confront the deterioration of a personal relationship, the absence of meaningful connection, or the uncomfortable possibility that professional success has failed to deliver the fulfilment they expected.
These matters do not disappear because they are ignored. They simply compete poorly against tasks that appear more urgent and more immediately solvable.
Work offers something personal uncertainty frequently cannot: a defined problem, an identifiable intervention, and some possibility of measuring progress.
Grief does not provide a quarterly report. Loneliness cannot be resolved through a revised operating model. Questions of meaning rarely respond to the same tools used to improve financial or operational performance.
For individuals whose confidence has been built through solving problems, these experiences can feel frustratingly resistant to action.
So they return to what they know.
They organise, optimise, respond, initiate, and deliver.
Each action may be entirely reasonable when considered independently. The underlying pattern becomes visible only when movement consistently replaces reflection.
The boundary between using work to manage difficult feelings and using it to avoid those feelings lies in what happens when the work stops.
The problem emerges when activity becomes the only acceptable response to emotional discomfort, leaving little opportunity for the individual to understand what that discomfort is communicating.
An inability to tolerate an empty calendar may reveal something that performance measures cannot.
Why achievement does not always bring relief
One of the more revealing experiences for a high performer can occur immediately after a significant success.
A long-running transaction closes. A difficult restructuring reaches completion. A major publication is finished. A business finally achieves the financial position its founder has spent years pursuing.
For a brief period, there is satisfaction.
Then comes restlessness.
Attention shifts almost immediately towards the next opportunity, the next challenge, or the next improvement.
Ambition often explains this: achievement expands a person’s sense of what is possible.
But the next goal can also become a way of escaping the moment in which they might discover what success has, and has not, changed.
Success may bring pride and relief. It may also expose exhaustion, emptiness, disappointment, or the recognition that an anticipated transformation in personal wellbeing has not occurred.
Tal Ben-Shahar has described the “arrival fallacy”: the expectation that reaching a long-pursued destination will deliver a lasting change in happiness. The person expected to feel different after achieving the goal.
Instead, they remain themselves, carrying many of the same unresolved questions.
A new objective becomes attractive not simply because it offers another accomplishment, but because it restores the anticipation and direction that the previous achievement no longer provides.
The future becomes emotionally more comfortable than the present.
This is particularly significant when achievement has been used as a promise of eventual permission.
When the business is stable, I will rest.
When this project is completed, I will spend more time with my family.
When I reach this position, I will finally feel secure.
These promises may be sincere. Yet the conditions can continuously move because the original problem was never solely the volume of work.
If the deeper difficulty concerns self-worth, emotional exposure, or the ability to exist without constant achievement, reaching another milestone may not resolve it.
External success cannot automatically settle an internal question that has never been examined.
When stillness begins to feel like a loss of control
Imagine a chief executive who has spent fifteen years building an organisation and now finds that its success has made their daily presence less necessary.
During its early development, constant availability was essential. Resources were limited, decisions carried immediate consequences, and the founder’s personal intervention frequently prevented small problems from becoming significant failures.
Over time, the organisation matures. A capable executive team is established. Governance becomes more structured. Operational responsibility is distributed. The business no longer requires the founder’s direct involvement in every decision.
Objectively, this represents progress. Internally, it may feel like a loss of purpose: fewer calls, fewer urgent requests, and the unfamiliar experience of watching capable people make good decisions without them.
The first response is not necessarily intervention. It may be the private unease of opening a calendar that used to be full, or the impulse to join a conversation simply to feel connected to events. Gradually, the chief executive starts attending meetings that no longer require their presence, revisiting delegated decisions, and requesting updates that add little to the decisions being made.
Standards and accountability remain the stated reasons for this involvement. Yet the additional oversight may be less about any failure in the organisation than about the leader’s difficulty accepting a role in which usefulness no longer depends on constant participation.
For years, the leader’s sense of authority was reinforced through direct action. Their judgment mattered because they were needed everywhere.
