The Question I’d Stopped Asking

I'd been leading the team for nearly a year, and the work had stopped giving back.

The hours were intense and they weighed heavily. Each quarter’s pressures piled up before the last one felt finished. My team was doing what I asked, though rarely more. I could point to decent success metrics, but sensed none of us felt as energized as before.

Small things I’d have shrugged off a year earlier had begun to annoy me: a joke in a meeting, a minor delay, a two-word reply to an email, a schedule change nobody thought to run past me first. These weren’t especially new, but I seemed to have less resiliency for them. And I had a nagging feeling that the current version of me was one nobody would see as ready for more. I felt strained keeping up with what I already knew how to do, and that's not what being promotable feels like.

The team’s interactions had changed too. Small frictions that used to dissolve on their own had begun sticking. Two people who'd always gotten along were suddenly trading clipped replies in meetings. I could have chalked it up to a personality clash, but I had my doubts. A team pulling hard toward something difficult has little energy left over for pettiness. Mine seemed to have plenty to spare.

By the time I looked up to process all of this, I was just tired. Tired of the hours and the friction. And tired of watching a team I used to enjoy fray around the edges. I'd been telling myself it was the quarter, or the calendar, or budget constraints finally catching up with all of us. But underneath that explanation, I knew better.

In Crossing the Unknown Sea, the poet David Whyte recounts a conversation with his friend, Brother David Steindl-Rast, a Benedictine monk, from a season when Whyte's own work had stopped exciting him. Brother David's answer stopped him cold: "You know that the antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest? The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness."

The feeling of grinding comes from working hard at something that fails to bring us deep meaning.

Rest doesn't fix that, and neither does a vacation. What actually fixes it is something I'd already been told, years earlier, by someone who saw it in me before I could see it in myself.

Recalling That Lunch and Choosing Again

About three months into my very first supervisory role, I had lunch with my mentor. He asked how it was going. Being young and a bit too brash, I told him I was bored.

He listened, then said something I've never forgotten: "You're bored because you're not leading. You're just babysitting that shop."

He was known for being direct, and he was right. I'd inherited that team and was maintaining it, keeping things running, doing what the role seemed to require, but not asking what the role could become. From that lunch forward I began leading differently. I started asking what was next, and the work stopped feeling like something to get through.

I'd thought I learned that lesson for good, but it seemed I needed a refresher.

Something had clearly shifted between my team and me. The excited charge that comes when people are reaching for something significant that they aren't sure they can do had gone missing months earlier.  I’d mistaken its absence for maturity but we were actually in a rut, good at maintaining yet none of us reaching for anything anymore.

Competence can disguise our slip into functionary mode but energy tells the truth.

What had slipped was contact with the version of myself that took this role because I wanted to build something, not just run it. That self became so buried under all the urgency I was handling competently that I'd stopped listening for it.

At the next meeting, I brought my team one real question instead of another task: which part of how we serve our clients had we stopped questioning? I wanted an actual conversation: a small group of us asking what we'd stopped seeing. It cost nothing but our attention, and it surfaced three things worth pursuing.

For the first time in months, it stoked my own curiosity. The clipped exchanges between my two colleagues eased on their own within a few weeks. They didn’t need a mediator as much as they needed something real to reach for.

Most leaders don’t take a role to maintain what already exists. They take it to build, to develop people, to solve something meaningful together. If they’re capable, they succeed at this. That’s when purpose can get buried under administrative routine. The excitement wanes because, somewhere in the daily maintenance, contact with why the work matters gets lost.

Practice Invitation

Think about the last time you felt genuinely excited about something you and your team were building together, the kind of excitement that makes long days feel worth it.

If that feeling is recent, notice what produced it and what it would take to keep it alive.

If it's been a while, ask yourself: when did the work last ask something of me I didn't already know how to do? When did I last bring my team a real question instead of a task?

Then a follow up: have I learned this before, and let myself forget it?

And that’s The Gist of It™.

Thank you for reading.

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Marilyn Gist