I was running the global launch of one of the world’s most recognizable brands when I ran out of myself.
The brand was Clairol Herbal Essences. Our campaigns were successful. Sales were strong. I had direct reports on four continents, living what, from the outside, looked like a spectacular career. Then one morning, I woke up in a Hong Kong hotel room, unable to get out of bed. I was hungover. I had gained significant weight. I stopped exercising. I was putting in brutal hours seven days a week and had nothing left to show for it except a club sandwich I could not touch. I was burned out.
What I did not know then, and spent years figuring out, was that I had confused momentum with meaning. I had been moving fast without ever stopping to examine whether the direction still made sense. And so, I kept setting new goals on top of unexamined old ones, wondering why nothing held.
I was not unusual. I was the norm.
The cost of moving without looking
According to a 2025 Forbes analysis of leadership burnout research, burned-out leaders are 34% less likely to outperform their peers, 3.5 times more likely to leave their roles and half as likely to feel engaged. We typically respond by recommending more grit. More resilience. Better time-blocking. Stronger accountability structures.
But what if we are solving the wrong problem?
Most leaders are pushing in directions they have never honestly examined. They are executing against goals set in planning sessions that skipped the most consequential question: What did the year behind us actually try to teach us?
This is not about what we accomplished or where we fell short. It is about what the year reveals: what is working, what has quietly stopped working and what the organization has been carrying forward out of inertia rather than intention. That question is the missing step in most leadership development programs, most annual planning retreats and most conversations about sustainable high performance.
What research shows
Harvard Business School research published in “Learning by Thinking: How Reflection Aids Performance” found that “taking time to reflect on our work improves job performance in the long run.” Employees who reflected showed higher rates of learning and retention overall, and those who regularly engaged in structured reflection improved their productivity and performance by 23%.
Twenty-three percent. From reflection as opposed to a new technology platform or additional head count. From fifteen minutes of honest backward examination.
And yet, nearly 70% of executives say burnout has affected their decision-making abilities, which means the leaders most in need of reflection are the ones least likely to stop long enough to practice it. Speed without reflection does not just produce burnout. It produces decisions built on assumptions nobody has inspected.
The annual planning problem no one names
Most leadership teams approach annual planning the same way most individuals approach New Year’s resolutions: with enormous forward-facing energy and almost no honest backward examination. Results are reviewed. Priorities are declared. Resources are allocated. And the genuine accounting of what the year behind actually revealed – about what is working, what has stopped working and what the team has been carrying forward out of habit – is skipped entirely.
The result is predictable. Goals lose momentum by Q2. The same unresolved tensions appear in next year’s planning session because nobody examined the assumptions closely enough to notice.
I have watched this pattern across four continents. I have also watched what happens when teams do the honest backward examination first. The quality of the conversation is categorically different because the people in the room are finally engaging as themselves.
3 practices that actually work
Before your next planning session, do this first. Ask your team three questions before a single slide is presented: What genuinely worked this year that we want to build on? What do we need to leave behind? What did this year try to teach us that we almost missed? The third question is the one that changes the room. Most teams have never been asked about it, and the conversation it produces will be more useful than any amount of forward-facing strategy work built on its absence.
Build fifteen minutes of structured reflection into your weekly rhythm. Not journaling as a therapeutic exercise, but a structured weekly question asked with genuine honesty: What did this week reveal that I have not yet acted on? The leaders who ask that question consistently make better decisions than those who simply move to the next week.
Before adding a new commitment, ask what you are carrying that no longer belongs. Most leaders have goals that made sense eighteen months ago and do not anymore. They carry them out of inertia rather than intention. Releasing what no longer belongs is not a failure of persistence; it is strategic clarity that creates room for what actually matters.
What honest reflection produces
The year after my burnout, I did the work I had been avoiding. I sat with honest questions. I examined what the previous years had been trying to teach me. And what emerged was not a new goal but a new clarity about what I valued, what I was building toward, and what I had been mistaking for success.
That clarity became a framework, inspired by the Roman god Janus, who is often depicted looking both forward and backward simultaneously, and refined over nearly three decades. The insight at its center belongs to every leader who has felt the gap between moving fast and moving well and wondered which they had been doing.
The most important leadership skill right now is not the ability to endure more; it is the willingness to stop and look honestly at where you have been. And then allowing that honesty to inform you where you go next.
Opinions expressed by SmartBrief contributors are their own.
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