Now, organisational maturity requires a different form of leadership: influence without constant intervention, responsibility without personal control, and confidence in outcomes they do not directly produce.
The external transition is structural.
The internal transition is psychological.
Becoming less operationally necessary does not mean becoming less valuable.
If this distinction remains unresolved, organisational development may be experienced as a personal loss rather than a leadership achievement.
The executive may then begin recreating the conditions that once made their involvement essential, through routines that restore a familiar sense of relevance.
The organisation becomes more capable, yet the leader struggles to allow that capability to operate independently.
This can resemble overfunctioning, but the central issue here is the identity beneath it: the leader has built an organisation capable of independence and struggles with what that achievement now asks of them.
The organisational cost of a leader who cannot stop
When personal restlessness remains private, its consequences may appear limited to the individual.
But senior leadership behaviour rarely remains private.
An executive who equates movement with value can gradually shape the entire organisation around that belief.
Meetings multiply because visible activity is interpreted as engagement. Employees learn to provide frequent updates because silence may be mistaken for insufficient attention. Teams begin treating immediate responsiveness as a measure of professionalism, even when the underlying work requires sustained concentration rather than continuous communication.
The organisation becomes busy in ways that are not always productive.
More subtly, the leader’s discomfort with inactivity can distort how performance is evaluated.
A thoughtful manager who creates stable systems, delegates effectively, and prevents unnecessary escalation may appear less committed than a colleague who is constantly visible, available, and involved in resolving crises.
The first may be producing greater organisational value.
The second may be producing more recognisable evidence of effort.
When leadership fails to distinguish the two, it risks rewarding activity rather than effectiveness.
This extends beyond employee wellbeing to decision quality, resource allocation, succession and governance.
When activity becomes the norm, it is harder to distinguish necessary intervention from an executive’s preference to remain indispensable.
A chief executive who continually launches initiatives can tie up capital and management attention in transformations competing for the same people and resources. Strategies may be revised or abandoned before their expected payback is measurable. The financial cost is not simply expenditure on individual programmes, but the opportunity cost of fragmented execution and delayed returns.
Succession becomes part of the same problem. A CEO who finds it difficult to stop may also find it difficult to leave. If every material decision still requires their reassurance, a credible successor cannot build independent authority and the board inherits avoidable key-person risk.
A leader presenting an endless sequence of projects, transformations, and performance interventions may appear exceptionally dynamic. Yet the volume of activity does not establish whether those interventions are coherent, necessary, or commercially justified.
The governance question is not how hard the executive works, but whether that work creates value proportionate to the capital and attention it consumes.
One practical board question is what happens when the CEO is absent. During a planned holiday, how many interventions are genuinely requested by the organisation, and how many are initiated by the CEO? The pattern is not a diagnostic score, but it can reveal whether delegation operates in practice or only on an organisational chart.
When movement itself becomes evidence of leadership, restraint can be mistaken for weakness and succession readiness for disengagement.
The relationships that receive what remains
High performance often attracts admiration because its visible outcomes are easier to evaluate than its personal costs.
The organisation sees delivery, financial results, strategic clarity, and professional reliability.
The people closest to the high performer may encounter a different version of the same individual.
Someone who is physically present but mentally preparing for the next obligation. Someone who can listen carefully to a complex business problem but struggles to remain emotionally available during an unresolved personal conversation. Someone who responds to vulnerability with solutions because solutions are more familiar than simply remaining with another person’s experience.
In personal relationships, however, this can be experienced as distance rather than dependable strength.
The difficulty often lies in moving between environments that reward different kinds of presence.
Professional life often rewards decisiveness, emotional containment, and the ability to convert uncertainty into action. Personal relationships may require something quite different: patience without immediate resolution, attention without measurable output, and the willingness to experience another person’s emotions without taking responsibility for eliminating them.
