What Gives You Joy? It’s a Leadership Question.

The answer high performers least expect, and the one that actually sustains them.

Photo by Ian Schneider on Unsplash

My clients are high performers. Ambitious. Proven. They have succeeded over and over again.

So they come to me already moving fast, and they want to move faster.

One client is months into a stalled job search. Another is staring at negative feedback she can’t make sense of, much less address. The thread running through all of them is the same: the dread that creeps in when you keep spending effort and stop seeing progress.

They expect me to tell them to push harder. Longer hours. More on the plate. It’s what has always worked for them, and it’s what their instinct screams when things slow down.

I rarely suggest any of it.

Instead, I tell them to pause. To breathe. To move their bodies. Getting out of our minds and into our bodies has a way of loosening the grip that fear and old habits have on us.

And then I ask the question that makes them go quiet:

What gives you joy?

What makes you laugh? What could you do and lose all track of time?

Most of them freeze. Not because the answer is hard, but because the question feels so out of place. So unrelated to work.

That’s exactly where the work is.

This is a hard time to be a worker, and even harder to be a leader.

With an always-on culture, there is always something to worry about. Some new threat to the business, some risk to your financial health, some stealth competitor, or just the dark and scary unknown.

The data backs up the mood. Globally, employee engagement fell to 20% last year, its lowest level since 2020, costing the world economy an estimated $10 trillion in lost productivity (Gallup, State of the Global Workplace: 2026).

When times get harder, the highest-performing leaders tend to double down. Push harder. Demand more, of themselves first and then of their teams. There is nothing wrong with asking for more when more is required.

But too often we forget the power of joy. Of the things that make us feel lighter and filled with energy instead of dread.

Today I want to explore the path less taken to keeping yourself and your team on course when things feel dark.

Classic management guidance isn’t bad, but it isn’t enough.

Most leadership advice says you stick to the basics when sentiment is down:

• Be clear about the why behind the goals. Purpose unifies a team and keeps people motivated.

• Delineate roles and decision authority. Autonomy gives people a sense of control and speeds up the work.

• Recognize great work publicly and regularly. People who are seen and valued feel more secure.

• Give and receive feedback with respect, timeliness, and specificity. When everyone knows where they stand and how they can improve, they worry less and deliver more.

These are all good practices, and they should be part of your core playbook. But sometimes they aren’t enough.

Why?

Because sometimes the work itself isn’t what motivates someone. And no amount of positive reinforcement, or even a healthy culture, can mask the insidious risk of working in a deeply uncertain environment.

Even if you lead well, there are sociopolitical and macroeconomic forces that can disrupt your business and how your team works. Tariffs, wars, supply chain breakdowns, inflation, fuel prices. They aren’t in your control, even when you build contingency plans. And even if you mitigate some of them, your clients and partners may not be able to.

It sounds grim. Perhaps it is.

So take a page from the Stoics and the Epicureans.

The Stoics believed worry is unnecessary. If you can’t control something, let it go. If you can control it, then do something about it. Either way, worry takes you nowhere.

If you can’t control macroeconomic change, stop wringing your hands over it. You can control your response, so do some prudent, anticipatory scenario planning, and then let it go.

That’s a great way to handle uncertainty. But I’ve found the human mind is an unwieldy thing. Even when you try to manage it, it squirms away. Doing the prep work is one thing. Actually letting it go is another.

This is where a dose of Epicurean philosophy keeps you on track. The Epicureans believed in the pursuit of pleasure as the highest good. They’re often misread as seeking reckless indulgence, but it’s really about making reasonable choices that increase your enjoyment and reduce your pain.

If you’re hungry, eat. If you’re tired, sleep. This isn’t about answering every craving, especially the destructive ones like abusing substances or overspending. It’s about meeting your essential needs and making yourself more comfortable.

So what happens when you marry the Stoic view with the Epicurean one?

You find a path that lowers the stress for you and your team, and gives you permission to put some joy back into your work and your life.

Permission to be less focused, on purpose.

When my clients hit a wall, they are universally surprised by what I suggest. I almost never tell them to work harder. I ask them what lights them up.

For one client, it was building a transformative children’s product. For another, it was more time with his nearly grown children. For another, it was exploring new hobbies with no need to achieve anything at all.

The activity didn’t matter. It was how it made them feel that made the difference.

For me, it’s painting and drawing. Playing games. Exploring new places. Dancing. Music. When I’m doing any of those things, I lose all track of space and time. I’m lost in the joy of it.

Here’s why these things belong woven into your days and weeks, not saved for some someday: our best work, our most creative thinking, our greatest ability to lead and collaborate, all of it comes when we are relaxed. I’m not saying fear and anger can’t produce results too. But they come with side effects you don’t want. Migraines. Fatigue. Fraying relationships. A low hum of malaise.

It’s far better to feel upbeat and ready to engage. And that only happens when you give yourself permission to spend time on the things that get you there.

It’s counterintuitive. Taking time away from your core work to loosen up and exercise different muscles can feel like you are purposefully avoiding your work. Or that you aren’t committed to your goals. But it’s actually the opposite if you’re doing it intentionally and with time bounds.

My client who was struggling with the job search felt like he would be abandoning his responsibilities to his partner and family if he took time to build out his children’s product idea. I gave him permission to time-block parts of his week for it.

Why? Because it was the one thing that made him feel better. And when he felt better, he was able to persist in his search. Even more important, he was able to show up to networking conversations and interviews with energy and enthusiasm, something he couldn’t fake. Without a positive attitude, no amount of outreach and applications was going to land him opportunities.

The pursuit of his side project idea wasn’t a distraction. It was his fuel.

When you allow yourself time to insert joyful activities into your routine, you build the capacity to sustain your energy, your resolve, and your strategic thinking when the pressure is on.

Know what lights up your team, and protect it.

Once you know how to re-energize yourself, learn what does the same for your people. Make time to hear how they’d spend their time if they had no constraints.

Then, when you can, don’t just ask. Have them share it. Make it a team activity.

Putting joy into the work isn’t only a mental break from the grind. It’s how your people come to feel fully seen. When someone gets to share their love for something, it lets everyone else share in their happiness.

The antidote to fear is joy. And just like fear, joy is contagious.

This doesn’t have to be expensive or time-consuming. A golf outing hosted by the fanatic on your team is lovely, but if that’s not in the cards, have them tell the story of how they got into the sport. A five-minute mini-lesson on Zoom. That’s it.

It sounds basic, maybe even reckless, to spend what little time you have on something unrelated to work. But giving your people the floor to share what matters to them will do more for them than any KPI review. And their teammates will feel the shift too.

Your greatest asset is your team.

The only way to truly maximize their contribution is to maximize their energy and their engagement. Using something outside of work to do it? That’s the quiet advantage the wisest leaders already rely on.

It’s time for you to use it too. For yourself, and for your team.

Your Turn

What lights you up? I’d love to hear about it in the comments. And I’d love to know how you make room in your days for those moments. If you’ve found a way to bring more joy into your team’s work, share that too. Other leaders would be grateful for it.

May you lead without limits,