9 Hidden Factors That Influence Your Leadership More Than You Think

What I’ve learned in leadership is that on most days, there are hidden factors at work. These hidden factors can make you excel, or they can completely work against you.
Knowing what’s at work in the background can be tremendously liberating. Once you realize what’s helping or hurting you, you can deal with it.
So what hidden factors threaten to make or break you as a leader?
Here are nine I’ve identified at work in my leadership. You’ll notice many have to do with a leader’s mind, while a few are more physical.
It should be no surprise so many of the factors are in your mind. Leadership, after all, is a mind game.
Work at the mental aspect of leadership and you’ll discover what many leaders have discovered: Changing your mind can change everything.
1. The weight of leadership
Anyone who has led anything remotely significant is familiar with the weight of leadership.
The weight of leadership is the sense of responsibility you carry that goes with your job.
The problem is it never turns off easily.
It follows you home. It accompanies you to bed. It travels with you on vacation.
It’s hard to shake the weight of leadership. You feel it because you are the leader, and you’re likely the leader because you’re the kind of person who feels it.
So what can help lift the weight of leadership? A few things:
Naming it
Doing something fun (the power of distraction)
Prayer
Talking to a friend or mentor who understands
When it’s appropriate, the weight of leadership can spur you toward leading better. But when it crushes you, all of the benefits of feeling responsible for what you lead disappear.
2. Pace Many leaders run hard. But you can only run so hard so long.
For many of you, it’s been too long.
Any leader can run hard for a season, but even if you avoid burnout , eventually it becomes counterproductive to run hard all the time.
Why?
Your mood tanks. Your fatigue rises. Your productivity drops.
And—bottom line—it’s unsustainable.
Smart leaders ask themselves: Am I living in a way today that will help me thrive tomorrow? If not, why not?
! 3. Lack of sleep
I’ve written about sleep before, and I’ve become a sleep evangelist of sorts over the last decade. (Here’s why sleep is a leader’s secret weapon in my view .)
Frankly, my conversion was involuntary. I used to pride myself on how little sleep I got. Now, most days, I unapologetically nap during the day and generally get six to eight hours every night.
The truth is, before I started taking sleep seriously, I was awake, but I was a zombie. And despite being awake more hours, I wasn’t nearly as productive as I am today.
To say I’ve been 10x more productive since I started taking sleep seriously is probably not an exaggeration. I wanted to write a book all through my 30s. Never got a manuscript done.
I’ve written three in the last six years. Plus launched this blog, and a podcast , started speaking at conferences more often, and worked full time on top of that.
I find when I cheat sleep now, it feels like my world comes crashing down. If I can call an audible and simply admit “Man, I’m tired” and get some rest, things come back into alignment surprisingly fast.