A leader who has spent years being valued for fixing problems may find it unexpectedly difficult to participate in situations where fixing is neither possible nor desired.
The same competence that creates security in one environment can create distance in another.
There is also a less visible consequence.
People who are consistently strong may become uncomfortable allowing others to witness their own uncertainty.
They can offer support more easily than they receive it. They can take responsibility for others more readily than they can admit needing care themselves.
Busyness then serves an additional function: it reduces the opportunities in which their own vulnerability might become visible.
Their distance may be read as independence, while beneath it sits an identity with little room for emotional need or uncertainty.
The distinction is rarely discussed because the individual continues to function exceptionally well.
Performance conceals what relationships gradually reveal.
The difference between rest and surrender
Leadership discussions frequently present slowing down as a matter of balance.
The implication is that high performers simply need to manage their schedules more effectively, establish boundaries, or recognise the benefits of rest.
Better boundaries can reduce excessive workloads, but they do not by themselves resolve the fear of becoming irrelevant when nothing demands attention.
A person who associates inactivity with uselessness may experience an unstructured afternoon not as recovery, but as a small loss of identity.
Removing tasks without understanding their emotional function can leave the original discomfort intact.
There is an additional complication.
Some leaders associate slowing down with surrendering standards.
They fear that if they become less vigilant, performance will deteriorate. If they delegate more fully, important details will be missed. If they stop pursuing improvement, the organisation will become complacent.
These concerns are not irrational: organisations do require standards and accountability. The question is whether vigilance responds to evidence or continues when the evidence no longer warrants it.
Does the leader intervene because the evidence indicates a problem?
Or does the absence of a problem itself become uncomfortable enough to provoke intervention?
That distinction calls for self-awareness as well as executive judgment.
The ability to act decisively is essential. So is the ability to recognise when action is no longer justified.
Restraint is not the abandonment of responsibility.
At times, it is the disciplined recognition that responsibility has already been exercised appropriately, and that further intervention would satisfy the leader’s need for control more than the organisation’s need for direction.
A mature executive does not have to become less ambitious.
They have to become less dependent on continuous activity as proof of their ambition, relevance, or worth.
What becomes visible when movement stops
Slowing down can expose questions that sustained activity has kept at a manageable distance.
Is the work still meaningful, or has it become familiar?
Am I pursuing this opportunity because it matters, or because I do not know what to do without another objective?
Would I still feel valuable if I were no longer the person everyone needed?
What remains of my identity when my professional role is temporarily absent?
When a leader repeatedly experiences rest as failure, delegation as irrelevance, or completion as emptiness, the pattern deserves examination.
Not because ambition is a problem.
Because the absence of choice may be.
There is a meaningful difference between choosing to work intensely and feeling unable to do otherwise.
The former can express purpose, curiosity, and commitment. The latter may gradually narrow a person’s capacity to respond to life outside the environments where they feel most competent.
For senior leaders, this distinction becomes more important as authority increases.
The executive who has not examined their own dependence on activity may inadvertently turn that dependence into organisational expectations. Their personal discomfort becomes embedded in reporting routines, decision processes, performance standards, and the unwritten rules through which others learn what successful leadership looks like.
An individual pattern becomes a collective operating condition.
And because it often produces visible effort, the organisation may continue rewarding it long after its costs have become apparent.
The deeper leadership challenge, therefore, is not simply learning how to rest.
It is developing enough psychological independence from achievement to distinguish necessary action from personally reassuring action.
The strongest leaders are not necessarily those who can remain in motion the longest.
They are those who can recognise when their continued movement serves the organisation, when it serves their ambitions, and when it is protecting them from something they have yet to confront.
Because sometimes the hardest thing for a high performer is not carrying responsibility. It is discovering who they are when nothing needs to be done.
The Hidden Psychology of Leadership — Article 6
Dr. Leticia Lilleström
Strategic CFO & Executive Advisor
Author of The Human CEO | Phoenix Lillestroms Limited
