February 2020. Five a.m. alarm. I bounded down to my basement, hopped on the elliptical for twenty minutes, meditated for ten, wrote down three things I was grateful for, listed my goals for the month and the year, and wrote out ten dreams for 2030. Then I read for twenty more minutes before my youngest woke up.

By six a.m. I felt unstoppable. By two p.m. most days, I'd crashed.

I kept it up anyway, three weeks straight, right up until the word COVID started showing up in the daily news and none of us knew yet what was coming. Then work went remote, our kids' school went virtual, and the one hour a day that belonged only to me got sacrificed first. Not because it stopped working. Because everything around it fell apart, and the thing that felt most optional was the thing I dropped.

We ended up moving in with my parents for a stretch, three hours outside Toronto, so my mom could help homeschool and my dad could take the kids off our hands for a few hours here and there. It was a genuine gift. It also meant I was constantly surrounded by people and had less time to myself than I'd had in years.

By May 2020, I hit a wall. I was burnt out from working around the clock and mentally exhausted from trying to hold together my kids, my team, my clients, and my personal relationships, more or less in that order. And here's the part I'm least proud of. I didn't tell anyone how bad it was. Everyone was struggling, so I decided mine didn't count, and I put on a version of myself that had it handled. Which, it turns out, takes even more energy than just admitting you don't.

Eventually I went back to the one thing I could still control when everything else felt chaotic: the hour before my house woke up and started needing things from me. But I'd learned something by then. I couldn't force myself into the exact routine from the book that started this whole experiment, Robin Sharma's The 5 AM Club. Waking up to exercise first thing has never motivated me. What worked was meditating, then coffee, then journaling in peace, then exercise, in that order. Same hour, rebuilt around who I actually am instead of who a book told me to be.

Here's the pattern I see now in most of the burnt-out leaders I work with, myself included back then. We treat exhaustion like a discipline problem. Get up earlier. Push through. White-knuckle it until the busy season ends. But research puts close to half of adults in a state of regular exhaustion, and that's not a discipline gap. That's a signal.

Exhaustion is rarely the actual problem. It's the symptom of one, usually something further upstream: no real boundary between work and the rest of life, no honest account of what someone is actually carrying, or a belief that admitting you're struggling will cost you something professionally. So instead of naming it, most leaders manage it. They cut corners quietly. They get short with people who don't deserve it. They tell themselves it's temporary, right up until temporary becomes eighteen months.

The habit I had to build wasn't a better morning routine. It was the willingness to notice, early, when the one thing keeping me steady was the first thing I was willing to sacrifice, and to protect it anyway, even when it felt like the most replaceable hour in my day.

So here's what I'd ask. Not whether you're tired. Most of us are. What's the one hour, habit, or boundary you quietly gave up first the last time things got hard, telling yourself you'd pick it back up once things calmed down?

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Most leaders aren't dishonest. They're wearing a mask, a version of themselves that's easier to approve of, and it's quietly costing them their best people and their performance. Shannon Talbot helps overwhelmed leaders take it off. She's a leadership speaker, facilitator, and consultant, and the author of Breaking Free. Learn more at shannontalbot.com.