The Engine That Runs You

A client told me last month that she’d hit every target her board set for the year. Revenue up, team retention strong, product roadmap on track. By any external measure, it was her best year. She described it as the most exhausting, hollow twelve months of her career.

“I spent the whole year performing,” she said. “Not leading. Performing. Every board meeting was about proving I belonged. Every decision was filtered through how it would look. I hit the numbers, but I have no idea what I actually think about where this company should go.”

She wasn’t burned out from the work. She was burned out from the engine she was running it on.

The Fuel Matters More Than the Speed

I’ve started paying closer attention to this—not whether someone is motivated, but what they’re motivated by. The distinction changes everything.

Fear works. If you’re afraid of getting fired, you’ll work hard. If you’re afraid of looking incompetent, you’ll prepare thoroughly. But fear-driven work is expensive. It raises cortisol, narrows thinking, and makes you defensive in exactly the moments that require openness. You can sprint on fear, but you can’t build on it.

Rewards work too. Bonuses, promotions, recognition—these produce effort. But there’s a well-documented pattern: once you start doing something for a reward, the reward becomes the reason. Remove it, and the motivation collapses. Worse, research on contingent rewards shows they can actually erode interest in work people previously found intrinsically meaningful. The reward replaces the reason.

Then there’s approval. This one is subtle because it often looks like high performance. The leader who’s always prepared, always responsive, always exceeding expectations—sometimes that’s excellence. Sometimes it’s someone who’s outsourced their sense of worth to their audience. From the outside, it looks like success. From the inside, it feels like anxiety.

These engines all produce motion. But they share a structural problem: the source of fuel is external. Someone else controls the supply. When the threat recedes, the reward disappears, or the audience changes their mind, the engine stalls.

The Shift That Sustains

The leaders I work with who sustain through difficulty—real difficulty, not the performative kind—have a different relationship with their work. They’ve made a shift I find hard to describe precisely, but it looks something like this:

They stopped optimizing for outcomes and started paying attention to the process. Not as a “journey before destination” platitude—more structurally. They found the zone where the work itself is challenging enough to be engaging, and they oriented around getting better at it.

I described it to a COO I work with as the difference between “winning the quarter” and “becoming the kind of operator who can navigate anything.” Same work, different orientation. One is fragile—you win or you don’t, and the satisfaction is brief either way. The other compounds.

The ones who go further connect the work to something beyond themselves. They can name who benefits. Not in a mission-statement way, but in a specific, concrete way. “My team has four people in their first management role. If I do this well, they’ll be better leaders for the rest of their careers.” “The customers who use this product are small business owners who can’t afford the enterprise alternative.”

That kind of clarity doesn’t make the work easier. It makes it more durable. Research on purpose and persistence consistently shows that people who connect their work to a contribution beyond themselves sustain effort longer, procrastinate less, and report higher well-being and even reduced mortality—even when the work is hard.

The Diagnostic

There’s a question I’ve started using with clients that sounds simple but tends to land hard:

What’s actually driving you right now?

Not the answer you’d give in a performance review. The real one. Sit with it for a moment.

Are you avoiding a consequence? (Fear)
Are you chasing a reward or a milestone? (Incentive)
Are you performing for someone’s approval or validation? (Audience)
Are you trying to win, prove something, or reach a finish line? (Achievement)
Are you engaged in getting better at something that matters to you? (Growth)
Do you know who benefits from your work, and does that sustain you? (Purpose)

Most people, when they’re honest, find they’re running on a mix. That’s normal. The question isn’t whether you ever operate from fear or approval—everyone does. The question is which engine is primary. Which one do you default to when things get hard?

The default engine determines the experience. Two people can do identical work, produce identical results, and have completely different internal lives based on what’s driving them. One is anxious and brittle. The other is challenged but grounded. Same output. Different fuel.

Moving the Default

The useful insight, I think, is that this isn’t fixed. You can shift what drives you—not all at once, but incrementally.

If you’re running primarily on fear, the move isn’t to eliminate fear. It’s to find one thing about the work that you’re genuinely curious about or interested in. Add a small intrinsic element alongside the external pressure. Give yourself something to move toward, not just away from.

If you’re running on approval, the shift is noticing when you’re filtering decisions through “how will this look?” and asking instead “what do I actually think is right here?” Not always. Just sometimes. Enough to start rebuilding an internal standard that doesn’t depend on the audience.

If you’re running on achievement—hitting targets, winning, proving—the reframe is from “did I win?” to “did I grow?” Measuring success by what you learned and how you improved, not just whether you got the result.

These are small moves. But they shift the engine. And the engine determines everything downstream—how you handle failure, how you treat people when you’re under pressure, whether the work feels sustainable or slowly corrosive.

The Real Question

My client who hit all her targets? She’s rethinking what she’s optimizing for this year. Not the goals themselves—those are still ambitious. But the relationship she has with the work. She wants to lead from something more durable than the need to prove she belongs.

That’s not a soft ambition. It’s one of the hardest shifts a leader can make. Moving from an engine that’s worked—that’s produced real results—to one that might sustain her for the next decade without the brittleness.

The question I’d leave you with is the same one I keep asking myself: what are you actually running on? And is that engine taking you somewhere you want to go, or just somewhere fast?